Legislation is about keeping legal, especially in fields where legislation governs exactly what you can and can't do.
The training sector is subject to a great deal of legislation and government policy. If you are in an RTO, you should have read a lot of this as part of your induction. The RTO is also required to know what relevant legislation that affects it, and provide you with access to copies when it affects your work.
About Legislation
Legislation (as well as other kinds of government policies and decisions) can greatly affect what you do in training and assessment. This especially applies in highly regulated industries where it is easy to break the law.
Some act as standards that you must use to assess students. So stay up to date with whatever affects you.
Try these for a start:
You are not necessarily expected to know them all, but you must know anything that affects your VET work.
VET is based on the policy frameworks at national and State/Territory bodies as well as those of your own RTO. New policies and guidelines come out all the time at various levels: state and Commonwealth.
Most of the following national VET policies are discussed in this handbook. You can access relevant national and state policies through the local accreditors’ websites, e.g. www.asqa.gov.au. (Link opens new window). Some are matters of compliance, and you might be penalized for contravening them, so you will need to analyze them to see how to use them. They include:
You must also incorporate many ethical and legal responsibilities into your work practices. These may include:
A variety of other government departments might also issue policies that affect you.
There are also sets of guidelines. Some are required for all RTOs, some are only required if they’re relevant to what you do. A few are only recommendations. There are guidelines on:
You should frequently review other sources of useful information and advice, such as:
VET is broad and is frequently changing. It is your responsibility to stay up to date and to comply with new policies. You may also need to ensure that your RTO is up to date.
You need to keep an eye on key websites to identify changes to VET policy and operating context.
When they arise you will need to determine the impacts on your current work practices. Consider options for modifying your practices to meet the new set of requirements. Discuss your ideas with your supervisor and ask if you need extra support to manage change.
You can even help make changes. You will have opportunities to contribute to new developments in VET policy. The most obvious is your feedback on your organization’s practices that arises through doing your job.
Other opportunities include:
The Standards for National Recognition (SNR) is the Australian national quality standard for training institutions under the national regulator, called ASQA, the Australian Skills Quality Authority. The standards are nearly the same. If you follow the protocols of the Certificate IV, you will normally meet the NSR requirements that affect you as an instructor.
The SNR changes fairly often due to its continual improvement regime.
Registration Authorities use indicators to gauge the continuous improvement of RTO performance and establish of risk profiles. They are:
Principles behind the changes
Some of the principles behind the current version include:
While there is greater flexibility than previous versions of the AQTF/SNR, most of the older requirements still apply in some way. Some of them are simply good management (e.g. risk management, staff induction, staff performance monitoring).
Interpreting the SNR
The SNR needs to cover the legal basics, but the main idea is that it should actually help us do a better job of training and assessing. In other words, it is a list of criteria that apply holistically to a functioning program. However, there can be various interpretations of many points of the SNR, which still has many layers of meaning:
The SNR people have published implementation guidelines. Some were just explanations of requirements and some were de facto extra rules.
You need to know something about copyright, whether developing your own materials or using materials from other sources.
What does copyright protect? Copyright protects:
How long does copyright last? Copyright now expires 70 years after the death of the author. (It used to be 50 years.)
Are all copyright rules the same? No. Images, music and electronic media have different copyright rules. There are also other kinds of intellectual property such as patents, plant breeds, designs, circuit layouts, and trade marks.
What doesn't copyright protect? Copyright applies to the text and does not extend to the ideas, concepts, styles, techniques or information. Names, titles, slogans and headlines are too small or unoriginal to be protected by copyright.
However, some of these may still be protected by other intellectual property laws:
In any case, if you use the ideas in academic work and express them in your own words, you need to provide references to avoid plagiarism. (You can plagiarize without infringing copyright.)
What if it doesn't follow the exact text? One could contravene copyright by making a paraphrase of something or a revised later edition. It is demonstrably still the same work. A novel using exactly the same plot and characters would also fall under this category even if it did not use the exact same text.
What do you have to do to get copyright for your work? Protection is free and automatic from the time something is first written or recorded. There is no registration for copyright protection in Australia. The copyright notice does not need to be on something to gain protection, but it is a good reminder (e.g. © Joe Blow 1973).
Educational institutions have special provisions to use copyright material for educational purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. Some of these provisions allow material to be used for free and others require payment.
The Copyright Act also provides some exceptions to the general rules regarding copyright. The most important of these permits 'fair dealing' for the following purposes:
This is no general exception for personal copying. It must be for one of the specified purposes.
What can you do? You can make single or multiple copies for students as follows:
What you can't do. You can't sell copies to students or anyone else under any circumstances at all.