Communicating university access while respecting students’ agency

The challenge

UNSW Sydney’s Access and Equity (Students) team was launching a website for programs that widen access to university for students from low socio-economic backgrounds and under-represented schools.

The site needed to explain the programs to students, parents, teachers, schools, partners and donors. Each audience needed different information: a student exploring a pathway into university had different questions from a school considering participation or a partner deciding how to get involved.

There was also a more sensitive communication challenge. Language intended to sound encouraging could imply that students lacked ability, needed rescuing or depended on the university to succeed.

UNSW wanted the content to recognise students’ strengths and agency. We needed to explain what the programs offered without making assumptions about the people taking part.

Our role

Antelope Media was the content partner for the website, working with the team’s Director and Senior Marketing Officer, who managed the build.

Emma Sorensen led the assignment. She reviewed the proposed sitemap, advised on content priorities and wrote and revised the copy in batches through UNSW’s review process. Ralph Grayden and two senior editors provided writing, editorial and proofreading support.

Our role combined content planning with website copywriting: identifying what readers needed to know, finding gaps in the supplied material and developing language that reflected UNSW’s approach to access and equity.

Finding the information readers needed

We began by reviewing the draft sitemap and existing material. This established which pages could be developed from the information available and which required further input from program teams.

The source content wasn’t equally developed across the programs. For example, Gateway needed additional program detail to give readers the level of information already available for ASPIRE.

We identified those gaps and the information required to fill them, rather than allowing differences in the supplied material to dictate the usefulness of the finished pages.

The writing also needed to work for public audiences. Institutional terminology and explanations that made sense internally had to become clear accounts of the programs, who they were for and how readers could participate.

Applying inclusive language in practice

UNSW’s guidance challenged familiar ways of writing about educational access. Words such as “help”, “assist” and “enable” could reinforce deficit framing when they suggested that students lacked capability or needed the institution to act on their behalf.

This wasn’t a matter of replacing a few words. We reviewed what each sentence implied about students and their relationship with the university.

That meant examining who was presented as taking action, how students were described and whether program explanations recognised their existing strengths. The opportunities and information still needed to be explicit, while the language respected students as people making their own educational choices.

We applied the team’s guidance across the copy, including pages drafted before the detailed language direction was issued. Earlier material was brought into line with the same approach as later batches.

These were choices made for UNSW’s brief and audiences. Inclusive writing requires judgement about context, rather than a universal list of words to avoid.

Keeping several audiences in view

The site had to explain the access programs consistently while addressing different reasons for visiting.

Program pages needed to be useful to students and schools. Partnership and involvement pages needed to explain how organisations could participate. Donation content needed to communicate the value of the work without portraying students through a story of helplessness.

We wrote and revised these pages through the client’s review process, balancing audience needs, program information and the division’s language guidance.

The resulting content connected the programs and participation opportunities through a consistent voice, while retaining the distinctions readers needed to understand each part of the site.

What we delivered

• review of the proposed sitemap and existing material
• content priorities and identification of information gaps
• questions and requests for additional program detail
• website copy for access programs, including ASPIRE and Gateway
• partner, involvement and donation content
• revisions applying UNSW’s inclusive language guidance across the copy, and
• senior editorial review and proofreading support.

The result

UNSW received website content that explained its access programs while recognising students’ strengths and agency. The same language principles were applied across program and participation pages, including material developed before the detailed guidance arrived.

The assignment demonstrated the practical work behind inclusive communication: understanding what an institution intends to say, recognising what its wording might imply and making the information useful without diminishing the people it describes.

It also forms part of a broader relationship with UNSW, including subsequent work on equity communications and impact reporting.