RTO Superhero 🎙️ Empowering RTOs to Thrive!

Understanding VET Student Support – What’s Changing? with Lauren Boon-Hollows

Season 5 Episode 4

Join Angela Connell-Richards and Lauren Hollows in this insightful episode of the RTO Superhero Podcast, where they break down the changes to VET Student Support Services under the Revised Standards for RTOs.

With the introduction of Standards 2.3 and 2.4, student support has now been given its own Quality Area, significantly impacting how RTOs must provide and document services. Angela and Lauren discuss:

The shift from Clause 1.7 to a dedicated Quality Area for student support
The impact on RTOs delivering online and RPL courses
Ensuring reasonable access to trainers and assessors—what’s required?
Tracking student progress and well-being throughout their training
Leveraging technology and AI to enhance student support
The role of mental health awareness in trainer and assessor responsibilities
How to incorporate well-being units into training products

With completion rates being a key concern in the VET sector, providing the right support from enrolment to graduation is more critical than ever. Angela and Lauren explore practical strategies to help RTOs comply with these new standards while also enhancing student outcomes.

🚀 Don’t miss this deep dive into one of the most significant changes in the new standards!

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Angela Connell-Richards:

Welcome to the RTO Superhero Podcast and with my special guest, lauren Hollows, who's joining me for the whole year, this year, where we're going to be breaking down the standards and what's involved with what the RTOs need to do in order to prepare for the new standards. So Lauren and I just had a chat about what we've been doing and the amount of documents that we've been working on. I've already I'm about 30% of the way through rewriting all of our documents which we've already identified. There will be over 200 documents that we're going to be providing, and there's also quite a bit around student support and well-being. So welcome, lauren, to the Superhero Podcast.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Thank you so much, angela. I'm happy to be back. Awesome. So let's dive in. So this episode is on understanding vet support services and really looking at what's changed with the new revised standards. So the focus is on standard 2.3 and 2.4, which is training vet student support so that's how they've actually named that quality area. So there's a whole quality area on it. So I'd love to know know, lauren, where are you at, what do you think about the changes and what do you think is the most important changes that they've made?

Lauren Hollows:

um, so I actually really like the standard.

Lauren Hollows:

I think we previously only had 1.7, which what didn't really wasn't. There wasn't a lot of information in there um, and obviously, student support. If you're not adapting to your students, if you're not providing support for your students, then it's very, very hard to get them to the end, and completion rates are such a massive thing in our sector. And I think a lot of that relates to, if it doesn't relate to, contextualization contextualization of assessment tools, it's relating to student support and taking on students, whereby you haven't really explained what the program is and how it's going to run and therefore it's actually not suitable for the students. So this aligns the broad standards much more with, like, what's already required in government funding contracts, what's already required by ESOS, what's already required in government funding contracts, what's already required by ESOS, and so I think that this you know that what's within these standards broadly makes a lot of sense. I also think it's going to for the RPL RTOs, for our online RTOs, it's going to have a fairly major economic and business operational impact.

Angela Connell-Richards:

I totally agree.

Lauren Hollows:

They really look. For some of them they're amazing, they're fantastic, they work really well, but for others have, just to be perfectly candid, dropped the ball. You know RTOs where they say you've got 12 months to do the course online. My son's recently been going through a course in retail and he wasn't allowed to do the practical of any unit right until the end of the course and so he's been working in industry. He's been working at a job part-time for the last year and when we've been going through the hours, they're like well, your hours only start at the end. Once we've completed and you will be going over the 12 months, you're going to be charged an additional fee and I'm going actually hold on a second. Guys, let's just look at fairness and flexibility. He's been working in this place for all these time like and I'm happy to go back and explain like fairness and flexibility and student support, and you've actually got to explain these things and currency and validity right.

Lauren Hollows:

so I think that there is a lot of aspects for those particular rtos that this is going to impact like.

