VET & TAFE
‘No’ surety of standards in Cert III for aged care
If the Certificate III in Aged Care Work and the Certificate IV Assessor and Trainer were designed to be the cornerstones of education and skill development for workers in aged care there is a problem. My experience with these qualifications began with the pilot program for the Certificate III Aged Care Work which was administered and monitored in NSW by the New South Wales Nurses’ Association in the mid-1990s. The facility in which I was the educator was awarded pilot site status and over the following twelve months, about 80 care workers completed the Certificate III Aged Care Work.
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I agree. As an RTO in aged care, it is my opinion that the AQTF has just created and nursed an enormous bureaucracy who demonstrate a culture in which the more punishment they can dish out to RTO’s irrespective of the quality of students trained, the easier it is justify their existence and fabulous, growing budgets.
ASQA’s focus is a policing, bullying aopproach without regard for quality of students produced, as experienced by aged care providers themselves.
This then breeds a fear-based culture in the training sector where survival can only be guaranteed by a very large investment in a particular set of systems and procedures that ASQA happens to agree with. The real world effect of this behaviour is that too many RTO’s shift their focus to a kind of training which makes compliance seem obvious (and probably is) at the expense of training that focuses on the enhanced quality of life that a good aged care worker can provide.
The crucial attitude to the well-being of a vulnerable fellow human being is lost.