ASQA's approach to compliance

The Rapid Review of ASQA’s Regulatory Practices and Processes (the Review) recommended that ASQA more clearly distinguish the functions of monitoring provider performance and determining the most appropriate regulatory response where noncompliance is identified. It also recommended ASQA give providers a longer period to address non-compliance on a more systemic and sustained basis.

Consultation for Approach to compliance – regulatory practice guide

The regulatory practice guide, Approach to compliance was initially developed in response to recommendations arising from the Rapid Review of ASQA’s Regulatory Practices and Processes (the Review).

The draft ASQA Compliance Policy and consultation paper, were released on 25 November 2020 and were both open for comment until mid-January 2021. We received 31 submissions were and held a webinar ASQA’s approach to compliance - Consistency, collaboration and continuous improvement to discuss the changes with providers.

We undertook a range of targeted consultation activities in support of this process with:

• ASQA’s Provider Roundtable through a workshop
• ASQA’s SLG, including and a workshop with its sub-group on performance assessment (audit) practice

Feedback from the program of consultation resulted in:

• our draft compliance policy informing the content for two documents – an overarching Regulatory Risk Framework to describe the regulatory approach and an accompanying regulatory practice guide focussed on our Approach to compliance
• development of new approaches to support appropriate and proportionate regulatory practices where non-compliance occurs
• renaming ‘Undertakings to remedy’ to ‘Agreements to rectify’, to better reflect the purpose and nature of the regulatory tool, and reduced the maximum time period in agreement to three months, as opposed to the six-month period originally proposed
• removing the requirement to acknowledge non-compliance as part of the agreement to rectify
• clarifying that a progress report will be required from providers only where the agreement to rectify is for two months or longer.
• amendments to regulatory correspondence to ensure it more accurately reflects ASQA’s suite of regulatory tools and provides greater transparency regarding which tool is being used as well as whether decisions are reviewable.