Faculty and staff in higher education are tested by TEQSA against Standard 3.2, which requires that academic staff are qualified at least one AQF level above the course they teach or hold equivalent professional experience, that they are active in scholarship that informs their teaching, and that there are enough of them, with enough time, to deliver the course as designed. Providers get this wrong when they treat staffing as a recruitment task rather than an academic profile the regulator will read line by line.
This article explains what Standard 3.2 asks for in plain terms, and what the staffing evidence needs to show. It draws on fifteen years of TEQSA registration and course accreditation work, where staffing is the section I am asked to fix most often.
What Standard 3.2 asks of faculty and staff in higher education
The Threshold Standards put the staffing requirements in Standard 3.2, and read closely it has four parts. The provider must have a staffing profile sufficient to deliver the course. Staff must hold qualifications in the discipline at least one AQF level above the course, or equivalent relevant academic or professional experience. Staff must be active in scholarship, and their teaching must be informed by it. And the provider must give staff the induction, development and performance review needed to do the job.
TEQSA reads all four together. A provider can name well-qualified people, but if the workload model shows a single academic coordinating, teaching and assessing across three courses, the profile is not sufficient. A provider can show an ample headcount, but if none of the staff have published, presented or engaged with their discipline in five years, scholarship is missing. Assessors look for the profile, not the individual.
Qualifications and the "one level above" rule
The rule of thumb is simple: a level 7 bachelor course needs staff qualified at level 8 or above, and a level 9 masters needs staff at level 10, with a doctorate the usual expectation. The exception for equivalent professional experience is real, but it has to be argued, not assumed: it works for a practising architect or barrister teaching in their field, and not for a business owner teaching management theory.
Assessors also look at discipline match: a doctorate in education does not qualify a person to teach at level 9 in accounting. The staff CV should state the qualification, the awarding institution, the discipline and the year, and the mapping document should show which staff member covers which unit.
Scholarship and currency
Scholarship is the part of Standard 3.2 that private providers most often misread. It does not require research output in the university sense. It requires evidence that staff engage with the development of their discipline and with the scholarship of teaching, and that this engagement shapes what happens in the classroom. TEQSA's guidance notes on scholarship and on staffing describe the forms this can take, with the usual caveat that guidance notes are not themselves Threshold Standards.
What assessors want to see is a scholarship register or equivalent: for each staff member, the conference attended, the professional body membership, the industry engagement, the publication, the curriculum development, the peer review of teaching. A register that shows this for every academic, updated annually and reported to the academic board, is strong evidence. A single paragraph asserting that "all staff are active scholars" is not evidence at all. I have set out how this connects to the wider question of staff capability in TEQSA registration elsewhere.
Workload, sessional reliance and ratios
The Threshold Standards do not set a staff-student ratio or a maximum proportion of sessional staff. What they require is a profile sufficient to deliver the course, and TEQSA tests sufficiency through the workload model. Assessors look for the number of full-time equivalent academic staff, the hours allocated to teaching, assessment, moderation, student consultation and course coordination, and the reconciliation of that allocation with the course structure and projected enrolments.
Sessional staff are not a problem in themselves; heavy reliance on them without a core of ongoing academic staff is. In my experience, a course whose coordinator is sessional, or whose assessment moderation depends on people paid by the hour, will draw an RFI. The academic core needs to be ongoing, because that is where course ownership, scholarship and continuity live, and it is what makes the profile credible in the course design that TEQSA looks for.
Professional development as evidence
The fourth part of Standard 3.2, on induction, development and performance review, is where the record matters most. TEQSA does not expect a large development budget from a small provider. It expects a plan, a record of what happened, and evidence that the academic board sees both. I have written separately about professional development and TEQSA; the short version is that the PD record is the operational evidence that the staffing profile is being maintained rather than merely described.
Getting the staffing profile right before lodgement
The staffing section of an application should be built from real people who are contracted, qualified in the right discipline at the right level, active in scholarship, and allocated a workload the course structure can absorb. The evidence is CVs, contracts, a qualification and scholarship register, a workload model and a PD plan, all of which the academic board has seen and endorsed.
Faculty and staff in higher education are the provider's most visible claim to be an academic institution rather than a training business. TEQSA reads the staffing profile as a statement about who the provider is, and it is worth getting that statement right.
Download the Darlo New Course Readiness Checklist
— a section-by-section list of the staffing, design and governance evidence that belongs in a course accreditation application, drawn from our TEQSA registration work with private providers. Get the checklist
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Frequently asked questions
Do all academic staff need a doctorate to teach a masters course?
Standard 3.2 expects qualifications at least one AQF level above the course, which for a level 9 masters means a level 10 doctorate, or equivalent professional or academic experience that the provider can demonstrate. The exception must be argued case by case.
Does TEQSA set a maximum proportion of sessional staff?
No. The standard requires a staffing profile sufficient to deliver the course, and TEQSA tests that through the workload model. A course with no ongoing academic core, or with coordination and moderation dependent on sessional staff, will usually draw a request for further information.
What counts as scholarship for a private provider?
Engagement with the discipline and with the scholarship of teaching: conference attendance, professional body activity, industry engagement, curriculum development, publication or peer review of teaching. It must be recorded per staff member and visible to the academic board.
Can a provider list staff it intends to recruit after registration?
Not as the staffing profile. TEQSA assesses the provider's capacity to deliver now, so the profile must consist of named, contracted people. Planned recruitment can be described as growth, but it does not satisfy Standard 3.2.
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.