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Faced with designing and providing a support solution to a high student attrition rate in one undergraduate course, lecturers from UWS’s Bachelor of Health and from the Student Services Division collaborated in a research project to explore retention strategies and their effectiveness. Focusing on first year, the study used a variety of data collection methods: discussion groups, questionnaire, focus groups and telephone interviews, over a period of a year.

The general expectation was that dissatisfaction with the course and poor academic skills among students would be central factors. To our surprise, this was overturned by the findings. Prior to initiating an academic support program to aid transition, therefore, it seems that investigation can bring to light more complex factors for which conventional solutions are not necessarily the answer.