Just over a fortnight ago, I wrote about the troubling new disability data definitions in NCVER’s new VET Information Standard. Our disability and tertiary education community came out strongly to say what had been published was regressive and offensive.
And, a week later… NCVER apologised.
We unreservedly apologise. On this occasion, NCVER fell short of the expectations we set for ourselves, and those expected of us by governments, stakeholders and the broader community to ensure the VET system meets the needs of users. (NCVER, 6 August 2026)
Surprised? Me too, honestly.
It’s a difficult thing for organisations, especially ones tied to government, to admit publicly that they got something wrong. There’s a lot working against that kind of admission: the instinct to protect one’s reputation, the fear of what admitting fault might open the door to, and most unfortunately, the sense that changing course looks like weakness rather than good judgement or leadership.
Apologies from organisations are also challenging in a particular way, because they’re made publicly and officially on behalf of a large entity rather than an individual. Systems, power structures, and institutions have the capacity to perpetuate harm that communities have spent decades trying to dismantle. As a result, an apology from an entity of that size carries a different weight and significance than one person saying sorry to another. They represent something very different.
I’m glad that this story has taken a hopeful turn. Our community needs some glimmers at the moment, for sure!
So, this week, here are some of my thoughts on what elements can make apologies authentic and less likely to be received as lip service.
A good apology names the harm precisely, and explores how it might have been experienced by the people on the receiving end. For example:
The classifications used within the VET Information Standard were drawn from an outdated classification standard which was undetected prior to publication of the new standard. We recognise that some of this language is offensive to people with disability and may affect whether individuals feel respected, represented and willing to participate in national data collections. (NCVER, 6 August 2026)
That specificity doesn’t take back the harm; nothing does. But there’s something powerful about an organisation properly recognising and labelling what it’s done; partly because one must understand a mistake fully and deeply in order to learn from it, and partly because you can’t build a targeted solution to a problem you’ve only described in the vaguest terms.
Identifying the harm specifically also allows for more significant opportunities to make change. It enables organisations to identify and expose the link between a single misstep and the broader system of marginalisation or oppression it sits inside. NCVER’s mistake wasn’t really just about a handful of outdated and offensive data descriptions: it was one small, recent instance of a much older pattern, where disabled people get pathologised and our conditions described by systems that were never built with us in the room. Disabled people were neglected during the development of this instrument as a result of long-standing attitudinal biases against disabled expertise and low expectations of how and where we can add value to organisational decision-making, not simply as a one-off omission.
It’s easy to say “we used the wrong source” or “we published something incomplete”. It is much harder, but far more meaningful, for an organisation to admit its own role in perpetuating inequality.
Remediation and prevention need to be handled in related discussions but administered separately. They solve different problems on different timelines.
Fixing the immediate harm has to come first; if there’s harm that’s present or recent, that gets addressed straight away. The promise of a broader systemic fix down the track is never an excuse to let the current damage sit unattended while everyone waits for the bigger process to grind through.
Then there’s the separate, slower job of fixing the process, the system, or whatever root cause produced the harm in the first place. In NCVER’s case, the immediate mistake was the clumsy replication of outdated, pathologising language that was nowhere near grounded in current evidence or community language. But, the system underneath that harm was a long-standing failure to respect the role disabled people and disabled experts should have been playing in building a classification system like this one from the start. This is a data instrument that determines how disabled VET students get counted and understood, but disabled people weren’t meaningfully part of building it: this omission sends a powerful message about who was assumed capable of contributing to something this complex. Preventing this from happening again will require long-term cultural and institutional change.
Both jobs matter. Skipping to system reform without addressing existing harms risks further damage to relationships with those who are left feeling forgotten in the present moment. Failing to move on to prevention after remediation just resets the clock until the next version of the same problem turns up.
Ongoing accountability, done well, requires regular updates on the progress being made against whatever commitments the organisation made when it apologised. These should arrive without the community having to chase them down.
It also requires the creation of real opportunities for the community to be involved in shaping the solution, in ways that are sustainable and properly compensated. Asking those harmed to come up with the fixes for free is not conducive to the rebuilding of trust. Nor is locking those affected out of the remediation and prevention processes entirely. Organisations committed to genuine improvement will need to navigate this nuance carefully.
Lastly, leadership from the community needs to be invited and valued on its own merits, rather than deferred to because it looks good on the next progress update. In the case of NCVER, I will be looking for evidence that people with disability and our organisations have been involved in the amended standards in a legitimate way before I will be willing to accept their next proposal.
This débâcle has reminded me of something that often frustrates me, which is the way we treat leaders who change their minds. When decisions get revised because new evidence came in, or because the people affected by it were finally heard, we tend to reach for the same tired headlines: “broken promise”, “backflip”, “backdown”. We use these words to punish people for updating their views. Sometimes, the criticism is warranted, but often, it’s lazy. I’d love to live in a world where changing your mind for good reason was treated as good leadership, full stop, rather than something that needs to be spun or apologised for on top of the original apology.
Acknowledging harm isn’t a failure, and realising your first instinct on something was wrong isn’t either; it’s a recognition of the perspective of the people who were harmed. Moving forward from that, learning from marginalised communities, and responding with proper accountability is what leadership is meant to look like when it’s working.
Somehow, we need to get comfortable with saying we didn’t get something right, changing course, learning from it, and doing better next time, without that whole sequence being treated as a PR exercise.
On the other side, reaching for pitchforks to wield against organisations that have named the harm they caused, engaged with its impact, and made real commitments to fixing what produced it isn’t especially productive. Every permanent grudge held against an organisation that has turned up and done the work of repair is an ally lost; and allies, held onto properly, are much of what our bigger project of equality and justice runs on.
Of course, there’s a risk of grovelling. I’m not suggesting that we take every institutional apology at face value and skip off into the sunset. But I do think that if we don’t give deserving institutions space and support to improve, the current state of things stays exactly as it is, which is the whole problem we started with.
The balance between accountability, encouragement, and scrutiny is a tough one to walk, but we must.
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