A practical explainer from Insources Group
Australia’s international education system is in the middle of a reset.
With the Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025 now law, key parts of the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act 2000 changed from 5 December 2025. These are not cosmetic tweaks. They reshape who can enter the CRICOS market, how providers work with education agents, and how long you can “hold” a CRICOS registration without delivering to overseas students.
At Insources Group, we’ve been unpacking what this means in practice for:
- RTOs already on CRICOS
- RTOs thinking about applying for CRICOS
- Consultants and advisors who support both.
This article walks through the changes in plain language, connects the dots, and offers some starting points for your own internal conversations with boards, owners and clients.
- The big picture: from “compliance” to sector integrity
The policy intent is clear: tighten integrity across international education, especially in VET.
The reforms focus on five main levers:
- Stronger control and visibility over education agents and commissions
- A more muscular “fit and proper” test for ESOS providers
- A new two‑year domestic delivery requirement for most new VET CRICOS applicants
- Automatic cancellation of dormant CRICOS registrations
- New ministerial powers to pause applications and cancel classes of courses.
For RTOs and consultants, the mindset shift is this: ESOS compliance is no longer just about your training and assessment strategy; it is about the entire ecosystem around your delivery — ownership structures, agent networks, product mix and data.
- Education agents: from “recruiters” to regulated business partners
One of the sharpest shifts is around education agents.
New focus on commissions and data
The ESOS Act now defines “education agents” more clearly and introduces a formal concept of education agent commissions. The Department of Education can require providers to supply data about:
- how much commission is being paid
- what non‑cash benefits are provided
- how many students each agent recruits (and whose offers they accept).
Over time, more agent‑level information will be visible to providers through PRISMS. You won’t just see your own data; you’ll be able to overlay it with patterns such as transfer activity and risk indicators.
For RTOs and consultants, this changes the conversation:
- Agent management becomes a data‑driven vendor strategy, not just a marketing channel.
- “We’ve known them for years” is no longer an adequate risk assessment method.
- Commission structures need to withstand regulatory and public scrutiny, not just commercial negotiation.
Ownership and control links must be declared
The Act now requires providers to tell ASQA when there are ownership or control links between the provider (or its associates) and an education agent, and the other way around.
In practice, that means:
- If the provider, a director or a related entity owns or controls an agent
- or an agent or its associate owns or controls the provider
- or those ownership/control arrangements change
you must notify ASQA as a material change within a short, defined timeframe.
For anyone used to “friendly” structures where the agent and provider sit under the same umbrella, this is a red‑flag area. The relationship itself isn’t automatically prohibited, but it is now explicitly visible and assessed as part of your risk profile.
What this means for practice
For RTO managers and consultants, it’s time to:
- map every agent relationship
- identify related‑party links and beneficial owners
- build a repeatable process to update ASQA quickly when those links change
- start using agent performance and commission data as an input into strategic planning, not just record‑keeping.
- Fit and proper: who you are and who you work with
The reforms also strengthen the “fit and proper” provider test.
ESOS agencies now explicitly consider:
- the nature of relationships between providers and their education agents
- whether the provider, or related individuals, are under investigation for certain serious offences.
Regulators will be working more closely with other government agencies and law‑enforcement bodies. If a provider is no longer considered fit and proper, their registration can be automatically suspended under the Act. That suspension is an operation of law, not a normal administrative decision, which materially limits your review options.
From a governance perspective, this moves the discussion beyond “Do we have the right policies?” to “Who is around the table, and what is their risk footprint?”.
What this means for practice
RTOs and consultants should be looking at:
- clarity around beneficial ownership and control — who ultimately benefits from the business
- due diligence on directors, key personnel and significant partners
- board‑level oversight of agent networks and related entities, not just your core operations.
This is a clear signal that your reputation and governance settings are as important as your training and assessment strategies.
- New CRICOS aspirants: a required two‑year domestic runway
Perhaps the most consequential change for “new players” is the domestic‑first requirement.
For most new VET providers (TAFEs are treated differently), an RTO seeking initial CRICOS registration will now need to demonstrate that it has:
- delivered one or more courses to domestic students in Australia
- over a consecutive period totalling at least two years.
The two‑year period starts when your first domestic student commences and can include normal breaks in the academic calendar.
This applies to applications lodged on or after 5 December 2025. It doesn’t retro‑fit to applications that were already in the system before that date.
What this means for practice
For RTOs:
- The model of “set up a provider mainly to recruit internationals” is no longer viable for most VET providers.
- CRICOS must now be seen as Stage 2 in a growth pathway, built on a solid domestic track record.
