ABSTRACT
Many of the education leaders emphasised the importance of work-integrated learning, but few felt that they had got the process exactly right. Some universities offered paid internships for three months, some offered year-long placements that counted as credit towards a degree, some offered industry-based projects that were designed and assessed in partnership with the industry sponsor, and some offered combinations of these. Within a university, the purpose of an education strategy is to focus attention, harness activity and resources, galvanise people and processes into action, align internal systems and raise awareness of external pressures, all in order to achieve the education mission. Although much of the work done within the university is focused inward, education strategy also has to look outward. The interviewees spoke about the fraught nature of education leadership in Australian universities. There are usually multiple education goals; sometimes these are in conflict and sometimes the tension between them threatens to generate mutually incompatible strategies.
