Review - Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research

Regulatory monitoring and reporting (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority 2007) includes a
section on the review process of the regulator in regard to awarding bodies monitoring arrangements.
In Scotland, again there are explicit requirements for awarding body organisations, documented in the
awarding body criteria (2007). 27
For other nations, there were no explicit standards or requirements documented and found in the
public domain. However, this may not mean that they do not exist but that they may be in another
form. In the case of Ontario for example, the Private Career Colleges Act explicitly covers the process
for registration and course approval (accreditation) and the role of the supervisor in this regard.
Quality assurance of providers
A recent report on mapping the qualifications frameworks of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) economies highlights the importance of a quality assurance framework and its link to a
qualifications framework—a qualification framework is only as strong as the quality assurance system
supporting it. 28 Quality assurance addresses the ‘assurance of qualifications as meeting the
requirements of the descriptors in the framework and of the providers awarding the qualifications’. 29
This report summarises the quality assurance of qualifications into three regulatory elements:
accreditation, awarding and audit of providers:
• Accreditation may rest with a single or multiple agencies, including self-accrediting
providers. Some national qualifications frameworks have brought the accreditation of most
groups of qualifications into a single qualifications authority or agency. In other national
qualifications frameworks the accreditation functions remain distributed across multiple
agencies and providers.
• Award of qualifications can be carried out in various ways. In some countries a centralised
agency awards groups of qualifications and in others awarding remains the responsibility of
different awarding bodies and providers. There are no countries where all qualifications are
awarded by a single central agency or authority.
• Audit of providers typically involves some oversight of learning provision and assessment.
This also can be located in a central qualifications agency or distributed across multiple
agencies. Where these functions are distributed, qualifications frameworks can be used as
benchmark tools for the standards to be achieved in quality assurance. 30
However, this approach does not tease out other various regulatory functions in terms of:
• approving organisations as suitable for providing training and assessment
• approving these organisation to deliver specific programs
• ongoing monitoring of these training organisations (in addition to audit)
• strategies that may be employed to manage non-compliant training organisations.
Front-end processes—registration
All nations reviewed in terms of their quality assurance systems have a process for gate keeping the
approval or registration of training organisations. However these processes varied in terms of:
• the level of scrutiny
• parameters reviewed, for example program design, program materials, program facilities,
complaints processes and refund policy.
Level of scrutiny
In all nations, there is a line drawn between those who do not require approval or registration and
those that do. In almost all nations the line is very similar.
27 SQA, 2007, www.sqa.org.uk/files_ccc/AccreditationAwardingBodyCriteria.pdf
28 Burke G, McKenzie P, Shah C, Keating J, Vickers A, Fearnside R and Bateman A 2009, p.10.
29 Burke et al, 2009, p.10.
30 Burke et al, 2009, p.10–11.
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