Migration Newsletter – Edition 7

Hello everyone!

It’s been 25 days since our last edition of the newsletter, and the reason we took so long to issue a new edition was because we were waiting to actually have some news to write about.

25 days later and we are still waiting. The allocation of places for visas 190 and 491 is yet to be concluded for this financial year and for this reason the states haven’t announced their new occupation lists and requirements for this financial year’s program. 

State Announcements

In fact, the Northern Territory just announced that their interim quota for these visas has been deleted and they won’t resume invitations until they receive their new allocation, South Australia announced that they are still not in a position to open a full Skilled Migration program and NSW published guidelines in line with what they had for last year, however the occupation lists for each RDA office in the state is yet to be released.

Why do the States matter so much?

Ok, maybe if you still don’t follow news about Australian Immigration, you may ask yourself why the announcements from the states are so important. With only 6500 places for visa 189 (skilled independent), the focus is now on the State Nomination skilled visas 190 and 491, which together will offer over 22,000 migration places in 2020-21. Although this is less than half of what was offered during the last financial year (July 2019 to June 2020), we expect that the number of invitations per month from January to June will be at the same level as before, once the program remained closed during half of this year. Nevertheless, the question that remains is: which states will receive the larger allocation of skilled visas places? We will know soon.

PTE x IELTS

Pearson has recently released a new concordance report between PTE and IELTS. In this new report, they found that the equivalence that everyone uses nowadays is outdated, and it suggests changes to how PTE and IELTS scores should compare.

In this equivalence suggestion, 6 on IELTS would be equivalent to 46 on PTE (today is 50), 7 on IELTS would equate to 66 on PTE (today is 65) and 8 on IELTS would be the same as 84 on PTE (today is 79). That would make PTE harder for those who need a higher score and easier for those applicants who need a score of 6 or less.

Nevertheless, despite these suggestions by Pearson, the definitions of ‘Competent’, ‘Proficient’ and ‘Superior’ English in the Australian immigration legislation haven’t changed and it should take much longer for these new levels to be updated in the legislation, if they ever happen at all.

See you next time! (hopefully with some actual news).