by: Dr Michelle Mosiere
What is the role of professional accreditation bodies?
Professional accreditation is an interface between education and vocation, discipline and profession, and quality assurance and regulation that helps to ensure new entrants to a profession meet entry-level thresholds for professional registration.
Professional accreditation bodies ultimately assess whether graduates of a course will be able work to a professional standard upon completion. Using desk audits and site visits, professional accreditation bodies focus on the alignment of a course to the professional accreditation standards, which commonly include:
- course design and assessment – to confirm that students achieve the expected professional learning outcomes
- professional placements and work-integrated experiences – to ensure they are safe, sufficiently resourced and appropriately supervised
- learning resources and teaching activities – to explore the level of alignment between disciplinary, educational and professional needs
- the way providers represent the professional accreditation status of relevant courses – to protect students from any misleading marketing practices.
What does professional accreditation mean for senior academic leaders?
It means a lot of work compiling the evidence needed to apply for or renew professional accreditation. In many cases, it involves even more work than course accreditation applications to TEQSA. This is because accreditation bodies need to verify that the course in its entirety will ensure students achieve all expected learning outcomes and associated professional standards.
What happens if professional accreditation is not gained or maintained?
There are serious consequences to providers and students alike if courses in disciplines such as accounting, teaching, engineering, medicine, nursing and allied health fail to gain or maintain professional accreditation:
- Students experience significant barriers to professional registration.
- Providers face potential regulatory action for non-compliance.
- Corporate governing bodies are critically scrutinised for governance failures.
As the diagram below shows, the loss of professional accreditation is its own case study in the interconnectedness of the Higher Education Standards Framework (HESF).
What is being done to reduce the regulatory burden of professional accreditation?
Efforts are underway to streamline professional accreditation processes. For example, Universities Australia and Professions Australia, which represents 18 peak professional accreditation bodies, recently signed a Joint Statement of Principles for Professional Accreditation that encourages:
- nationwide consistency across disciplinary requirements, professional accreditation standards, and accreditation processes
- widely applicable and inclusive standards that reflect the diversity in institutional structures and frameworks, educational design and delivery, and quality processes of the professional associations or accreditation bodies
- transparent, accountable, efficient, effective and fair evidence-based accreditation assessments.
What else is worth knowing?
The attached article ( Professional Standards Council Article on Higher Education Accreditation) explores key issues relating to higher education accreditation, including:
- benefits of professional accreditation
- differences between statutory and non-statutory accreditation bodies, and
- levels of accreditation detail.
If you need support navigating, project managing and/or quality assuring a professional accreditation application, please contact us via info@dvesolutions.com.au to speak with a member of the team.
We have team members who have experience with the following:
- Australian Psychology Accreditation Council (APAC) (one team member is their former accreditation manager),
- Australian Nursing and Midwifery Accreditation Council (ANMAC),
- Certified Practising Accountant (CPA) Australia,
- Australian Computer Society (ACS), and
- Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand (CA ANZ), among others.
We are here to help.