Lauren Hollows:

Ultimately, if you take on the responsibility of a student, if you're going to take money from a student, you have a responsibility to provide them with some support to get them to the end of that course, and I think that there has been a lot of issues in this area, and this is where we have seen some of the rorting happening in the past, where we're going in and we're enrolling students that aren't suitable for the courses. We're never going to be able to provide the student support that they need to get through to the end of it. We didn't bother doing a proper check to make sure what their disability or what their needs were prior to enrolling them properly in the course, and so, therefore, we ended up with much lower completion rates than we should have. So I'm hoping that through putting these standards into place I think reading some of the specifics of the actual, you know standards, that's who we're going to be talking like, that's who the regulator is going to be looking at in those processes.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Yeah, and I totally agree with all of those. One of the really important parts like I love support services as well. I think it definitely shouldn't be one clause. It should be more encompassing when it comes to or inclusive, I suppose, when it comes to looking after all of our students.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Thing that I major changes that I've seen is one is that language, literacy, numeracy and digital skills and how are we assessing that prior to course commencement, so that information that we're disseminating prior to course commencement and also ascertaining whether the student is this and the course is suitable for that student and do they have those foundation skills in order to successfully complete the training. I think that's what I found is it's more highlighted now within the revised standards. And then the other thing is is how are we checking in on the students on a regular basis throughout their training? So, yes, they may have got through the LLND assessment, but how are we checking their academic progress throughout the training? So that's something that I've seen is a bit different coming up with ideas of how do we do that, like the trainers are going to need to do, like quizzes or things like that, to identify that on an ongoing. Then the other part was for me is how are we disseminating information to the student on a regular basis? So this has not been something that's been highlighted before in previous standards.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Where it's with information, it's not just your marketing materials, it is how are you ensuring that the student knows how to access support services and are we notifying students? Do you need support? It's not just here's your student handbook and then off you go support. It's not just here's your student handbook and then off you go. Six months later you have no idea where you, where that student handbook's gone and you don't know what. You don't even know if the RTO offers support services. So it's making sure that students are aware of those policies and procedures how to submit a complaint, how to get academic support and that leads me in really well into getting reasonable access to trainers and assessors. What are your thoughts around that?

Lauren Hollows:

I mean, this is not like. I'd love to see somebody argue against this and be like why should they have to have reasonable access to their trainers and assessors? Like you know we often like, and assessors like um, yeah, you know we go, we often I got, I often go in and you know me like I'm a massive, I'm a data girl, like I love to. I'll get into their student management system, I'll pull reports and start pulling data and stuff like that and I'm like okay, you know, like with cricost rtos, this is not generally an issue. You're generally looking at like a 1 to 40, 1 to 60 at most. Um, that's, that's kind of the ratio that you're going to be working with, right. Um, when we're working with the traineeship and apprenticeship rtos, it can vary. Like you can go from anywhere, from like a 1 to I probably see maybe even like up to 1 to like 200, just depending on whether or not they're doing like groups in the workplace or if they're doing that block model sort of training right. We can get much higher ratios of trainer to student in those sorts of scenarios. But then, like you know, sometimes we'll go into colleges and we'll look at it and they'll have like a one to 500 ratio and I'm kind of going okay, you've got a 1 to 500 ratio. I can almost guarantee, if you've got a 1 to 500 ratio, your completion rate is going to be below 30%. You're going to have a massive drop-off rate of students from enrollment to commencement.

Lauren Hollows:

You know your onboarding process is probably crap, um, and so I think that this is where, like you know, rtos need to be looking at their data and kind of going okay, well, what's reasonable, like what's reasonable for an online rto? How many students can a trainer reasonably have? What is the expectation of how much time students should be sending? And look, you could be doing business training and you could be doing lectures every week with 150 students in a zoom pool, and then you know, you've got. You've got, maybe you know, five or six sessions throughout the week where students can jump in on tutorials or where they can jump in on student support sessions or where they can book in with you, and yet maybe potentially, that's all working really well because you've got a whole load of automated processes that happen in the background. You know accelerates about to launch its AI tutor. Later on this year you may have an LMS that already has that sort of functionality built into it, so there are certainly ways that you can do it, and when you're really good at utilizing your system, when your admin is kicking goals, when you've got a trainer who's super organized, that's like 0.5% of RTOs, though.

Lauren Hollows:

Like the vast majority of RTOs are God bless their cotton socks just not that organized. Rtos are God bless their consults just not that organized. They are not that well resourced. And so I think that you know this is going to be a highlight to that. I've noticed in state funding contracts they're actually now asking us to put in what is the student to staff ratio. They certainly check that in.

Angela Connell-Richards:

We're seeing in ASCA audits too. Yeah yeah.

