Before Marketing any VET Qualifications in your school handbook read this important article to ensure advertising meets the RTO Standards 2015.
The following is endorsed by both ASQA and TAC and is taken from the directive from ASQA. This is to assist schools to work within the regulations of the RTO Standards 2015 as part of their partnership Agreement, specifically Clause 4.1 – Provide accurate and accessible information to prospective and current learners, when promoting VET offerings during the course counselling process. RTOs are responsible for ensuring any marketing done by the school meets the RTO Standards.
- All listed VET qualifications must include the code and title as published on training.gov.au. Alternate school codes are not to be used.
- For schools that have a signed a third-party agreement with an RTO for the following academic year at the time of publication of course counselling handbooks, the publication must include the RTO name and code. If room permits, the RTO logo may also be applied. If you only use 1 RTO you only need to do this once. If you use multiple RTOs, then each RTO is to be listed against the relevant qualification. This is to notify the students of which RTO is responsible for their issuing their qualification if they are successful.
- For schools that have not yet entered into and signed a third-party agreement with an RTO for the following academic year at the time of publication of course counselling handbooks and have identified VET offerings in these publications:
- it is important that no RTO name, RTO code or logo be published together with qualifications; and
- the following statement must be included under the proposed qualification offering:
‘The <insert qualification code and name> is a proposed offering for the 20## academic year. At the time of publication, no agreements have been entered into with a Registered Training Organisation for the delivery of this qualification. On the basis of interest from students in the <insert qualification name and code>, the school will initiate a formal partnership agreement with an RTO for the delivery of the qualification.’
- The regulators recognise the ‘point in time’ printing of hard copy handbooks and wouldn’t consider this a regulatory issue if a third-party agreement had not been signed prior to the time of print.
Once a formal agreement has been established with a RTO for the delivery of a qualification, the publication of all marketing material must comply with Clause 4.1 of the Standards for RTOs, 2015 and changes made by the school to include the RTO name and code (and logo if room permits). It is highly recommended that you work with your RTO to ensure compliance requirements are met.
The advertising of profile funded courses, school-based apprenticeship or traineeships should also include RTO name and code (and logo).
