December 

2022-2023

INTERNATIONAL APPROVAL AND REGISTRATION CENTRE

Annual General Meeting 2022

Elections & Nominations

Presidents Report 2022

Warm welcome to our Newest Members

Crucial Conversations and Risk Planning

Promote your school with us!

This year's meeting was the Centre's first in-person AGM since covid-19 changed how we do business! Of course, that meant that some people were travelling and could not make it, others were able to make the trip or check-in virtually to share on our progress. Thanks to all who attended or voted by proxy.

With another successful year, we saw modest growth in finances and membership, yet we spent more on improving services and growing our human resources!

We welcome two new Board Members for 2022-2023! Melina Tuminello of ACS Distance Education Australia replaces Secretary Marie Beerman. Marie stood down from her post of four years. Our sincere thanks goes to Marie for her dedication to the Centre during her service. 

We also welcome Daniel Hunt, CEO of The Career Academy. A global education brand. Daniel joins our United Kingdom Regional Committee and we excited to have him on board. The Career Academy is a long-term member of the Centre, Daniel himself brings a wealth of experience to the Regional Committee and has already started consultations on peripheral membership categories to extend our services. 

Other dedicated Board members were re-elected into their posts and are excited to continue our collaborative work for the Centre for another year.

Executive Committee Australia

Regional Subcommittee United Kingdom

by John Mason, President International Approval and Registration Centre (IARC), Board Member Australian Garden Council, Principal ACS Distance Education, Publisher and Author.

Industry Update

The world has now removed many of the covid restrictions that have dominated our lives for the past couple of years, but we are left with a different world, economically, socially and in so many other ways. There are many factors at play, which have and will continue to impact the education industry (broadly) and in turn IARC (more specifically).

These factors include ongoing health issues, logistics and supply problems, war in Ukraine and climate change. Added to this, we have continuing technological change which has not slowed, despite the disruptions caused by these other factors. Increased volatility has thus become the norm in the wider world, and that includes the education industry.

The Current Status

Some of the impacts on industry include:

Online education is reportedly grown by around 900% since the start of covid-19 pandemic. While some who have experience with online education have expanded; many others have become involved with delivering online, without being properly trained or experienced in the delicate differences between online and face to face education. Some new players have already crashed and burned. Others are learning and getting better. The state of play in online education is volatile and varied. Some online programs are very good and very stable, others are volatile and driven more by quick financial gain than by provision of quality education.

Significant worker shortages, and sometimes critical shortages of skilled professionals have appeared in many industries. There is a shortage of tradespeople, health workers, and I.T. professionals in many countries. This issue may well have been brewing before the pandemic but has only been exaggerated since. Some reports for instance, suggest that there are only enough computer programmers looking for work, to fill 10% of the jobs available (in Australia). These shortages are exaggerated by reduced skilled migration and by people leaving professions. Many teachers for instance, found work outside of teaching over covid, during classroom lockdowns. Now we have fewer people in the workforce who have education experience.

Ongoing risks of sickness is resulting in staff shortages in workplaces. For example when people get covid or the flu, a workplace may exclude them from coming to the workplace. Other workplaces that allow sick staff to come to work, can then find others get sick and stay away. Either way, the result is often there are fewer people attending the workplace than what was planned for.

Financial pressures have been rising this year. The costs associated with providing an education service is increasing, and at the same time cost of living is increasing. Education businesses cannot easily increase income, because clients cannot easily afford increased costs. With increased pressure on finding staff, it is becoming increasingly difficult to pay employees more to retain them. There is a financial crunch at play which is continuing to grow.

IARC Remains Buoyant

In these volatile and uncertain times, IARC continues to remain strong. Over the past year:

• We have remained active on social media.
• Committees have met via zoom out of both Australia and the UK
• Jade Sciascia, Melina Tuminello and Sandra Eberwein have done a stellar and very professional job in managing the website and social media, newsletters, dealing with correspondence, membership management, the Centre’s financial obligations, development projects and attending to all other operational issues.
• Membership levels remain strong.

Our financial position has remained stable with an increase of 7% growth in cash assets in 12 months. (This % does not include a further $2.9k outstanding from accounts receivable). 

IARC Activity

Over the 2021-22 period, IARC has been even more active than over the previous year – we have seen a significant increase in interest in membership which we could assume is symptom of the increased numbers of online education businesses. We have grown our membership by 8%.   

Over the past year, the IARC office has increased human resources. We have also identified the needs for increased IT programs to support our business. We opted to implement Airtable - a low code platform for customising workflow and customer relationship management – which enabled us to move our records management and data online. We have also opted to use SOC 2 Type II compliant smart forms with Jotform for increased efficiency, productivity and security. These two systems have enabled us to improve many aspects of the Centre’s workflow; the use of these systems will continue as we utilise their integration capabilities to embed payment widgets and other apps into our operations. These are an extremely affordable way to meet our customers needs and expectations.

Summary of Membership

We have a total of 81 members – this includes all categories of membership. Full fee-paying members, honorary members, and subsidiary memberships.  This is 8% increase on membership from the 2021-22 membership year.

