We have researched and evidenced 7 policy directions to frame the reforms required to re-regulate senior secondary certification. The directions emerge from an unusual and perhaps unprecedented combination of circumstances in and around senior secondary schooling, amplified by the impact of the COVID pandemic, offering an opportunity to attain what has previously seemed impossible: a unified, standards-based senior secondary certification framework.

Through a new consortium of diverse stakeholders, we will work to catalyse and build the conditions for re-regulation and reform, including co-contribition toward our policy approach and agenda, increased ground-up demand for change and trust in the transformation. This work will form the basis of the significant policy reform required.

The directions come from the final of three technical papers commissioned by Learning Creates Australia with the Assessment Research Centre, University of Melbourne, which map and interrogate the role, performance and explicit goals of senior secondary recognition of learning and a schema on the new components of a recognition system.

These directions, and their underlying logic, are designed to frame reforms to re-regulate senior secondary certification. The directions are firm, but not fixed. They are presented for further discussion and, if or as appropriate, for revision.

We acknowledge that this new approach raises the bar for ambitions for the reform of secondary education. There are many real and deep questions that need to be agreed upon to progress a re-regulation effort. Unpacking those with a diverse and relevant group of stakeholders will be the focus of the next three years of Learning Creates work.

Over the past two years we have delivered a series of policy papers, conversations and forums with experts, system leaders, employers and researchers to sense make and better understand the complex and intersectional policy, research and political terrain.

Together we have identified and evaluated potential policy levers, that work in concert to create our goal. This has included:

• Convening eleven policy forums of around 10-20 senior policy bureaucrats per forum throughout 2020-21. After the Education Council was dissolved, our convenings have been one of the only national convenings of senior State Department officials and ACACA agencies focussed on this agenda.
• Three technical reports with the Assessment Research Centre, which map and interrogate the role, performance and explicit goals of senior secondary recognition of learning and a schema on the new components of a recognition system 
• A policy report of 22 recent reviews on policy and practice for school to work transitions
• Five commissioned seminar papers (published by CSE) on global innovation and practice regarding emergent forms of assessment and learning recognition across systems;