The reform agenda in Australian tertiary education is sound. Whether it delivers now depends far less on policy design than on capability: whether providers have the systems, the skills and the access to make it real. That is where the gap will open, and it is the same gap opening in every country attempting this.
By David Bowser. Founder & CEO
At EduTECH in Sydney in June, I moderated a panel on vocational education governance, quality and systems reform in Australia. It brought together three women who see the system from very different seats: Megan Lilly from Jobs and Skills Australia, the national body that advises government on skills and workforce needs, Chloe Read from TAFE NSW, the largest public vocational provider in the country, and Natalie Turmine, CEO of Service and Creative Skills Australia, which sets the training standards for the service and creative industries. Thirty minutes, no audience questions, and a lot of ground to cover. The detail below is Australian. The tension underneath it is not. Every system trying to lift quality while widening access runs into the same question: how do you raise the bar without burying the providers who have to clear it?
Self-assurance asks more than compliance ever did
Australia's revised Standards for RTOs, the national quality rules that govern registered training organisations, took full effect in July 2025. They move the sector towards what is called self-assurance. Instead of proving compliance against a checklist, providers are asked to understand their own performance and take responsibility for improving it. In principle, this is the right shift. Quality you own beats quality you can only demonstrate on audit day. In practice it asks a great deal, particularly of smaller providers, and it only works if they have the capability and the systems to back it up. A checklist is something you can survive. Self-assurance is something you have to be good at.
Credit recognition is the structural prize
The second thread was harmonisation. Australia's Universities Accord, a national review of higher education, put the idea of parity of esteem between vocational and higher education into serious circulation. The newly legislated Australian Tertiary Education Commission is now building the machinery, including a national approach to recognising credit across the two sectors.If it works, a learner's effort will finally carry with them across a boundary that has been far too rigid for far too long. That is the structural prize, and it is worth the difficulty of getting there.
The AI conversation was better than most
AI came up, as it does everywhere, but this was a more useful conversation than the usual one. Nobody was selling anything, and nobody was catastrophising. Two things stayed with me. The first is ethics. Using these tools well means being clear about what they are doing, protecting learner data, watching for bias in the systems we hand judgement to, and being honest with learners about where AI sits in their assessment. It also means not stripping out the productive struggle that produces real learning. If the tool removes the difficulty, it may also remove the point. The second is access, and this is the one I keep thinking about. The best AI tools increasingly sit behind subscriptions. Well-resourced institutions buy them. Smaller providers, and the learners they serve, often cannot. Vocational education carries a disproportionate share of the people the system has historically underserved: second-chance learners, regional students, people retraining midway through a working life. If AI capability follows the money, the technology most often described as a leveller will quietly widen the gap instead. Access alone does not solve it either. Having the tool is not the same as knowing how to use it well. That takes real investment in professional learning for instructors, trainers and assessors, and it takes time that most providers do not currently have.
Where this leaves us
What struck me most was the mood in the room. This was not a group of people complaining about reform. It was a group who broadly want it and are wrestling, honestly, with how to make it work. The reform agenda is welcome. The hard part, as always, is delivery: the systems, the capability, and the day-to-day discipline that turn good policy into good practice. Good intentions do not lift quality on their own. Systems, clear processes and the right tools do, and so does making sure that the providers furthest from the money are not the last to get them. That gap between ambition and delivery is exactly where we spend our time at Curio, in Australia and in the other systems we work across.