Blueprint 2026: What’s in Your Strategic Plan?

Moving from Survival to Strategy

As we approach the end of 2025, the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector is finally seeing some stability. We have made it through a tough year of strict audits (including the confusion around marking times and "illegal holidays"), adapted to the new 2025 Standards, and adjusted to the government's new rules for controlling the number of international students.

For many college leaders, 2025 was just about surviving. But as we look toward 2026, we need to stop just trying to survive and start planning to thrive.

The government has set the rules clearly now:

• Student Caps: A limit of 295,000 new international student starts for the whole country in 2026.

• AI Safety: A new AI Safety Institute is starting early in the year to oversee artificial intelligence.

• Integrity: A strict focus on honest, high-quality education rather than just recruiting large numbers.

So, I ask my colleagues: What is in your plan for 2026?

If your plan is just "business as usual," you are already falling behind. Here is a simple blueprint for what every Registered Training Organisation (RTO) needs to focus on right now.

1. The "Managed Growth" Reality Check

The government calls the new cap of 295,000 students "managed growth." This is a slight increase from 2025, but it means we can no longer rely on getting huge numbers of new students every year to make a profit. The market size is now fixed for many providers.

Your 2026 Strategy Must Address:

• Value Over Volume (Yield): Since you cannot easily increase the number of students you teach, you need to focus on the value of what you offer. Instead of offering "cheap and cheerful" courses to compete on price, you should look at offering higher-quality, premium courses that justify higher fees.

• Small Provider Rules: If you are a smaller boutique college, the government has set aside specific places for you in a "Small Provider Pool." Your plan needs to understand these specific rules so you don't get squeezed out by the massive colleges.

• Diversification: With international student numbers capped, is 2026 the year you focus on training local Australian students or offering corporate training to businesses?
  

2. Making AI Work for You (Operationalising AI)

The new Australian AI Safety Institute (AISI) will be up and running in early 2026. This means the "Wild West" era of using AI in education is over. We now have to be careful, compliant, and smart about it.

Your 2026 Strategy Must Address:

• Assessment Integrity: Students now have access to powerful AI tools that can write assignments for them. Your Training and Assessment Strategy (TAS)—the master plan for how you run your courses—must clearly explain how you will check that student work is genuine. How will you prove the student did the work, not a computer?

• The Efficiency Bonus: Are you using AI to help run your business? If you can use AI to handle paperwork and compliance tasks faster, you save money. That money can then be spent on hiring better teachers and improving resources.

3. The "Genuine" Student & Visa Success

The government is updating Ministerial Direction 111, which is the set of instructions giving priority to certain student visa applications. The message is simple: they want "genuine" students who are here to study, not just to work.

Your 2026 Strategy Must Address:

• University Pathways: The new rules allow exemptions for students moving from an RTO to a University. This means partnerships with universities are now incredibly valuable. Do you have agreements in place that allow your students to transfer seamlessly to a degree?

• Aligning with National Goals: The government wants better connections with Southeast Asia. Does your marketing plan align with this? Recruiting students from countries the government wants to engage with (like those in the Southeast Asia Economic Strategy) will likely make the visa process smoother for your students.

4. Housing and Community Responsibility

For 2026, universities are being forced to provide student accommodation if they want to enrol more students. While this rule technically applies to universities, it sets a new standard for everyone: education providers are expected to help solve problems, not create them. This is often called having a "social license to operate",—meaning the community trusts and accepts you.

Your 2026 Strategy Must Address:

• Real Student Support: It is no longer enough to just give a student a list of rental websites. Can you partner with accommodation providers? Can you create homestay networks? Showing auditors that you care about where your students live builds a strong reputation.

5. The Shift to "Self-Assurance"

We are now fully working under the 2025 Standards. The regulator, ASQA, is moving away from just telling us what to do ("education") to checking that we are doing it ("enforcement"). The new system is about Self-Assurance—this simply means you need to find and fix your own problems before the auditor does.

Your 2026 Strategy Must Address:

• Proving You Are Watching: It is not enough to be compliant; you have to prove you are checking yourself. Your calendar for 2026 should be full of internal checks, meetings with industry experts, and reviews of your data.

• Fixing the "Illegal Holiday" Issue: As we saw this year, auditors are very strict about course timetables. Ensure your 2026 calendar explicitly includes time for marking and grading so that you aren't accused of giving students unauthorised breaks.

6. Quality is the Culture

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must fundamentally rethink how we view quality.

Quality is not one part of RTO culture. It is the culture.

In the world of vocational education and training, quality cannot sit on the sidelines. It cannot be treated as a checklist item, a box to tick, or something that only matters when an audit is around the corner.

In an RTO, quality is the mindset, the behaviour, the standard, and the promise. It is reflected in every learner interaction, every assessment decision, every unit resource, every piece of evidence, and every internal process. When quality becomes the culture, compliance becomes a natural outcome rather than a stressful event.

Strong RTOs do not chase compliance. They build quality systems, quality teams, and quality experiences. Compliance simply follows.

When we embed quality into daily practice, we elevate everything: learner outcomes, staff confidence, industry trust, regulatory stability, and organisational reputation.

At CAQA, we have seen one truth play out over and over again:

• RTOs that prioritise quality never fear audits.

• RTOs that treat quality as culture always lead.

Quality is not something you do once. It is something you live, breathe, and uphold every day.

In 2026, the RTOs that succeed will be the ones that stop acting like victims of new rules and start taking control.

The caps are set. The standards are clear. The tools are available.

The question is no longer "What will the government do to us?" but "What will we do with the certainty we now have?"

Your blueprint for 2026 is built on Quality, Value, and Integrity. If you get those three right, you won't just survive the year—you’ll define it.