Lauren Hollows:

So I think that that's going to be something that you know does need to be focused on, and I think that, from a business operational perspective because you and I both operate with rtos on like okay, but yeah, let's like be realistic about bottom lines and we, we want every. There needs to be viability and stuff like that. So the RTOs that are going to do well through this are the RTOs that are going to have a really good student management system, a really good learner management system, and they are putting in place a lot of these features. Right, If I talk to RTOs, I was talking to one a couple of weeks ago and they had something like 4,000 or 5,000 students and I was like you, like the system that they were on.

Lauren Hollows:

I was like you really can't be on this system. Like you've got only five users that have got access to the system. Your trainers don't have access to the student management system. You don't have a proper LMS. Like you've got the shitty old Moodle one where students can't access your policies and procedures. We can't enroll them in a new course, there's no talking between the systems, and they were like but you know so and so is going to be really expensive for us. I'm like do you have any idea how much this system is going to save you? I'm like there's like two admin people that are pulling spreadsheets and reporting spreadsheets to you on a weekly basis yep like the time, the time it's going to save, and that is 120 000.

Lauren Hollows:

The system that we're going to be talking about is not 120 000 a year, but that's what you're going to be saving like, so I think that it does. Really, it is going to be really interesting when we talk about student support services and documenting it and being able to offer, like making sure that the physical people you've got in the business are going to be able to give the best value for money. You have to have that back-end support.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Well, there's so much good tech out there now, Like there's all this great technology, a lot of AI being incorporated now, and instead of being afraid of it, people should be embracing it because it's going to allow you to give more customer service to your students.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with that. And the other part, with reasonable access what I've read into the standards is making sure that you include in your calendar, so you have your calendar of schedule of all your training. When is it that the students have one-on-one access to the trainers and assessors? And my thought process is that you need to include that in your training calendar and it can be face-to-face or online, no matter different forums. And the other one I recommended was you know, put a Facebook group together or use your learning management system where the student, if they're logging in regularly, you could put a post in there and get discussion boards going in there. So I think, when it comes to reasonable access to trainers, I think, yeah, you should be doing this. And students need. They don't know when they need support and they often will not ask for support unless they've got that one-on-one opportunity where they don't have to be embarrassed about asking a question in front of all the other students. So that's my thoughts on that.

Lauren Hollows:

And I think there's a lot of cultural aspects that filter into that as well.

Lauren Hollows:

So, understanding that, depending on, like your cohort, your delivery model, like, if you are dealing with job seekers as a cohort, right, you're often dealing with people who've had really poor experiences in school and so people wanting to put themselves out there and risk, like, what they may see is, you know, asking a stupid question that's going to be, you know, reasonable support for a job seeker cohort is going to be very, very different, and I think this is the discussion I've had with a lot of RTOs.

Lauren Hollows:

Like we've got RTOs that are, you know, literally only offering graduate diplomas for people who've already got, you know, a bachelor's degree right. We've got short course RTOs who are only offering one day courses in the civil construction sector. We've got RTOs who are in the cry cost space. We've got RTOs who are in the job seeker space. This is where that reasonable word comes into play and it's going to be really important and I know that you've done this in your policies and I've done this in my policies is like for that particular cohort let's define what reasonable is okay and we're not going to put one standard against every single student.

Lauren Hollows:

So if you're an RTO and you're going, well you know, I had a friend tell me that they went through an ASCII audit. They were expected to do this, so I'm going to have to be expected to do that, but that's a massive imposter on my business. I'm like, well, well, well, Like it's not going to be a one size fits all approach. Ascii is going to take the same approach as to like what is reasonable for your cohort. If you tell me you're taking ten thousand dollars from a student, you're working with them for a full year. You're expecting them to be in class two and a half days a week. Reasonable support for that student is different than the student that pays 99 to come in and do a one day first aid class. We're not going to expect the same thing for a and for b, and I think that's what stresses out RTOs is like they hear one thing and then they should be in your TAS.

Angela Connell-Richards:

It should be in your training and assessment strategy. So what is your support services that you need to provide for that particular learner cohort and the qualification that they're undertaking? Once again, as you said, two and a half days a week, one day, um? Or are they going to be with you all year? Or is it, um? Is it going to be they come in once a month, so you've got to like, or online you were talking about earlier. I think online is going to be have the biggest impact when it comes to support services, because how many online courses I know that I've done where it's just here's your login details and off you go and there's no support. You feel like you're waiting in the sea where you can't access anybody because no one's getting in contact with you, and I think that's going to be the major impact with anybody delivering online is how are they going to give their students access to trainers and assessors?

