How we operate

RTO Grow is Australian-built software for Australian training organisations. This page sets out how we run the business — how we treat the environment, the people who use the platform, and the data you trust us with.

We have written it to be useful rather than decorative. If you are filling in a tender response, a government funding contract, an enterprise client's procurement questionnaire or your own supplier due diligence, you can point at this page or lift from it directly.

Everything here is something we actually do. Where we have not done something yet, we have said so at the bottom instead of dressing it up.

Vocational training still runs on printed assessment booklets, printed enrolment forms, printed marking guides and printed observation checklists — often one full set per student, per unit, discarded at the end of the course.

RTO Grow captures all of it digitally, including for face-to-face delivery. A trainer marks an observation on a phone at the worksite instead of carrying a clipboard back to the office to be photocopied and filed. Assessment evidence, judgements, enrolment records and reporting data live in one place from the moment they are created.

We think paper displacement is the single largest environmental effect our software has, and it is the one we can point to honestly.

RTO Grow is cloud-hosted. There is no server for your RTO to purchase, power, cool, maintain or eventually send to landfill. Capacity scales with actual use rather than sitting idle overnight and through the holidays.

The platform runs in a browser on the devices your team already owns, including older laptops and phones. We deliberately do not require recent hardware, which keeps working equipment in service longer.

Our production infrastructure runs in the Sydney region. Consolidated cloud infrastructure is materially more energy-efficient per workload than distributed on-premise servers, and our providers publish their own renewable energy commitments and reporting.

RTO Grow supports face-to-face, online, blended and workplace-based delivery equally, with the same assessment recording and reporting behind all of them. Where an RTO chooses to move part of a course online, or to assess in the workplace rather than requiring learners to travel to a campus, the platform does not penalise that choice or make it harder to report on.

We are not claiming credit for our customers' delivery decisions. We are saying the software does not push them toward the higher-emissions option.

Most training platforms are designed for people who are comfortable with software. The result is that experienced trainers — often the most capable people in an RTO — end up locked out of their own systems, or dependent on a colleague to do things for them.

We design for the 55-year-old trainer with thirty years of industry experience and no patience for software. Plain language instead of jargon. One clear next step instead of a wall of options. The system always tells you where a file lives and what a button is about to do, before you press it.

Digital inclusion is the point, not a side effect.

The student experience is mobile-first and works on a phone, because a large share of VET learners are studying around shift work, on a worksite, or from a regional or remote location without a reliable connection.

Progress saves automatically. Learners can stop mid-lesson and return to the same place days later without losing anything. We treat "I closed the tab and lost my work" as a failure on our side, not the learner's.

RTO Grow includes native LLN assessment aligned to the Australian Core Skills Framework. It is designed to identify where a learner needs support so the RTO can provide it.

It is not designed to filter people out. LLN results never automatically reject a learner and never block enrolment on their own — every ACSF determination is confirmed by a person, and what happens next is the RTO's decision, made by a human who can see the whole picture.

We design against WCAG 2.1 Level AA: text contrast, keyboard navigation, screen reader labelling, and never relying on colour alone to carry meaning. Our public site currently returns zero violations on automated WCAG 2.1 A and AA testing.

We have not completed an independent accessibility audit, and automated testing covers only part of the standard. When we do commission one, we will publish the result including anything we failed. Our full accessibility statement sets out the detail.

Learners' records — their unique student identifier, their results, their certification — are their own. RTO Grow supports issuing them properly, correcting them when they are wrong, and providing them to the learner on request. We build for the learner's long-term interest in an accurate record, not just the RTO's reporting deadline.

RTO Grow is built and supported in Australia by people who understand the Australian VET sector. When you contact us, you are speaking to someone who knows what ASQA is.

This is the most important thing on this page.

RTO Grow captures the data your compliance work needs and makes it retrievable when someone asks for it. It does not — and cannot — make your RTO compliant. Responsibility for meeting the Standards for RTOs sits with your CEO and your compliance team, exactly where the regulator puts it.

We will not sell you the opposite of that. Any vendor telling you their software makes you audit-proof is describing a product that does not exist, and is setting you up to be surprised.

Customer and learner data is stored in Australia, in the Sydney region. We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, and we operate under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme — if a breach occurs that is likely to cause serious harm, you and the OAIC will be told.

Security controls in place:

• Data encrypted in transit and at rest • Row-level access controls, so users only see records belonging to their RTO • Role-based permissions across administrator, trainer and student • Point-in-time recovery backups, held in Australia • An audit trail on assessment judgements: who made the decision, when, and under what authority

Under the Credential Policy, not everyone who can mark work is authorised to make an assessment judgement. RTO Grow enforces this at the platform level rather than trusting a process document — a person working under direction cannot record an assessment judgement, regardless of what they click.

RTO Grow uses AI to remove blank-page work: drafting learner guides, suggesting assessment questions, proposing mappings. It is a starting point, and it is labelled as one.

Our rules:

• AI never makes an assessment judgement about a learner. Only an authorised human assessor does that. • AI-drafted content that has not been reviewed by a person is visibly flagged as such until someone reviews it. • The person always sees what the AI produced and can change or reject any part of it before it goes anywhere near a student. • AI assists with content and structure. Accountability stays with the human who confirms it.

Student records and assessment evidence are never sent to AI services. We do not sell, rent or trade customer or learner data, and we do not use your content, your learners' work or your RTO's data to train third-party AI models. Your data is used to run your platform, and that is it.

Your records are yours. You can export them. We do not hold data hostage to force a renewal, and we do not charge an exit fee to hand back information you created.

Australian RTOs carry long retention obligations, including a thirty-year obligation on certification records. We build with that horizon in mind: exportable, readable formats and no proprietary lock-in that would make your records unusable if you moved on, or if we were not here.

We do not publish testimonials we did not receive, logos of organisations that are not customers, star ratings we did not earn, or "trusted by [number] RTOs" claims we cannot substantiate. If you see a quote on our site, a real person said it and agreed to it being there.

We would rather be short and true than long and impressive.

• We are not carbon neutral and we do not purchase offsets. We have not measured our emissions properly, and claiming a status we have not measured would be exactly the kind of thing this page exists to avoid. • We are not B Corp certified. • We do not run a tree-planting or donation programme. • We have not completed an independent security or accessibility audit. • We are a small Australian company, not a large one with a sustainability department.

When any of these change, this page changes with them — including the date.

We review these principles annually, and immediately whenever something material changes: infrastructure, subprocessors, how we handle data, or the way AI is used in the platform.

Last reviewed: August 2026. Next scheduled review: August 2027.

Questions about anything here, or need something specific for a procurement response? Contact us and we will answer in writing.