Friendly guide to the acronym (FGA)

For our second installment of our new column on acronyms that dot the VET and higher education landscapes we look at the AQF and TEQSA. “The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) is the national policy for regulated qualifications in Australian education and training. It incorporates the qualifications from each education and training sector into a single, comprehensive national qualifications framework.” So reads the AQF website since the framework, first established in 1995, was overhauled by its AQF Council (AQFC) under the directive of former education minister Julia Gillard and re-issued on July 1. The AQF now covers 10 qualification levels, from a certificate 1 through to a doctorate. Like its predecessor, it cuts across all three sectors. On the face of it, the new framework sounds simple enough, and higher education providers have until 2015 to fully implement it. But with the advent of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), standards such as the AQF – once a guideline without binding enforcement behind it – are expected to take on a whole new level of seriousness, and also complication. All indications are that the AQF will be embedded into TEQSA’s new qualifications standards when the regulator’s duties really get underway in 2012. What is much less clear, however, is how TEQSA, its standards panel, the AQFC and also DEEWR will come together to implement those standards. The implications for education providers, their peak bodies, and, frankly, the media, are as difficult to decipher as the acronyms themselves. “Given all this inter-connected complexity, the sector is likely to feel more reassured when it sees a standards panel chair announced and the panel takes over the task of putting this jigsaw together,” Professor Margaret Mazzolini, pro vice-chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology and chair of the Swinburne’s new academic senate, told Campus Review. “DEEWR might be well advised to delay finalising the qualifications standards until that happens.” For higher education especially, a sector that loathes outside regulation at the best of times, the formation of the new AQF and TEQSA has been fraught alternately with resistance and pleas for commonsense. At the height of the AQF revamp, for example, the Group of Eight (Go8) argued it should be able to call its qualifications whatever it pleased, thank you very much. It also lobbied hard for greater synergy between the standards and the regulator, as both steamed ahead on seemingly different tracks. During the drafting of the TEQSA legislation, the organisation led a successful charge to preserve proud university traditions, most notably self-accreditation of courses. As Campus Review recently reported the peak body enjoyed another win earlier this month, when DEEWR agreed to grant extensions for responses to TEQSA’s draft qualifications standards. TEQSA, of course, is here to stay. An outcome from the Bradley Review of Higher Education, it’s a major reform – with unprecedented legal power – of which the Gillard government is particularly proud, boasting it has set a new international standard for guaranteeing educational quality. Dr Carol Nicoll, the outgoing CEO of the outgoing Australian Learning and Teaching Council – or ALTC – will be its chief commissioner. Yes, it’s a whole new world of reform out there. Perhaps the only sure thing is that more strings of capital letters will emerge than fall away. In two weeks, we’ll try to unravel a few more.