Lauren Hollows:

Yeah, yeah, I look and, to be honest, you know part of me looks at him and goes you know what the online one's kind of? You've had this coming for a while, guys. So I think that it's you know, it's one of those things you know. So I think that it's one of those things. It's just one of those areas that's 100% been coming. I can go onto Google now and I can Google two-week TAE or I can Google online get your online X course, you know, and I kind of look at it and I go, oh, this is not like or the RPL thing which you know has been hitting on LinkedIn recently as well Like you know, if you're an, I mean.

Lauren Hollows:

What's I mean? I'm interested to hear from you. Okay, so what is reasonable support for an online RPL? What is reasonable support for an online RPL you enrol? You spend $900 to RPL through whatever qualification it is Diploma, whs- what's reasonable support in that you know for that particular course?

Angela Connell-Richards:

Yeah, I think so as well. You really need to be looking at um. Who once again, who are your learner cohort? So if they're online, what type of support are they going to need?

Angela Connell-Richards:

If you're doing an online course, that um involves like a lot of technical skills, uh, that are required for the industry sector, how are you ensuring that they know how to apply those technical skills when you're delivering online? It's as long as a piece of string, I think you know you never know how long it's going to be, but you really need to identify the learner cohort and need to have that within your training and assessment strategy, and it should be really clear who is your learner cohort, what is the training product you're delivering, how are you delivering it, and then how are you going to give reasonable access based on that? I don't know whether we create a calculator to do that. We're doing some things around risk management and how we're going to identify risks within an RTO based on the numbers student numbers, learner cohort and things like that, and I think in our last podcast you were talking about that as well some sort of risk calculator. You do that for your training and assessment strategies. Is that correct?

Lauren Hollows:

Yeah, we do that. So we do that for validation um purposes as well. So, like, we take into account the student number, we take into account if it's a a risk category within asqua, we'll take into account if there's been complaints lodged against the course and we've got a point system and based on the point system that classifies it as high, low or medium risk and then based on the risk category that then fills features into. You know how often we validate the training product, but you know, like it's probably going to be a fairly similar calculation as to whether or not we provide support services. And certainly, my advice to RTOs and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this like I have an RTO that, for example, offers a qualification. Like they offer a qualification to three very different cohorts. Right, they offer it to far north WA Pilbara students, they offer it to year 11 well-to-do students over a period of a year and they offer it through a job seeker course down south.

Lauren Hollows:

Now, each of those three cohorts is going to receive a different level of support and you're right, we would have three different tasks for that, because obviously it's different durations and it's different cohorts. So it's a different duration, different cohort, different tasks, um, and we would basically. We would basically be saying, right, well, this is the support that you're going to get as part of that course. The thing I'm going to, I think the thing that's going to be interesting and challenging is going to be when you've got students undertaking the same course but through different models and different durations, where and how you communicate that to the students, because you can't exactly do it in a handbook because a handbook is too generic.

Lauren Hollows:

So how you go about communicating that information to students and where you communicate that to them. I think that's going to be interesting because you kind of my gut instinct would be just knowing students as they are. You need to be very careful communicating that, because you might have one group of students going well, why does that group of students get that level of support and that group of students get that? We've had that before with, like, when we're running government funded courses and we're running like an equity course and we're running a participation course with equity, we were required to provide lunches and meals and it got to a point where we ended up providing lunches and meals to all of the students because trying to manage and explain to one group of students why they get lunch but they don't get lunch.

Angela Connell-Richards:

It was just, it was just too hard, right, but it's those sorts of things that like it's going to be interesting, like that's where I see rtos maybe kind of struggle, like may struggle a little bit when, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think it's something that they um, I don't think a lot of people are aware of this impact that's going to be on their RTO when it comes to support services and this reasonable access to trainers and assessors, and who knows what that's going to look like, because we're not going to know until we go to audit what are going to be the expectations from ASQA. And have you looked at that? So, since our last podcast, they've actually released the support services practice guides. What do you think about those?

Lauren Hollows:

I mean, look again, I don't think there's anything in there that's overly surprising. I kind of feel like we are seeing points of this at audit anyway. One of the things I've noticed in audit is how closely they're tracking trainers and assessors, and I've had it in several audits where they've kind of gone well, hold on a second, the auditor, the trainer and assessor you're putting forward for that qualification. We know that they train here, right, so they're looking at it and they're going. Well, you're saying that they're going to train with you, but then they also train here.