• We approved six new members.
• We rejected zero applicants. 
• We lost two members (reasons: business closure and debtor termination).
• We terminated the one membership.
• We wrote off a total of $330 from debtors.
• There is one nonfinancial member, with membership inactive and on hold, due to business restructuring and takeover.
• There are four prospective member applications being worked on at present.
• There are a further two new members anticipated to be approved through the ACS Affiliations Network agreement.

In closing, I want to revisit the reason why IARC was established.  As a founding member I recall working with Peter Derig, Fay Chamoun, Carmel Thompson and Katie Freeth to respond to what we saw as a need to have an affordable, credible way of recognising the quality of an education enterprise in any country, irrespective of whether they were operating within or outside of government, industry or other mainstream systems.  We recognised the importance of supporting diversity and innovation in education; and understood that sometimes other recognition systems, despite good intentions, were inadvertently diminishing innovation and diversity.

With warmest wishes,

Mr John Mason

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I don’t want to offend you, but I need you to hear what I’ve found...

By Jade Sciascia, Business and Education Integrity Manager

Planning for 2023? Get off to a great start by leading crucial conservations. We’ve explored the topic of communication before. I’ve shared my thoughts about leaning into difficult conversations, how change can happen as we move through challenging dialogues, and how we know morale suffers as animosity occurs when conversations need to happen, but they don’t. In this article I’m considering conversation with a specific focus in mind. Risk planning.

To focus on risk planning, you might ask yourself ... what keeps me up at night? You will know the answer. We’re asking our members to tune into that. You will have an instinctive connection to your business which will help you to identify risks. You can gather your people and resources and plan a strategy (to return to a full night’s sleep!). To do that successfully, planning often works best with the input of a team. Here’s my tips for maintaining healthy relationships when working through risk planning with your staff or colleagues.  

Suggestion No. 1

Simple advice I once heard was “don’t tell yourself a story”, in other words, start only from facts. Don’t take someone else’s story as fact either. Check in with yourself before starting a meeting or discussion… what do you know for sure? Assume the people around you are entirely aligned with you for mutual benefit … believe in their best intentions and avoid filling gaps with negatives or jumping to conclusions. Keep the conversation on track - develop a project charter as a tool to highlight the problem and focus on the goals. 

When we’re having conversations around challenging topics such as risk, strong emotions are often ignited. Emotions will cloud tone of voice, our non-verbal communication and even how we think about the situation. Be aware of amygdala hijack!  

Suggestion No. 2

Consider how speaking in person (instead of electronically) is often more helpful in the development of professional relationships. Do not undervalue human connection and its power in the way your team can pull together in strategising. Leaders will pick up the phone, have conversations or virtual meetings. Spending only 15 minutes in conversation is long enough to establish rapport and develop understanding that conversational interaction is ordinary and functional. In a world of cyber operations and remote working, talking on the phone is far removed from reality for many people nowadays. Speaking regularly - however you decide to do it - will help to keep you and your gen X, Y, Z team on the same page.

Where risk shows up, processes or issues may need altered, to keep the conversation positive aim to use contrasting communication with “don’t and do statements” …

“I don’t want to offend you…” Don’t statement “but I need you to hear what I’ve found…” Do statement

“I don’t want you to feel pressured….” Don’t statement “but we need to schedule a more efficient timeline…” Do Statement

Shift the general narrative to future opportunities instead of correcting issues from the past. If a conversation goes downhill, gently point out to your colleague, staffer or stakeholder, that the conversation is not going as you’d hoped and you’d like to revisit it later or the next day.

Suggestion No. 3

Record your findings. No, not you in fact, ask a staff member to do it. Encouraging staff or colleagues to work with you through risk planning is empowering for them. Consider trust building in your team - keep listening to them. Their skills and expertise may deviate significantly from yours. Utilise their customer facing abilities, product engineering expertise, and their data infrastructure and security skills, to help you adjust and write (or rewrite) the plan. If you can’t transfer the risk (a risk handling strategy in itself, let’s be clear), you can involve staff directly to work on reducing and monitoring risk. Then remember compassion, walk in their shoes. Approach your risk management process as if you were on the other side of the desk. How would you want to be treated if your employer had serious concerns? What response would you want if a (major) crisis was being averted and suddenly you were chosen to be part of it?

As the General Manager, Company Director, Chief Executive Officer, or whatever position of responsibility you bear – the liability for risk management lies with you. Nonetheless, staff are employed to assist, as you lead the business in making ethical and judicious decisions.

As a member of the Centre, risk-based thinking and prevention is encouraged, along with ethical practices and valuing staff. Risk, compliance, and governance is a major header of your business, but this doesn’t need to be your focus if you develop a culture of communication and collaboration, with a holistic and strategic approach. What you and your team do best is education – wouldn’t it be nice to spend time focusing on learners and learning.

Explore risk or compliance as part of your integrated QMS with the Centre, talk with me.

Get in touch | jade@iarcedu.com  

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