New Worksafe National Assessment Instruments

Worksafe Victoria in conjunction with Safework Australia released the newest editions to the High Risk Work National Assessment Instruments in March 2020, for use by RTOs by 1st May 2020.

The new instruments have had some changes made to the wording in them after a strong feedback from trainers and students alike, other major changes include:

• No more "critical" & "non-critical" questions. Those familiar with the old assessment, would be aware that all "critical" questions must of been answered correctly, with a percentage of the remaining "non-critical" questions, allowed to be wrong, to pass the assessment. Now all the High Risk Work Assessments, have a pass rate, for all questions. 
• Only 1 version of each assessment. Some questions used to have "options", where there may have been up to 3 different options to choose for a single question. Students sitting in the same class, may of had different "versions" of an assessment & Assessors may of had a multitude of "Versions" to mark, these options have now been removed, so everyone sitting the assessment will always have the same "Version".
• Many of the assessments have had calculations questions added, making this component of the assessment more rigorous

While there are many areas of this new document that still require change, the new documents are an improvement on what we have been using to date. Unfortunately change is a slow process with the regulators as someone once explained to me if you put seven people in a room from different parts of the country trying to get an agreement on something is very diffcult.