We need to shift the focus back to quality !

One of the six pillars of Foundation for Indigenous Sustainable Health's operations is Education and Training as they work to break the cycle of generational poverty and engagement in the justice system for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The challenge they see in our training systems across Australia today is that over the last decade there has been a major shift away from Quality and more a focus on Compliance from governments, both national and state. This has had a negative affect on training organisations as they are needing to focus more of their resources on meeting the growing compliance standards instead of focussing on providing quality training for their clients.

Quality can be defined as providing a product or service that delivers the intended performance, the degree of excellence of something, where as Compliance is defined as meeting regulatory requirements or standards.

Researchers note that a focus on external standards and compliance is a “corruption” of quality improvement frameworks. When the focus becomes monitoring efforts on compliance with standards we tend to create a lot of them.

We end up defining quality as the satisfaction of funder and accreditor requirements and stop our efforts there and not focus on the quality of education and training.

Quality education and training is critical to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to break the generational cycle of poverty and engagement in the justice system. When the focus is on quality then compliance follows however a focus on compliance does not guarantee quality.

We need to stop the drive down the burrow of compliance, as it becomes self-perpetuating, and bring back the focus on quality education and training leading to sustainable and measurable results !