Developing procurement theories to optimise education per cost of school

This project aims to radically advance the body of procurement knowledge by developing a novel whole-of-life procurement decision-making framework to optimise educational outcomes per total cost of school facilities. The project will advance state-of-the-art and Nobel prize-winning theories and also develop a new theory into implementable models in a cohesive framework, for the first time in an educational setting and across government and privately financed schools. Furthermore, the framework’s success in creating schools with significantly improved value will be validated using a new approach to operationalising the contribution of schools’ facilities to educational outcomes and accounting for their total production and transaction costs.

Research team

• 
  Prof Colin Duffield, Professor
• 
  Assoc Prof Lihai Zhang, Associate Professor
• 
  Dr Mayuri Wijayasundara, Research Fellow
• 
  Dr Philip Christopher, Research Fellow
• 
  Mr Ali Saeed, PhD student

Industrial partners

17 government agencies and industry partners, such as Infrastructure Australia, NSW Treasury, Department of Treasury and Finance Victoria, Department of Finance, etc.

Major funds awarded

ARC LP160100259 ($400K over three years).