Incentives and sanctions following external evaluation and review

• Introduction
• Provider categories
• Incentives and sanctions for Provider Categories
• External verification requirements applications at levels 1-6
• Target turnaround times
• Tenure of programme accreditations/consents to assess
• EER frequency
• Right to assess student work and moderate results
• Frequency of financial attestations for PTEs
• Transition arrangements
• Summary of incentive/sanction arrangements

Introduction

NZQA’s incentives and sanctions arrangements operating as a result of external evaluation and review (EER) apply to non-university tertiary education providers - institutes of technology and polytechnics, wānanga, private training establishments and government training establishments.

Guidance information (PDF, 87KB) about the incentives and sanctions arrangements is also available as a pdf document.

Statutory policies for incentives/sanctions

Improving performance

Improving educational quality and performance is an integral driver for the evaluative approach to quality assurance. In order to support tertiary education providers to make these improvements, NZQA applies significant quality assurance incentives on the basis of external evaluation and review (EER) results.

This approach is possible in an environment of mutual trust and accountability between NZQA as a government agency, and the tertiary education sector. The expectation is that NZQA is able to invest high levels of trust in the information provided by high-performing tertiary education providers.

Where EER demonstrates high levels of confidence in educational quality, providers will have greater freedom, lower compliance costs and performance-responsive quality assurance processes. For providers who have not demonstrated educational quality, or where there are quality concerns, NZQA sanctions will increase the level of external scrutiny and limit the provider’s activities until there is evidence of improvement.

The incentives and sanctions outlined in this document apply equally across all non-university tertiary education providers and reflect, wherever appropriate, the distinctive nature of each part of the non-university tertiary education sector.

Statutory basis

NZQA policies for incentives and sanctions are established under section 253 (1) (d) and (e) (relating to programme approval and accreditation), and, where relevant, section 253 (ca) of the Education Act 1989 (relating to registration of private training establishments). Changes to NZQA statutory policies and criteria to enable the incentives and sanctions arrangements were formally agreed by the NZQA Board on 31 March 2011.