- Your focus for the first two years must be on domestic quality, outcomes, and proof that your systems work.
For consultants:
- Business plans that promised “fast CRICOS access” need to be re‑cut.
- Advice to prospective providers should reframe CRICOS as a medium‑term goal, not an entry strategy.
- Support services can be repositioned to help new providers build robust domestic operations as the foundation for later international delivery.
- “Use it or lose it”: automatic cancellation of dormant CRICOS registrations
The days of “parking” a CRICOS registration as an option for later are ending.
If a provider does not deliver any registered course to any overseas student at any onshore location for 12 consecutive months, its CRICOS registration will be automatically cancelled for all courses and locations.
Key features of this change:
- It operates automatically under the Act, not via a separate ASQA decision.
- That means there is no merits review of the cancellation itself.
- There is a limited ability to apply for an extension of the 12‑month period, but the application must be made well before the end of that period and only in specific circumstances (for example, genuine start‑up delays, disasters or events outside the provider’s control).
What this means for practice
For RTOs:
- You need accurate visibility of when you last had onshore overseas students actually studying with you.
- If you are approaching a 12‑month period without activity, you need to decide whether to:
- actively recruit and commence students, or
- plan for an orderly exit from CRICOS, or
- justify an extension under the rules and timeframes.
For consultants:
- You can add real value by helping clients build monitoring tools, risk registers and decision points around this 12‑month window.
- This is also a trigger to review whether keeping CRICOS for certain courses still makes strategic sense, or whether it is legacy scope that creates more risk than value.
- New ministerial levers: pausing applications and cancelling courses
The reforms give the Minister for Education additional powers that operate at a system level, not just at the level of individual providers.
Pausing the “front door”
The Minister can now:
- temporarily suspend the making of ESOS initial registration and course‑add applications
- direct ESOS agencies to pause processing of applications already lodged.
If the “making” of applications is suspended, new applications simply cannot be lodged during that period. Where processing is paused, providers may choose to withdraw and seek fee refunds.
For both RTOs and consultants, this introduces a new category of risk: your client may be fully compliant and still be unable to enter or expand in the CRICOS space for a period, because of broader integrity concerns in the sector.
Cancelling classes of courses
The Minister can also cancel specified classes of courses through a legislative instrument, where there are systemic quality problems, limited skills value, or broader public‑interest concerns.
If a course in your scope is caught:
- it will be suspended for new overseas student enrolments
- current students can generally continue to the end of their course or withdraw
- once they have all completed or withdrawn, the course is cancelled at all locations
- CoEs for future commencements are cancelled
- you cannot add that course back to scope while the instrument remains in force
- if all of your courses are in the cancelled group, you cease to be a CRICOS provider entirely and would have to re‑apply from scratch.
What this means for practice
This is a clear prompt to:
- review your CRICOS scope against labour‑market relevance and public‑value arguments
- identify courses that might be perceived as low‑value, thinly justified, or primarily migration‑driven
- either strengthen those offerings significantly or plan to exit them in a structured way.
For consultants, this is a space to help providers portfolio‑manage their CRICOS scope, not just add more courses for growth.
- Internal review: longer timeframes, more structured processes
Finally, the reforms extend the timeframe for ESOS agencies to decide internal review applications from 90 days to 120 days. Agencies can also formally stay (pause) the operation of a decision while the internal review is underway.
Operationally, that means:
- disputes and appeals may take longer to resolve
- in some cases, the immediate impact of an adverse decision can be held off while the review runs
- planning assumptions about “how long we might be in limbo” need to be updated.
For RTOs, this is a reminder to build regulatory dispute scenarios into your risk management and financial modelling. For consultants, it underlines the importance of helping clients build strong submissions and evidence early, rather than hoping to fix everything at appeal stage.
- Where to from here? Practical next steps
From an Insources Group perspective, the providers and consultants who will navigate these changes most effectively are those who use them as a catalyst for strategic uplift, not just compliance patching.
A practical starting agenda for the next few months could include:
- A structured agent and ownership audit
- A refreshed governance and “fit and proper” narrative for boards, owners and key staff
- For aspiring CRICOS providers, a realistic two‑year domestic growth plan as the runway to international delivery
- For existing CRICOS providers, a CRICOS activity and scope review, focused on the 12‑month inactivity rule and on course‑level public‑interest risk
- Scenario planning for ministerial actions and extended review processes.
International VET in Australia is moving into a more transparent, data‑driven and integrity‑focused phase. Providers and consultants who align early with that direction will not only survive the shift, but help shape what “quality” looks like in the next decade of the sector’s evolution.
