Risk priorities

Regulatory Risk Priorities 2023-24

ASQA uses an intelligence driven approach to determine the most significant risks to ensuring the quality of VET and the integrity of national qualifications issued by training providers. We conduct extensive research and draw on a range of sources to understand and prioritise the greatest risks to the VET and ELICOS sectors.

A key component of our approach to risk is our Environmental Scan (the Scan), which enables us to identify systemic and provider risks to VET quality and compliance, both current and emerging. The process recognises that we cannot mitigate every risk, so we determine annual risk priorities and the focus of our regulatory attention for the year ahead. 

Environmental scan outcomes

The 2023 scan identified 8 risk themes, a range of regulatory approaches currently in place to treat those areas of risk, and actions planned to further mitigate the risks in the coming year.

These include:

• initiatives to strengthen the regulatory framework
• quality and performance assessments
• compliance management and enforcement actions
• broad and targeted education campaigns aimed at the sector. 

Like all campaigns, this will involve a range of activities, including resources and guidance to assist the sector to mitigate these risks, as well as targeted regulatory activities to ensure we maintain appropriate regulatory oversight. This includes being able to identify providers who are failing to meet their obligations and using the regulatory tools at our disposal to support these providers to return to compliance or exit them from the sector where they are unable or unwilling to deliver quality outcomes. We will share our insights with you at the conclusion of each campaign.

Consultation on Regulatory Risk

As part of the Annual provider and course owner survey 2023, we also asked providers about risk in VET.

• Agreement of providers and course owners (‘providers’) that ASQA engages with the sector about risk in a positive way remains moderate to high. Just over three quarters of respondents provided positive assessments of how ASQA:
  • consults with stakeholders to inform its areas of regulatory focus (76>79%); 
  • uses evidence to target regulatory activity to areas of high risk (69>76%); and
  • provides relevant and timely information about sector risks and areas of regulatory focus (68>76%).
• Over three quarters of providers use ASQA education and information products about priority risk areas (76%) and, of these, 98% consider them to be at least moderately useful.
• Despite remaining quite low there has been an increase (46>55%) in provider perceptions of whether ASQA undertakes its regulatory activities efficiently and minimises costs to RTOs and taxpayers.