Fund recognition of prior learning properly, or stop pretending it is available
Recognition of prior learning is the purest form of the reform this site keeps proposing — do not assess the same thing twice. It is also, on the regulator's own account, an enduring and growing integrity risk. Both are true, and that is the problem.
Steps this would change
Rationale
This entry exists because it is the place where this database's own instincts run into a wall, and saying so is more useful than another confident proposal.
The case for RPL is the case this site makes everywhere else. A person who already holds a competence should not be trained in it again. Outcome Standard 1.6 of the Standards for RTOs 2025 requires exactly that: students with existing skills, knowledge and competencies are to be supported to seek recognition so they can progress. It is the same principle as verifying credentials once in health and reusing survey data in environmental approval.
And the regulator describes it as an enduring and growing risk. RPL is among ASQA's most frequently identified areas of non-compliance. It has warned about RPL mills: high-volume, low-quality operations issuing qualifications with minimal real assessment, targeting mandatory qualifications for government-funded job roles, shortage occupations and migration pathways.
Those are not competing claims about the same fact. They are both correct. Recognition of existing competence and sale of unearned credentials look identical from outside — a short process producing a qualification — and the only thing distinguishing them is assessment rigour that is invisible in the record.
Why the current settlement is the worst of both. Done to standard, RPL requires the same rigour, principles of assessment and rules of evidence as any other assessment. That is expensive and slow. Funding models generally pay per enrolment or per unit delivered, so a provider doing RPL properly earns less and works harder than one delivering the training, and a provider doing it improperly earns more and works less than either. The incentives point away from the honest version in both directions.
So the option formally exists, is rarely used well, and is heavily used badly.
What would have to change: an evidence standard specific enough to be audited against, and a funding rate for assessment-only delivery that makes rigorous RPL viable. Both are national decisions.
Filed as an idea. This database has no visibility of what proportion of RPL is sound, what rigorous RPL actually costs to deliver, or whether a defensible evidence standard can be written for competences that are genuinely tacit. Those are the whole question and none of them is a process question.
What is being traded away
Making RPL easier is exactly what the mills want. Any proposal to streamline recognition arrives on the same side of the argument as the operators ASQA is trying to shut down, and it will be used by them. In a sector where qualifications gate entry to aged care, disability support, childcare and migration, a wrongly issued credential puts an unqualified person in a room with someone vulnerable. That is a worse outcome than an unnecessary six months of training, and this site should say so plainly rather than treat duplication as the only cost worth counting.
Paying more for assessment-only delivery creates its own gaming. A funding rate that makes RPL commercially attractive makes RPL-heavy business models commercially attractive, which is precisely the model under scrutiny. Rate design would have to be paired with audit capacity that does not currently exist.
The tacit-knowledge problem may not be solvable by an evidence standard. Much of what an experienced worker knows is demonstrable in practice and hard to evidence on paper. A standard tight enough to defeat a mill may be tight enough to exclude the honest applicant it was written for, and the result would be RPL that is formally available and practically unobtainable — which is arguably where it already is.
And a note on this site's method. Almost every reform here argues that assessing the same thing twice is waste. RPL is the case where the second assessment is the only thing standing between a credential and a fraud. It is recorded at length as a corrective: do not assess twice is a good heuristic and not a principle, and the difference matters most where the credential is the protection.
Precedent
Outcome Standard 1.6 already requires students with existing competence to be supported to seek recognition. The obligation exists. What does not exist is a funding model or an evidence standard that makes discharging it viable.
Sources
- ASQA, Standards for Registered Training Organisations 2025, Outcome Standard 1.6
- ASQA, published risk priority material on recognition of prior learning, describing inadequate RPL as an enduring and growing risk and warning about RPL mills
- ASQA, Practice Guide: Recognition of Prior Learning and Credit Transfer