Abstract

One of the most significant challenges facing universities today is developing effective, efficient and equitable approaches to support diverse student cohorts, resulting from the market mechanisms now driving the tertiary education sector. Traditional mechanistic structures using specialisation of skills meant that the responsibility for the integration of this cohort was given to specialist language and study support advisers and counsellors who sat on the periphery of the educational experience. This created ineffective, inefficient and inequitable deficit and compensatory models of student support. At La Trobe University (Australia), two Language and Academic Skills advisers proposed working collaboratively with an academic to consider a business approach which embedded support into a mainstream subject with the aim of developing greater efficiency, effectiveness and equity in the management and delivery of this support. This was done by adopting the principles of strategic management and organic, team based structures in order to address many of the issues faced by students and staff in the current business driven tertiary education environment. This paper explores the application of these business principles to the re-structuring of a core second year subject (with an extremely diverse cohort) and outlines the positive impacts on students and staff.