Non-compliance is to be avoided at all costs. Read our top 3 tips on how to avoid it. Contact us for more information on our compliant resources.
With the results of audits being a do or die situation for RTOs, avoiding non-compliance is essential for your business.
With lots of RTOs experiencing difficulty in expanding their scope at the minute (particularly with TAE40116 Cert IV in Training and Assessment), and with guidance on audits limited and vague, it can be difficult to know when to start when preparing for one.
However, we’ve got some handy tips to help you on your way:
- Contextualise the resources – while resources are written to pass audit, you cannot assume that your resource provider knows your student cohort like you do. Although your resources should cover the core content and specifications of the unit of competency, they will likely not be tailored to your specific learners or the industry they are working in/intending to work in. If you present them at audit without the appropriate contextualisation, the auditor is going to pull you up on this and mark you as non-compliant. One area where contextualisation is paramount is the assessment tools; also, make sure the verbs used in the specification are transferred into the actual assessments – this will ensure they are valid. To help you, we’ve actually written a handy contextualisation guide ourselves for you. Download it for free here.
- Educate your team – it’s not enough having the best resources available, contextualised to meet your learners’ every need, if the people delivering your training don’t have the required skills and knowledge themselves. Sometimes, the unit or qualification specifications will state certain minimum qualifications that assessors need; sometimes, it may not state this exact information. However, this doesn’t mean that any old person off the street can be an assessor; you will need make sure your assessor has a thorough knowledge of all the course content and the assessment materials. This will likely involve internal training on your part, and you should have a review process in place to ensure all your assessors meet a minimum benchmark standard.
- Know what you’re up against – while it can be difficult to know just what an audit is going to pull you up on – due to the subjective nature of an auditor’s opinion (we’ve heard stories of the exact same unit passing and failing with different auditors) – ASQA do at least tell you what they’re going to be checking beforehand. They have an audit tool template online for VET and CRICOS that you can download and view. This will tell you exactly what evidence ASQA are after, so you can prepare ahead of time and have each point covered come your actual audit.
Please note that these are not the only things you need to do to avoid non-compliance at audit – you will need to do many other things, such as creating a detailed Training and Assessment Strategy.
