Preparing for your registration renewal can be a scary prospect, particularly because it is such a long time between renewals, and you haven’t necessarily had the regular feedback from the regulator that you get with say, a State Funding contract. In this article, we highlight the critical considerations you should make in preparation for your renewal process.
First thing is first, make sure you are aware of your obligation to submit your intent to re-register more than 90 days prior to the expiry of your registration. If you don’t know this date, you should. It can be found on training.gov.au under the Registration tab and you should incorporate this obligation into your compliance schedule. Once you have this date, work backwards from here. You should aim to be 100% confident and prepared before you submit your notification and prior to this, you may need anywhere from one month to twelve months to review and refine your business policies and procedures, depending on your capacity and capabilities.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), a long time may have passed since your last regulatory audit. In some cases, your last audit may have even been under the old SNR framework. Regardless, a long time has passed and without interaction from the regulator, your organisation may have become complacent. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily operational grind of running an RTO and we rarely take the time to step back from the operations and look at the fundamental compliance framework that supports our organisation. If this is the case, now may be the perfect time to undertake a review of your systems and processes through the completion of an internal audit or by engaging an external consultancy firm to understand how you are positioned with respect to the standards.
One of the first things that could happen from ASQA’s end is a desktop review of your publicly available information. Before you even consider notifying ASQA of your intent to renew registration, you should ensure that all public information pertaining to your organisation meets the regulatory framework. This includes but is not limited to:
Most of the above should be easily located on your website.
Are your operations centered around outdated or redundant policies and procedures? Just because it passed audit last time around, doesn’t mean it will work this time. The VET sector is a rapidly evolving beast and with the excessive media attention in recent years, the regulator’s audit approach and expectations have changed considerably in the last 5 years. We recommend a complete review of your policies, procedures, registers, templates, etc. and some questions you should ask yourself include:
We recommend an annual review of all policies and pro forma to ensure what you say you do, is what you do.
Another key component of your operations is your registers and compliance schedules. These can include:
The quality and availability of trainers/assessors will be heavily scrutinised at audit and as such, we recommend that you ensure your trainer files include the following at an absolute minimum:
You may be asked to submit a completed financial viability risk assessment spreadsheet and even your strategic plan. This is not something to take lightly and should be given your absolute attention and priority. Time and time again, we see organisations fail audits based on their submission of inaccurate, ambitious or incomplete financial viability requirements. In most cases, the RTO will engage their accountant to complete the spreadsheet but you must consider the following: