Just two weeks left to nominate for the 2026 ACSES Awards

Do you know an exceptional individual or team driving meaningful change in student equity outcomes in Australian higher education?

With the June 30 deadline fast approaching, now is the time to submit your nominations for the ACSES Awards for Innovation and Excellence in Impact on Higher Education Policy and Practice 2026.

The awards recognise those whose work has influenced decision-makers and led to better outcomes for students from equity backgrounds—whether through innovation, advocacy, collaboration, or evidence-based practice.

Up to five recipients will be honoured in 2026 for their outstanding and wide-ranging contributions to the sector. This follows the recognition of significant contributions made by individual and team award winners in 2025.

ACSES will support winners—or a nominated team member for group awards—to attend the formal award ceremony at the ACSES Policy Symposium 2026, to be held in Brisbane from 8–9 September 2026.

Whether you’re nominating a colleague or yourself, don’t miss this opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary people making higher education fairer and more equitable for all.

Nominations close at 4pm (AWST) on Tuesday, 30 June 2026, followed by assessment by the judging panel in July–August.

Visit the ACSES website for more information and to download an application pack.

Announcing the recipients of the 2026–27 round of the HDR Stipend Scheme

ACSES is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026–27 round of the HDR Stipend Scheme:

• Suvasish Das Shuvo (University of Wollongong) and his project Generating policy-ready evidence on food insecurity among Australian students
• Christine Gallagher (The University of Sydney) and her project First generation scholars in higher education in Australia
• Rovini Rathnayake (Queensland University of Technology) and her project Equity and mathematics preparedness: Impacts on first-year engineering student success in Australia
• Musha Shi (Curtin University) and her project “From utility to affective inclusion”: Leveraging generative AI to support the emotional well-being of low SES students

The 2026–27 round of the scheme invited Higher Degree by Research students with an interest in student equity in higher education to apply.

Recipients will each receive funding to undertake their research project along with the opportunity for research outputs.

ACSES would like to commend all applicants on the high standard of research proposals submitted whilst also extending congratulations to its recipients.

ACSES Capacity Building Grants Program wraps up

The Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) is pleased to mark the recent conclusion of 12 projects funded through the Capacity Building Grants Program.

This competitive program provided support for universities across Australia to develop their internal capacity to design and undertake impact evaluations of equity programs.

These diverse projects have each made a critical contribution, supporting universities to engage equity teams in targeted training and professional development, work with specialist evaluators to develop resources, and build the data infrastructure required to measure impact.

Final project reports and associated resources are now available on ACSES’s Equity Hub website.