The same agency appears in this database twice, and the split is functional rather than an error. This entry is ASQA as the VET regulator under the National VET Regulator Act. Education regulators and the CRICOS register is the ESOS function, which ASQA and TEQSA both perform for their own sectors. A vocational provider wanting international students deals with one agency wearing two hats under two Acts.

Recognition of prior learning is where this body's problem lives, and it is one of the more interesting two-sided findings in this database.

RPL exists to stop people being trained in what they already know. Outcome Standard 1.6 of the 2025 Standards requires students with existing skills to be supported to seek recognition so they can progress through the training product. In principle it is the purest form of the reform this site keeps proposing: do not assess the same thing twice.

In practice ASQA describes inadequate RPL as "an enduring and growing risk in the VET sector", identifies it as one of its most frequent areas of non-compliance, and has warned about RPL mills — high-volume, low-quality operations issuing qualifications with little real assessment, targeting mandatory qualifications for government-funded job roles, skills shortage occupations and migration pathways.

So the mechanism designed to remove duplicated assessment is also the mechanism most used to sell qualifications to people who have not earned them. Both things are true, and any reform proposal here has to hold both. See Fund recognition of prior learning properly, or stop pretending it is available.