Designing best practice in HDR Supervision: A national benchmarking exercise

Supervision plays a critical role in the responsible conduct, quality and impact of research and graduate research outcomes. To ensure continuous improvement in support for supervisory practice, Flinders University has recently initiated a project to establish a Higher Degree by Research (HDR) Supervisory Framework and associated resources. The project aims to enhance support for individual supervisors, candidate, university and sector benefit. A benchmarking sub-project was initiated within a wider research project, aimed to identify novel and best practice across the Australian and New Zealand sector in policy, processes, frameworks and training related to supporting excellence in supervisory practice. In June 2023 The Wee Consultancy were engaged to undertake a qualitative benchmarking review of universities identified through an extensive desktop review followed by interviews with leading institutional experts.

This presentation details the benchmarking review methodology, results and outcomes at Flinders University. After a thorough web-based search of policy and practice in HDR Supervision at Australian and New Zealand Higher Education Providers (HEPs), identified participants were asked questions about the supervisor eligibility requirements; what success looks like in supervisory practice; how compliance was measured at their institution; what training requirements are in place and how compliance is monitored.

The results of the project concluded that policy and practice are often not aligned, and most universities identified a review of their supervisory policy suite was needed and/or planned. Regulatory auditing of compliance was not commonplace and tended to only happen in response to a complaint or performance issue at most universities. The project noted that HDR supervision is not explicit in any Strategic Plan, and performance review of supervision duties is not well established. What has been suggested by participants in order to improve the quality of HDR supervision is a scaffolded approach to supervisor training that builds on and strengthens supervisor knowledge and skillset, with clearly defined quality measures and targets. This project has been instrumental to Flinders University, who has implemented a number of policy and procedural changes already to address best practice, some of which will be shared as part of the presentation.