Research on Professional Standards for Disability Services

In early 2021, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission engaged the Institute to investigate professional standards in the delivery of disability services, in recognition of the need for more effective safeguards and oversight measures to ensure disability workers deliver safe and high-quality services.  

The Commission sought to develop a coherent understanding of:  

• the types of disability services delivered in Victoria  

• who delivers those services  

• an explanation of how these types of work link to existing bodies of knowledge, practice, qualifications, training, professional standards, capability frameworks, regulatory structures, and registration requirements.  

In order to identify the ways in which the disability sector, regulators, experts, the community, educators, and workers understand what constitutes professional standards for disability workers, we developed a typology of disability services and a framework linking these services to relevant professional standards, codes of conduct, capability frameworks, bodies of practice, registration requirements, qualifications, and training. The typology and the framework have been designed to allow for easy incorporation of new information as the sector grows and changes.