Lauren Hollows:

So for, like, rto registrations, this is quite like it's quite interesting to see how much they're delving into this space. They're trapping the hell out of where trainers are going. So the RTOs can't turn around and say you know, oh well, we've got this trainer and they're going to do X, y and Z. They dead. They're now kind of going to that step of, okay, well, show me the contract, show me the payslips, like show me that they're actually doing the hours that you say that they're doing.

Lauren Hollows:

So I think again, that's going to have an impact from that perspective of like, all right, well, if we're going to say that we're going to provide access to trainers during these points in time. You know how does that fit in? You were saying you were updating, like the position descriptions and contracts, and we've updated our contracts as well. If we've got a trainer sitting in a classroom now, they're there to offer student support, but they're also doing their admin and marking time right under the award. Anytime you've got a trainer that's dealing with students, they've got to have x amount of admin time right, which is really, look, the award sucks. I'm going to put it out there and say the award sucks and the award is stupid and the award really does not understand how training and assessment works in the vet sector, because it kind of makes this assumption that, like, trainers and assessors develop training and assessment materials, which in 99% of the cases they do not. They don't develop shit, they literally just train and assess.

Angela Connell-Richards:

And we can't even get them to validate Exactly, right?

Lauren Hollows:

I can't even get them to complete their trainer matrices. I have to have somebody sit and hold my. I have a dedicated team member that sits and holds their hand to build their trainer matrix with them, right? So like I look at this and I kind of go, okay, well, you know what is the trainer and assessor doing. But you know like all of those things are the myriad of stuff that RTOs then have to navigate when they're going through this. So, really thinking about from that perspective and again, like, use your systems, like in Xero, we track hours for training differently than we do our admin hours and stuff like that. But RTOs need to think about this from a business perspective and just be a little bit careful in going, oh, when they're doing their admin marking, we're going to chuck them in a classroom and a trainer and anyone can come and see them. Just be really careful, guys.

Lauren Hollows:

As an RTO, you are an employer. It works fine if you've got a really good relationship with your trainers and assessors. If you've got that trainer and assessor that wants to be a pain in the ass and is like well, I saw a student today and he's like well, I saw a student today. So all of that time that I spent that was actually training time, and now you owe me an additional four hours of administration time. You know like you just need to set your systems up very, very carefully to deal with these things. Most trainers and assessors are very reasonable people. Most RTOs are very reasonable people, but it's an area where there can be trouble.

Angela Connell-Richards:

It's something where you need to be open and honest and and have a transparent process of of how we ensure access to the trainers and assessors, but also know what are they working on, and I think, yes, it may not come in on the award, but that's something we still can put into their contract and within the position description. What are the requirements for trainers and assessors? Um and, in particular, we're now going to need to add into that that they will need to um, what, how much time do they need to allocate to spend just, uh, one-on-one with students? Um, I think that needs to go into the contract as well.

Lauren Hollows:

Yeah, and you were saying as well. Also, that goes into, like the PD of the trainers that is now expected in relation to student support, you know, in relation to trainers being able to manage student wellbeing. Who is it in the college that's going to manage student wellbeing? Are you going to have a student wellbeing officer, like in Christchurch? A lot of the larger colleges will have, like a counselor or a support person like that, you know operates within the college to some extent. I know that my, whenever I ran big cry cost colleges like we're talking about hundreds of students we literally had a counselor, like who had an office and worked five days a week dealing with all the dramas of, you know, the lives of our students. Uh, you know. So that works fine for cry class, the, the financial model is potentially there to support it. Um, for other rtos, how is that going to work? How are you going to manage student well-being? What does managing student well-being look like? You know what I mean. What is student?

Angela Connell-Richards:

learning. So some of the things that I have identified is that you're going to need to have, like, a student support officer that has some mental health training they're going to need to. It's a bit like child protection, where they need to have mental health training to be able to identify a student at risk. But exactly what you just said. Then the difference is if you've only got a one-day course, how much support services do you need to provide if you're only delivering one-unit courses, compared to if you're delivering over a whole year? So it's going to be very interesting to see what they're going to need to have in place. My recommendation is that I believe all trainers and assessors I already believe that trainers and assessors should have a first aid certificate. I think they also need to have a mental health certificate so that they're able to identify students at risk and then be able to then refer them to. It's not actually counselling the student. It's then knowing who to refer. Who we're going to refer them to when it comes to support services.

