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ASQA to investigate Aged Care training
Ensuring the quality of aged care training has been made a priority by the new national regulator of the vocational education and training sector. From January, the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) will scrutinise registered training organisations (RTOs) when they apply to register, renew or amend courses that include aged care qualifications.
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ASQA for all intents and purposes, ignores the feedback of aged care facility providers and students. It also ignores the quality of training staff even when their auditors observe quality training being delivered. Instead, it focuses on policies and systems that sit behind the delivery of training and assessment. The effect of this approach is to allow registration and re-registration of training organisations which have the particular kinds of policies and systems that it likes, while training organisations that actually deliver training that is at the high level demanded by aged care providers but have different systems sitting behind are damaged by ASQA’s bullying approach.
Aged care providers are struggling to understand how good RTO’s with outstanding reputations are struggling to ‘comply’ with the NVR standards while cowboy operations with scopes covering perhaps 11 different industries delivering very poorly trained students, are reregistered.
The answer of course, is that the cowboys have worked out that all you have to do to be an RTO is a to show a slick set of systems and procedures that directly line up with ASQA’s idiosyncratic preferred model and then you can train as poorly as you like.