When to let a course go

Maintaining an accreditation nobody enrols in is a cost.

Accredited courses carry ongoing obligations regardless of enrolment: currency of resources, staff capability, review, and renewal. A course that has not run for two years is consuming compliance attention and producing nothing, and it will still be examined at audit.

Providers hold on to these for understandable reasons, including the effort the accreditation cost and the possibility that demand returns. Neither is a strong argument, since the accreditation can be sought again if demand does return and the sunk cost is not recoverable by keeping it.

The decision is worth making explicitly, on a schedule, against a stated threshold: if a course has not run in a defined period, it is either restarted deliberately or retired. Left to drift, the answer is always to keep it.

Retirement has its own requirements, particularly around learners currently enrolled and the records that must be retained afterwards, and those obligations continue long after the course stops running.

There is one further obligation that outlives a retired course, which is to the learners who completed it. Records must remain accessible for the applicable retention period, and requests for statements and replacement certificates continue arriving for years after delivery stops. Providers who retire a course without establishing where those records live create a problem for whoever receives the request.