Procurement of assessment services from Australian Registered Training Organisations (RTOs)

This is a pre-release notice only.

The Department of Education and Training anticipates it will release an RFT for the procurement of assessment services from Australian Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) in quarter 2 of the 2018/19 financial year. The RFT will be available on AusTender.

The procurement will be for the following Trades Recognition Australia (TRA) programs:

• Temporary Skills Shortage (TSS) Program
• Offshore Skills Assessment Program (OSAP)
• Trades Recognition Service (TRS).

For more information, including the full Planned Procurement Notice, please go to AusTender www.tenders.gov.au.

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Change to the level of information publicly available on VET accredited courses

On 12 July 2018, the Australian Government amended the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Regulations 2011. This amendment requires the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) to publish certain information about VET accredited courses including:

• the titles and codes of units of competency or modules comprising a VET accredited course for current accredited courses and expired courses with training delivery reported through the Total VET Activity collections since 2015;
• a description of the course for those courses newly accredited or reaccredited from now; and
• a reference to an earlier (previous) or later version of a course that is accredited on or after 1 September 2018.

This additional information will be entered on to the National Register over the coming months. As a result, course owners and registered training organisations (RTOs) with an accredited course on their scope of registration are likely to receive notifications that there has been a change to their course when the regulators enter this additional information. This change however will not be referring to a change to the course, but rather a change to the information available on the course.

Ensuring these additional matters are entered on the National Register increases the transparency of accredited course information and enables Unique Student Identifier (USI) transcripts to include information on units of competency/modules. Once the information has been published on the National Register, it will be used to improve the information available on the My Skills website (www.myskills.gov.au), which will enable prospective students and employers to better understand course content and suitability.

For further information on this measure, please visit the recently updated FAQs on ASQA’s website at www.asqa.gov.au/faqs.

While this amendment only requires ASQA to publish this additional information on the National Register, the Training Accreditation Council of Western Australia will also be entering this information for courses that it has accredited to ensure that the level of information available on accredited courses is nationally consistent. For further details, please visit the Council’s website at http://www.tac.wa.gov.au/Pages/Accredited-Course-Transparency.aspx.