Current qualification, superseded unit

There are two honest ways to count what is superseded on a provider's scope, and they give very different answers. Count only qualifications, accredited courses and skill sets — the products a learner enrols in — and 26% of Australian RTOs have at least one. Count every training product, units of competency included, and it is 69%.

The interesting number is not either of those. It is the gap between them. 1,672 providers — 43.0% of the whole register — have at least one superseded unit of competency on their live scope and not a single superseded qualification, course or skill set.

It is not one stray unit

A single superseded unit could be dismissed as noise. Most of this group is not that: the median provider in it has 7, nine in ten have forty or fewer, and the largest single scope carries 203. Across the group there are 24,318 superseded units sitting on live scopes, and across the census as a whole — including providers who also have a superseded qualification — there are 84,827.

Put the other way round: 984 of these providers — 58.9% of the group — have six or more, and 86 have more than fifty. Whatever this is, for most of the group it is not a rounding error.

Where the sector actually sits

The three states are worth seeing together, because the middle one is the one that gets lost. Of 3,884 providers with a current registration on the day of the read:

Fewer than a third of providers come back genuinely clean. That is the sentence we got wrong ourselves for months, and it is why this page exists — see the note at the end.

How this was measured

A census, not a sample: every organisation on training.gov.au flagged as an RTO was read, and the 3,884 with a current registration on the day of the read are the population for every figure here. Providers whose registration is pending, suspended, non-current or cancelled are excluded — a provider that is not operating has an exposure that does not mean the same thing.

Live scope only. A scope entry counts if it has no end date or an end date still in the future. Historical scope — what a provider used to deliver — is excluded, which is why these numbers are lower than a naive read of the register gives. "Superseded" is the register's own status field on the product; we do not infer it.

Only what a provider delivers. Scope entries also include training packages — the container, not something anyone enrols in — and some of those carry a superseded status. They are excluded here. Counting them inflated an earlier version of this figure by 68 providers, which is exactly the kind of error a stated definition is supposed to expose.

Read in a single day, and that turned out to matter. An earlier version of this census was taken over eleven days. Comparing the two showed why that is not good enough: of the 662 providers measured on the first day with a superseded qualification, course or skill set on scope, 103 no longer had one eleven days later — and in 25 of 25 checked one by one, a scope entry for that product had simply reached its end date. Products leave a scope on their own schedule, so a census spread across eleven days is not one photograph. This one is: 3,884 of 3,884, same day, zero read failures.

What this does not say

• It does not say why. Why a unit is superseded while the qualification packaging it stays current would need the release history of each training package product by product, which we have not read. This is what the register records, not how it got there.
• It does not say anyone is non-compliant. The register publishes statuses, not obligations. What a superseded unit on your scope requires of you is between you and your regulator, and we make no legal claim about it.
• It does not say learners are affected. Who is enrolled in what exists only in a provider's student management system, never in the register and never here. That is a different question, and only the provider can answer it.
• It does not weight by how much work each one is. A superseded unit whose replacement the register calls equivalent is not the same job as one flagged not equivalent, and the rate of that flag varies enormously by training package.

Where this came from

Honesty about the origin, because it is the useful part. We hung our own free report's "nothing superseded on your live scope today — a clean sheet" on the strict count, while the page on this site counted units. The same provider could read "1 superseded" on screen and "a clean sheet" in the email we sent them, on the same day. The email is fixed and now lists the units with their replacements; this page is what happened when we asked how many providers had been in that blind spot.

If you want the whole census — both definitions, the exclusions, the limits and the table of everything we counted — it is in the sector study.