Is your Complaints and Appeals Procedure Compliant?

Author: Carolyn Claridge

The Standards for RTOs 2015 has a lot to say about how you manage complaints and academic appeals. In my time of auditing many RTOs over the years, I have to admit I rarely find a 100% compliant procedure which covers the requirements adequately.

Either the procedure covers complaints but not appeals, or:

• the steps for both are identical, or
• the independent mediator (if the RTO cannot resolve the matter) is the regulator, or
• there may be advice on how to make a complaint (e.g. a form or email), but no contact details of who to send it to, or
• there is no step ensuring the complaint or request for an appeal is acknowledged in writing, or
• there is no explanation of how complaints and appeals feed into the RTO’s continuous improvement activities,

…and so on.

Is your procedure compliant?

I would like to share with you, the checklist I developed for auditing these particular clauses in the Standards (we are talking about Clauses 6.1 through to 6.5), and encourage you to check your own procedure/s against this…

You can find a free template for a Complaints and Appeals Policy and Procedure for your referral in our Free Resources section here.

We have purposefully left the document in a Word version so you can brand it and make it suitable to your RTO and your applicable roles (no, we are not charging for this as many other compliance organisations do).

Just to let you know for your peace of mind, this procedure has passed regulatory audit repeatedly.

Our clients are primarily smaller RTOs without a Compliance Manager or Quality Team on staff, yet still require access to a compliance specialist who has extensive experience, access to the most current vocational training and auditing trends, professional VET networks and a myriad of audit-compliant templates and processes at their disposal.

If you would like any other assistance with your RTO compliance, please contact us here.

Good luck and please remember you are not alone in this compliance maze, we can help 😊.