Establishing a campus in Australia as an overseas education group means creating a new Australian entity, registering it with TEQSA as an Institute of Higher Education, accrediting its first courses, and only then applying for CRICOS so it can enrol international students. Done well, the whole sequence takes roughly three years from first engagement to first international cohort. Done in the wrong order, it takes longer and costs more.
What follows is an anonymised composite drawn from several groups I have advised over fifteen years of TEQSA work. No single client is described, and the details are blended deliberately. The pattern, though, is one I have seen often enough to be confident it is representative.
The group and its first assumptions
The group in this composite runs several colleges in South and Southeast Asia, teaches business and information technology, and has a healthy pipeline of students who want an Australian degree. Its owners assumed that their existing brand, curriculum and quality systems could be transplanted. They planned to open in eighteen months.
Three assumptions failed early. The first was that the parent company could be the registered provider. TEQSA registers an Australian legal entity, and that entity must have its own governing body, its own finances and its own accountability, so the group incorporated an Australian proprietary company and had to accept that the parent would be a shareholder rather than the operator.
The second was that the group's overseas accreditation would count for something in the assessment. It counted as context, not evidence. The third was that international students could be recruited from day one, which is the assumption our article on what international providers should know about TEQSA exists to correct.
Choosing the category and building the board
The group initially asked about the University College category, largely for marketing reasons. We advised against it. Institute of Higher Education is the category new providers enter, and the other categories carry additional requirements that a new entity with no track record cannot meet. The provider category reform pages set out the four categories, and none of them can be shortcut by ambition.
Governance took longer than anything except staffing. The parent company wanted its own directors on the Australian board, which is permissible, but Standard 6.1 requires independence and relevant expertise, and the parent's directors had neither Australian higher education experience nor independence from the shareholder. We recruited two independent Australian directors with higher education and finance backgrounds and a chair who had sat on a university council.
The academic board was constituted with a majority of external academics and a chair who was not employed by the group. The parent found this uncomfortable, and in my experience that discomfort is the single most reliable predictor of whether a group will succeed. This one accepted it.
Staffing, courses and the application
The group's plan was to fly in senior academics from its home campuses. TEQSA's Standard 3.2 requires staff with qualifications at least one AQF level above the course they teach and, for level 9 courses, doctoral qualifications or equivalent professional standing, together with scholarship in the field. Visa timing meant the academic leadership had to be recruited locally, and the group appointed an Australian dean and two course coordinators nine months before lodgement.
Courses were redesigned rather than imported. The home curricula were competency-based and mapped poorly to AQF level 7 descriptors, so each course went through a design cycle, external review and academic board approval, which took about four months per cycle. The application was lodged as a prospective provider with two bachelor courses, paying the 2026 fees of $14,700 for the preliminary registration assessment and $112,100 for the substantive assessment, plus $6,000 and $44,700 per course, as listed on TEQSA's application-based fees page.
What went wrong, and what went right
The group received one request for further information, and it concerned the parent. The application described a shared services arrangement under which the parent provided the student management system, marketing and finance functions. TEQSA asked how the Australian board controlled those services, what the written agreement said, and how the provider would meet Standard 5.4 if the parent failed to perform. The answer took six weeks and required a formal services agreement that had not previously existed. Had it been in the original application, the six weeks would have been saved.
What went right was sequencing. The group registered first, lodged its CRICOS application about three months after registration, and used the CRICOS assessment period to recruit domestic students and prove that its systems worked. That is the path described in CRICOS registration after TEQSA and in our overview of the accreditation journey from CRICOS to TEQSA, and it matters because TEQSA's own estimate is that international delivery begins at least thirty-five months after first engagement. The group hit that estimate almost exactly.
The lesson I draw from establishing a campus in Australia
Groups that succeed at establishing a campus in Australia treat the Australian entity as a new institution that happens to have a well-resourced shareholder, rather than as a branch office. That means an independent board, local academic leadership, courses built for the AQF and a services agreement that makes the parent a supplier rather than a controller. The application is the record of those decisions, and the board that made them must be able to show it did.
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— a month-by-month sequence from entity formation to first international cohort, drawn from our TEQSA registration and governance work with overseas groups entering Australia. Get the planner
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Frequently asked questions
Can an overseas parent company be the TEQSA-registered provider?
No. TEQSA registers an Australian legal entity with its own governing body, finances and accountability. The parent can own the entity, but the Australian board must control it.
Does overseas accreditation shorten TEQSA registration?
Not materially. TEQSA assesses the Australian entity against the Threshold Standards on its own evidence. Overseas accreditation is useful context but is not a substitute for Australian governance, staffing and course design.
When can a new campus apply for CRICOS?
Only after TEQSA registration is granted. Providers typically lodge about three months after approval, and TEQSA's decision on a high-quality application usually takes three to six months.
How long does the whole process take?
TEQSA's own estimate is that international delivery begins at least thirty-five months after first engagement with the regulator. In my experience a domestic registration decision takes eighteen to twenty-four months from the decision to proceed.
Dr Brendan Moloney is CEO of Darlo Higher Education, Australia's largest specialist TEQSA consultancy. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, is a Cambridge University Press author on governance in higher education, and has advised private providers on registration and course accreditation for more than fifteen years.