In February 2003, the Victorian State Minister for Education and Training launched the ‘Standards and Professional Learning Project’ as the first major policy initiative of the new Institute. The brief of the project was: to develop professional teaching standards for full registration, and to support new teachers (who were mostly newly graduated teachers from tertiary teacher education programs) to move from provisional to full registration at the end of their first year of teaching. This involved designing and implementing evidence based assessment processes to show that the standards had been met. These assessments would provide guarantees of teacher quality to the public and to the teaching profession in Victoria.