Module 5A, what supported independent living now has to show

On 1 July 2026 a new schedule of the Provider Registration and Practice Standards Rules commenced: Schedule 7A, Module 5A, the practice standards for supported independent living. If you hold class 38, assistance with supported independent living, it binds you now. If you are being audited this year, it is in your scope, whether or not the scope letter you received in June mentioned it. Ours did not. The audit plan that arrived in August did.

Why a separate module

Supported independent living is the class where the provider is in the person's home, every day, often with tenancy and support tangled together. The Core Module was written for services a person attends or receives. It was not written for the place a person lives. Module 5A is.

Its outcome statements are about the resident, not the provider. Read them as a list of what a person living in a SIL house is entitled to expect:

1. Genuine decisions. Each participant is supported to understand and make genuine decisions for themselves, with accessible information and decision-making support. Not consultation. Decision.
2. A safe, respectful and supportive home. The house is a home first and a workplace second, and the standard is written in that order.
3. Practice that improves. The provider uses evidence-based practice to drive continuous improvement in practice quality. The module expects the organisation to learn from what happens in its houses, not only to record it.
4. Tenancy and supports as agreed. Participants can access the tenancy and the supports as described in their service and tenancy agreement, which means the agreement has to exist, has to be theirs, and has to be true.

Each outcome carries its own quality indicators, which is what your auditor will assess against.

The trap in the paperwork

The Commission's consolidated Practice Standards and Quality Indicators PDF, the one most template packs were built from, is still the November 2021 version. It has no Module 5A. A document set built from it will be four outcomes short, and an auditor working from the current Quality Indicators Guidelines will find the gap on the first day.

Check the compilation number on whatever your policies were built against. The Rules are at compilation 6 and the Quality Indicators Guidelines at compilation 3, both dated 1 July 2026. Anything citing the 2021 consolidation predates the module.

The transitional rule that reaches back

Section 32(3) of the Rules deals with providers who, immediately before 1 July 2026, were registered for item 15, assistance with daily life tasks in a group or shared living arrangement, and are moving to the new SIL class. Until the Commissioner decides that variation, they must also comply with Module 5A.

In plain terms: if you ran group living under the old class and applied for SIL, you do not get a grace period on the new standards while the paperwork is processed. You are bound by both.

What the house has to be able to show

The module's outcomes translate into a short list of things an auditor will ask to see and then ask a resident about:

1. A service and tenancy agreement for each resident that separates the tenancy from the supports, says what each costs, and says how either ends.
2. Evidence of decision-making support. Accessible information, in the person's own format, and a record of decisions the person made, including ones the provider disagreed with.
3. A safeguarding approach for the house, not the organisation in general: who lives there, what the risks are between residents, and how the mix was decided.
4. Practice governance that reaches the house. Supervision, incident review and a way for what happened in one house to change practice in another.
5. A resident who can answer the auditor's questions about their own home: who they would tell, what would happen, whether they chose to live there.

What we do not know yet

Module 5A is new enough that no published audit report assesses against it. How auditors will weight its indicators, how they will sample houses against participants, and how strictly they will read the tenancy separation are all things the first year of audits will settle. Our own August audit was the first we have seen with the module in scope, and it was a provisional audit with no residents to interview, so it tested the documents and not the house.

We will write again when a report against Module 5A is public.

The uncomfortable version

If you added supported independent living to your registration because it was where the demand was, you also added a module that puts the resident's own decisions above your rostering. That is what the standard is for. Build for it or do not hold the class.

Everything above is drawn from the published Module 5A, the Rules at compilation 6, and our own audit documents. Indicator numbers are deliberately not cited until we have verified them against a compilation of the Quality Indicators Guidelines that carries the module.