Were the PCYC, Catholic and state secondary schools, or the South Australian Sports Museum running ghost colleges?
The details in this article are correct but I have since learned of another list of 144 ‘Lapsed’ providers – there are even more anomalies on it – and you can read all about them and view that list on this post on my website.
Last month ASQA advised the public that they had closed 150 ‘ghost colleges’ and had written to another 140 providers warning them that they “must resume quality training by the end of 2024 or face deregistration. Those who don’t resume satisfactory training will be found out and action will be taken to shut them down.”
On their website ASQA identifies ‘ghost colleges’ as a key risk to the sector and one which they are actively focussed on in their regulatory activities.
Regrettably, as some in the sector have identified, the use of the phrase ‘ghost colleges’ to describe ASQA’s recent endeavours is misleading.
There is a new power available to ASQA following the passage of legislation in March 2024 to amend the National VET Regulator Act 2011. It allows for a provider’s registration to ‘lapse’ when their registration has been dormant for 12 months, ie they have not enrolled or taught any students.
The problem this legislative amendment sought to fix was the practice of some in the industry who set up registered training organisations (RTOs), got them registered with ASQA, but then never operated them, instead choosing to sell them “off the shelf” to new owners. In theory if the new owners were subject to appropriate scrutiny at the time of purchase then it should not matter that they had not been through the rigorous initial audit process themselves, but nonetheless this legislative amendment was seen by many as a positive change.[1]
It had very little though to do with the practices uncovered by Clay Lucas from The Age newspaper in August 2023. He correctly shone a spotlight on a very different and much more malevolent practice – where providers enrol lots of students but rarely if ever require them to turn up for classes, instead allowing students to work (often in very exploitative situations) and with the providers frequently complicit in the exploitation of the students.
The colleges enrolling students and not requiring them to turn up to lessons are Australia’s ghost colleges. They are not the providers who have not been enrolling students for 12 months or more.
When Senators were recently trying to understand more about the profiles and details of the 150 ghost colleges ASQA claimed to have taken action against (in a recent hearing of the Senate Standing Committee on Education and Employment) ASQA took on notice a number of questions about the 150 ghost colleges, and they have now provided their answers to those questions.
See below, an extract from ASQA’s answers where they appear to be stating that Senators can find a list of the 150 providers whose registration has lapsed, by searching the national training database (www.training.com.au)
In fact there are a number of problems with these statements in ASQA’s answers.
Firstly and most importantly in work I have been doing with a colleague, we are unable to find an RTO containing the currency designation “registration lapsed” in the national database.
That field (‘lapsed’) may well have been added into ASQA’s internal database (which then interfaces with the national database )- but in the national database these are the only categories pertaining to an RTO’s registration:
- Current
- Current (Re-registration pending)
- Current (in Administration/Liquidation)
- Current (Suspended)
- Withdrawn
- Cancelled
- Non-current
There is no field for ‘registration lapsed’.
The second problem in the statements above is the suggestion that Senators can individually check any provider’s current registration status (ie one by one). There are 4,009 RTOs currently registered and Senators are seeking a list of the 150 RTOs (ghost colleges) whose registration has lapsed.[2]
Because of the limits in the reports which are available from the national training database and some issues with inconsistencies in the data, my colleague and I have been working to access the data on the 150 ‘lapsed’ RTOs through the national database’s API.
Our analysis shows:
- We cannot replicate the claim that 150 RTOs have had their registration lapse
- Instead we have looked for evidence of RTOs which ceased to operate in the last 12 months (ie their registration was cancelled or withdrawn by ASQA). By our count there are 87
- The 87 includes:
- 11 state and Catholic schools
- 7 community based adult education providers (including the PCYC)
- 3 government agencies operating enterprise RTOs
- 1 enterprise RTO (non-government), and
- 3 industry associations (including the South Australian Sports Museum).
None of these organisations can in any way be described as ghost colleges exploiting international students. They are organisations which have decided for a variety of reasons not to continue operating as an RTO. Some have withdrawn their registration voluntarily and others have had their registration officially cancelled (probably because they wound up their operations without necessarily completing the requisite paperwork with ASQA).
There are also 62 private providers in the list of 87. Ten (10) of them had CRICOS approval to teach international students, and some had their registration cancelled by ASQA after serious non-compliances were identified in their practices.
We would welcome seeing the ASQA list of 150 ‘lapsed’ RTOs and understanding how many of those providers had CRICOS approval.
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[1] With appropriate safeguards in place so that if an RTO had a legitimate reason for not conducting training for a 12 month period, it could make its case to ASQA and retain its registration.
[2] Until March 2021, ASQA used to make details of their regulatory decisions available on their website, see: https://www.asqa.gov.au/how-we-regulate/our-regulatory-practice/record-decisions-prior-1st-march-2021. It is deeply disappointing that they discontinued this practice.
