Hello and welcome to 2024 in Review. I’m Joanne Law, Director of Mediation Institute and wanted to give you a little bit of an overview of what we’ve been up to and what’s to come. It’s been a busy year with new software to implement, new courses to write and a review of the structure for our Graduate Diploma of Family Dispute Resolution course.

We now have a member portal that provides members with immediate download access to your member certificates, a streamlined join and renew process, and free for member events access. Visit www.mimembers.au to see what you can now do. There’s also now a tool for you to record your professional development and practice hours.

This is the current information on the proportion of member types we have. Professional Development Membership is a new option this year that is being adopted by students of other training providers and other practitioners who don’t need the other practitioner member services that we provide, who only really want to access the professional development.

We run a lot of events, professional development, practice development, group supervision, either run by Mediation Institute staff or MI members or in collaboration with other providers or organisations. https://www.mimembers.au/events

There were over 52 free member events in 2024, some were multi speaker events, well over 52. If you are interested in presenting, so presenting a one hour professional development webinar gives you three hours of professional development credits and is a really great way to showcase your expertise in whatever area that you work. Members are particularly interested in hearing about work that you might be doing on different panels or in specialist niche areas. If you are interested in someone presenting something for you, not to present it yourself, then also please get in touch and put in your wish list for 2025.

The transition between the National Mediator Accreditation System, NMAS or NMAS to AMDRAS, the Australian Mediator and Dispute Resolution Accreditation Standards, is now well underway. www.amdras.au

It started on the 1st of July 2024 and should be completed by the 30th of June 2025. Apart from anyone who’s still within the timeframes to study, be assessed, or be accredited under the NMAS you won’t be dropping off a cliff on the 30th of June, you’ll be able to finish within the timelines.

Our application to be able to train and provide accreditation under AMDRAS is before the board and hopefully will be approved soon. We’ll then be able to offer the higher levels of accreditation under the new standards and we’ll get information about that out to anyone who we believe is eligible and more generally in case you haven’t given us your full history when you join Mediation Institute.

We’ve started updating the structure for our CHC81115 Graduate Diploma of Family Dispute Resolution course. We were delivering it as a clustered course, but we’re now going to be making it available as single units . The first unit is now ready and able to be enrolled in the CHCFAM001 operating a family law environment.

Delivered in collaboration with RTO Inspiritive

This is for people who want to do their qualification in smaller bites or use the units as the highest quality professional development that you can do. Particularly, this is quite valuable for anyone who’s looking to make sure that you are up to date with the changes that have happened in the family law system over the last few years.

The next update to the Family Law Act 1975 will be coming in for soon. It’s been passed and the new Family Dispute Resolution Practitioners Regulations. Both of those legislative changes will be added into the course as soon as they are in force. We’ve also made changes to our Recognition of Prior Learning process.

With the changes to the Family Dispute Resolution Practitioners Regulations foreshadowed, they are potentially going to affect the longest serving family dispute resolution practitioners who didn’t do the actual qualification when they started. If they take a long break then they may find it difficult to come back and re accredit.

We’re putting together a process which we think will be clearer and more streamlined to allow them to have their current skills and knowledge recognised and be awarded the Graduate Diploma of Family Dispute Resolution. We’ve also invested in Immediation software, which is a practice management software, but also a panel management.

Our plan for 2025 is to promote the services of our members more widely, now that we have software that will make responding to referral requests more manageable for our staff. It has been really quite time consuming and difficult to do that. So too few of our members have actually spent the few minutes needed to add in the additional details and photo to make your profiles more likely to be chosen by potential clients. We’re also working on building up a number of different panels that will provide a little bit more ease, for other practitioners to find specialists like child consultants, parenting coordinators, and so on and to assist you with your referrals.

Mediation Institute’s been supporting International Mediation Awareness Week since it began, and the Australian Mediation Awareness Week before that because we feel there is still a need for more awareness education about the benefits of mediation needed out for the general community. There’s also a number of events for mediators during that week. So get in touch if there’s something that you would like to run under the International Mediation Awareness Week banner. They can be in person events or online. 

And finally, I’d like to provide a really heartfelt thank you to the Mediation Institute team. About Mediation Institute | Mediation Institute They’ve battled health issues, too much work, and all the other barriers that face us when there’s too much change happening. I thank you for your loyalty, your skills, and most of all your dedication to support our students and members. We are truly blessed to have you working with us.

And now to Christmas! It may take a little bit longer than usual to get back to you but there will be still someone available and if there’s any technical support or anything like that needed with the learning management system you can still get in touch, you can still enrol and update your membership details.

But I do hope that you do get a chance for some rest and relaxation over the holiday period and we’ll see you next year for another exciting year.