The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) is Australia’s independent national regulator of the higher education sector (replacing AUQA) and registers and evaluates the performance of higher education providers against the Higher Education Standards Framework, specifically, the Threshold Standards.
TEQSA periodically publishes Guidance Notes to provide information on topics of particular importance under the Threshold Standards. They do not introduce any new requirements of providers and are published for consultation from the sector.
The new Guidance Notes for consultation cover:
- Benchmarking
- Information resources
- Course approval, design and delivery
- Equivalence of professional experience to academic qualifications
- Third party arrangements
Guidance Notes were distributed to faculties and offices for comment on Friday 15 May. Staff are encouraged to provide their collated feedback through their faculties and offices.
More information is available on the TEQSA Wiki.
Consultation considerations
- To identify anything inherent in the Guidance Notes that will raise compliance issues or is considered counter‐productive to achieving the best outcome for students.
- To identify any gaps or weaknesses in our processes or compliance in these regulatory areas.
Consultation timeline
- Initial identification of particular issues staff think require feedback to TEQSA (via Wiki): 27 May 2015
- Full list of identified issues distributed to Faculties and Offices: 1 June 2015
- Extended replies from Faculties and Offices due: 18 June 2015
- Collation of feedback: 23 June 2015
- Review of feedback by Executive Group: 24 June 2015
- Submission of feedback to TEQSA: 6 July 2015