The workplace recommendation panel is a chance for you to showcase your Inquiry and for everyone to celebrate your success. It's important to remember that the panel fulfils an important role in ensuring you meet the requirements before recommending you for full registration.

During the Inquiry process, you and other teachers have been involved in many professional discussions, observations and reflections that have helped you move your practice from the Graduate Teacher level to the Proficient teacher level of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST). The panel meeting is therefore the culmination of a much larger process that began well before the formal start of the Inquiry, and has involved your workplace(s) and other teachers supporting you through your induction into the teaching profession. The role of the panel is to acknowledge that and to ensure the compulsory requirements have been met.

It’s important that everyone is well prepared for the meeting and that it’s a positive experience for everyone (we often hear that more experienced teachers pick up some tips from the PRT in these meetings).

As part of collating your evidence, you should have completed the APST Evidence checklist. Keep in mind that it’s your responsibility to make clear links between their practice and the standards. The panel’s role is to judge that the evidence is sufficient and demonstrative of the standards. One helpful way to make the process succeed is to provide a copy of your evidence to panel members well before the meeting so they have a chance to review it. If any panel member would like more evidence, they can request this prior to the meeting.

It's a good idea to ask your panel members how they would like the evidence presented and how they would like the meeting to run. Some workplaces prefer to ask the PRT questions about their work and others prefer to have a discussion about the process, led by the PRT.