Crawford School strategic plan

School Purpose, Vision and Mission

The School's purpose is leading public policy for a better world, capturing our mission of providing world-class graduate and professional education, high-quality research and substantial policy impact. To this end, we offer an array of professional graduate diploma and masters programs for individuals pursuing careers with government and other organizations, doctoral programs for those pursuing research and professional careers and executive training programs tailored for particular organisations and client needs. Research for some of our academics is discipline-driven, but typically applied. In other cases our research is multi- and cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, often with an Asia-Pacific focus. We seek to publish with leading national and international presses and journals, and then to go a step further by framing and leading policy questions and outcomes and the way in which policy decisions are made. In some cases our policy impact occurs through our engagement with government organizations, in other cases, through our relationships with the private sector and civil society organizations.

Our vision is that by 2020 the Crawford School of Economics and Government will be positioned among the leading policy schools in the world, and recognised as the leader in the Asia and Pacific region. Our reputation will be built on a foundation of high quality research that underpins a world-class education, and enables us to influence policy in Australia, the region and around the world. Under the guidance of the Crawford School Advisory Council, we will realize this ambitious vision; a vision that demands sustained effort, growth and continuous improvement in quality.

Critical to achievement of this vision will be the development of internal capacity and the building of deep strategic collaboration across the College of Asia and the Pacific and the University. To achieve our vision we must develop partnerships with key centres of policy focused groupings across the campus, the region and the world.

We have five key strategic goals, each with specific requirements:

Strategic Goal 1: To create an enabling environment in which all professional and academic staff members of the Crawford School can realise their full potential in pursuit of our shared mission.

This goal requires us to:

• Create a dynamic, exciting, and challenging environment for all of the School’s members, calling for the development and nurturing of a supporting architecture that demands excellence across all components of our School.
• Maintain and enhance the current highly productive partnership between professional and academic staff, encouraging new ideas, input, dialogue and exchange.
• Balance commitments across the three main areas of our School’s mission: world-class education, high-quality research and substantial policy impact

Strategic Goal 2: To develop internal capacity to anticipate and respond to growing demand for world-class education, high-quality research and substantial policy impact.

This goal requires us to:

• Retain and develop outstanding professional and academic staff and to provide access to development opportunities to ensure personal and professional growth in line with the School's goals, mission, and vision
• Ensure that new academic appointments build on existing strengths, offer new areas for development, and contribute to the continuing quality of education in our core and elective offerings.
• Incorporate our research and policy impact strengths into our educational offerings, continually delivering a challenging and cohesive curriculum which can adapt to changing demands from students and participants.
• Recognise the ongoing contribution that our teaching programs and students have made to the School's success to date, and continue to foster and develop collaboration across existing degrees, executive training programs, and new educational offerings. This will further enable us to market and recruit with extensive knowledge of our educational offerings, manage an excellent student experience and ensure ongoing pastoral care in an era of continued growth.

Strategic Goal 3: To build strategic education, research and policy impact partnerships within the College of Asia and the Pacific, and across the ANU.

This goal requires us to:

• Identify and build new strategic alliances and partnerships across the College and the ANU to enable us to meet the challenges of growth, especially with regard to educational offerings, research and executive short course programs. • Collaborate with the Australian National Institute of Public Policy (ANIPP) and the Coombs Policy Forum to further enhance our engagement with the policy community.

Strategic Goal 4: To enhance quality performance in education, research and policy impact.

This goal requires us to:

• Develop enhanced performance measures for education, research quantity and quality, and policy impact.
• Create a School-wide database that captures data for key performance indicators and measures of quality, incorporating, for example, data from teaching evaluations, research output and quality information and the full range of policy impact activity.
• Develop strategic benchmarking practices and relationships. This will involve benchmarking against our own performance over time to encourage a culture of continuous improvement. Further, we will develop relationships across the ANU, in the region and across the world to track our performance against comparable institutions.
• Ensure quality in coursework and PhD admissions and offerings as we grow our student numbers, in combination with investments in enhancing the quality of education in the School. This will also involve a focus on encouraging and rewarding excellence in education.
• Encourage and reward publications in high quality journals and academic presses. This will be facilitated by an added investment in research support at the School level.
• Promote a strategic approach to policy engagement and impact, further developing our core strengths, while targeting key policy issues in Australia, the region and around the world.

Strategic Goal 5: To define and articulate current core competencies in education, research and policy impact, in order to better understand our strengths, identify our weaknesses or gaps, and develop initiatives to respond dynamically to a changing environment over time.

This goal requires us to:

• Better understand how we can configure and reconfigure existing and desired strengths in education, research and policy impact in new and interesting ways to ensure growth and enhanced reputation.
• Map and define ourselves across our disciplinary and geographical strengths to identify current and future interdisciplinary linkages, and articulate strengths, weaknesses and areas for development.
• Identify potential new appointments or reallocation of existing staff and units to maintain a desired balance across our four core areas of expertise, maintaining existing core discipline and interdisciplinary strength and building on needed cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary interests.

The figure below provides an initial 'representational map' of this current activity in the Crawford School. It represents the four core areas of expertise in our School - economics, governance, the environment and development - and the cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary connections between them. Our current range of core country expertise is indicated (randomly placed) and our purpose is highlighted in the centre. This leadership in public policy includes and cuts across all of our cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary connections.

Current Activity in the Crawford School

Strategic Initiatives: Overview

Having articulated our vision, mission, purpose and five major strategic goals we turn to a series of strategic initiatives - planned for the next twelve months - that will help position the School to achieve its ambitions. These are centred on the three main areas of School activity: education, research and policy impact.