Lauren Hollows:

Yeah, and I think also there's a couple of really interesting like. So I'm actually encouraging a lot of our RTOs to look at unit selections for 2026. And, where relevant, use your imports to run things like support personal wellbeing in the workplace. That's a BSB unit, there's an AQF3 and an AQF4 wellbeing unit within the BSB training package as well, and so I know that for quite a few of the courses that I've got with different RTOs, we're now incorporating a wellbeing unit into the actual structure of the whole qualification and so by explicitly, you know teaching how to manage wellbeing, you know that's been incorporated and obviously as part of that we need to make sure that our trainers and assessors are qualified in knowing how to teach that as well.

Lauren Hollows:

But I think like that's for for a lot of rtos that's potentially one really simple way to look at, like just a practical way to incorporate, and also that then gives you the time to actually talk about a lot of these things, and that's a reasonable concern, for RTOs is like, well, where are we going to fit all of this into our schedule If you've got an explicit unit that's going to actually go and talk to some of these things and address it? One very clear how you're covering this. Criteria. Two makes it super easy within the TAS as to where you're going to cover it. Three, operationally, you know that you're actually kind of you know, like if you're working on a funding model or you're kind of being paid to actually then deliver that as part of your service. That's, you know, I think, like a practical way that I see this.

Angela Connell-Richards:

Yeah, I love that idea. I think that's a great idea, interesting. It would be interesting to see whether they end up putting that, a unit like that, into the tae. Yeah, yeah, that would be a great idea you guys should actually think about doing that.

Lauren Hollows:

You've got more electives now to choose from. You should think about including, like, a well-being support. Yeah, because our trainers need mental health support as well they do.

Angela Connell-Richards:

But also, um, there are often times where you don't you, you may suspect that something's wrong with a student, but you don't know what to do or you don't know what the process is, and and that's something that I've seen I think this is fantastic, that they've brought this in, and I think that's where there's going to be, because, you know, mental health is at an all-time high at the moment because of the pandemic, so a lot of people are suffering and they're suffering internally and they're not, um, it's not clear who is affected, and I think trainers being able to identify is going to be. It's not only going to help the students, it's going to help the trainer and the other students in the room if a trainer is able to identify.

Lauren Hollows:

I've been doing, like I've been teaching de-escalation training, I think since 2018. Now I do that with almost all of my trainers, as we do, like, whenever a new college college comes on board, we'll schedule in a de-escalation session at some point throughout the year. So, like, how to identify when you've got students that are like building to that point of like I'm gonna look, completely lose my, you know, my shit, um, you know. And then then the three key steps that you've got to do in order to like de-escalate that person back, to bring them to a point where they're actually like listening to you.

Lauren Hollows:

Um, and it's probably one of my favorite things to teach with trainers. One because it's very practical and hands-on. Um, I really love being able to do it when I can do it in person because, like I, I will pick a, I'll pick a trainer and I'll get right in their face and I'll get into like deescalate and stuff like that. Um, but also, like, through the process of de-escalation, uh, and teaching that like the body you know, learning how to read that body language and learning how to respond to, learning how to use words in a more effective way to like clue into a person and connect with a person. Um, the feedback that we always get from those sorts of courses is always like it's.

Lauren Hollows:

It's probably one of my best feedback courses, like from trainers, being able to go holy cow like I'm gonna use that, like I'm I'm gonna, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna use that on my wife or I'm gonna see it on my, I'm gonna use that on my teenage kid, you know, like it's a really practical thing and I think that doing stuff like that with trainers and assessors, um is really is a really valuable activity yeah, after I sold my RTO, I actually studied psychotherapy and counseling and I found it very useful.

Angela Connell-Richards:

I used to go practice on everyone, but I found it very useful in just my own life skills, not just learning how to be a counsellor, how to help other people, it's how you are able to react and that de-escalation is. Yeah, I love that idea. That's awesome. All right, right, I think we need to wrap up this uh episode. It's been fantastic. I uh, I love, I love that we both have such a passion when it comes to this vet student support. I think it's a wonderful change within the new standards and, um, I think, in the way um education is now and students and and what we're going through, particularly with mental health, this is a fantastic change that's not only going to support students but also, as I said, trainers and assessors and everyone within the RTO. So, yeah, thank you very much, lauren once again for joining me with the RTO Superhero Podcast. As per usual, it's always enlightening conversation. So thank you, thank you so much, angela.

Lauren Hollows:

Have a great day you too awesome.

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