Skills Assessment

There are different people you need to go to depending on what skills you have, and what job you do – different agencies assess different jobs.

Firstly teachers (seeing as that’s what I know the most about!) hopefully I’ve managed to answer some of the frequently asked questions I see on forums and the such like.

We use the AITSL to get our skills/qualifications assessed for migrations purposes (only – that bit is important later on down the line!), and you have to choose one of a couple of categories:

Exactly which category you apply under will be to do with your PGCE. First things first though – you need to be 4 year BEd trained or a 3 (or more) undergrad degree PLUS a PGCE (or other 1 year, full time ITT with at least 45 days on teaching prac.).

GTP is unfortunately not accepted – the only way in as a teacher if you are GTP trained is to do a conversion course in Australia before you can apply for your (non-student) visa – you will either need to get into Australia on someone else’s visa, or get your own student visa for this, and if its the latter (and possibly the former) pay stupidly high fees, something along the lines of $30,000 per year! last time I checked. Various states I’m sure will have their own requirements on this – this is just for migration and the visa at the moment, not actually being able to work as a teacher once you get there – that’s a whole other info page to be honest!

So, you’ve got a degree and your PGCE, you’ve worked out that despite working as a Primary school teacher in Year 1 for the last 10 years your PGCE was actually in Secondary English, so have decided on the Secondary Teacher as your application code. You need to download and fill in the form from AITSL website : http://www.aitsl.edu.au/applying-for-an-assessment.html and gather together the paperwork:

• Your degree certificate
• Your degree transcripts
• Your PGCE certificate
• Your PGCE transcript
• Letter from uni stating more than 45 days on teaching prac (I think mine was something like 112 days) – must be letter headed paper
• Copy of photo page of passport
• Evidence of registration with GTC (I used my GTC certificate from when I first passed my PGCE, and my NQT certificate from when I passed Induction, also from the GTC, as I don’t have a current membership card)
• Marriage certificate (if appropriate)
• IELTS certificate (if appropriate – I used the fact all my education had been completed at British Schools/Universities to meet the evidence for this criteria)
• 1 Passport sized photo

If you are going to claim points for length of work experience later on in the 175/6 process, you also need to get AITSL to assess this, in which case you also need to include:

• Statement from current/previous head teachers confirming length of service or statements from LA.

If you already have the 65 points needed for the 175/6 (current points level as of Sept 2011) then you don’t need to get this done, you don’t need any extra points over the 65 threshold and any that are over this won’t count (ie they stop looking for proof of points when they get to the 65 points).

All copies of these bits and bobs need to be certified, but luckily the AITSL accept a variety of people to do this, including headteachers and people who are registered medical practitioners, so just get someone from the list to sign, date, put contact details and a ‘I certify this as a true copy of the original’ on all bits of paper.

Once you’ve done all of this, off it goes to Australia. You can either post it normal Royal Mail or if you want to trace it use a courier – DO NOT use Royal Mail signed for International – it is NOT a traceable service, once it is out of the country you will not know what has happened to it and Royal Mail will be less than useful (or have been to us on many many occasions previously when International Signed for packages have gone walkies).

In quite a few weeks time (officially it’s 10), if you’ve done the above, you should get a lovely letter back from the AITSL saying well done, you’re a teacher! Which is nice (see my blog post about it here: http://sendusdownunder.com/2011/05/aitsl-wise-bunch-or-teacher/) Its a nice start to the process IMHO.

I’ll try and pop some info about other jobs/professions/skills in a bit when I get a chance to research them to help other out, but if you are stuck as to who is meant to assess your skills – if you look on the DIAC website SOL list, it should say who your assessing body is – TRA, VETASSESS and so on….

Useful links:

AITSL

DIAC SOL list