Chief Executive's Foreword

Last month I was delighted to be appointed permanently as Chief Executive. As many of you will know I had been acting in the position for the past 18 months. I am very pleased to have this opportunity to continue to work with the staff and stakeholders of NZQA and to contribute to a diverse and dynamic education sector.

It was gratifying to see NZQA rated very highly in a recent knowledge and confidence survey conducted by BRC, a marketing and social research company. We scored well in both the knowledge, and trust and confidence sections. We see this as an incentive to do even better in future.

Our success will always be measured by the quality of what we deliver and the efficiency with which we deliver it. To continue to be good at this we must have excellent collaborative relationships with our stakeholder organisations. The qualifications we co-ordinate are delivered in collaboration with a range of organisations: industry training organisations, wananga, polytechnics, private training establishments and secondary schools. I value our relationships with these institutions and it is not an exaggeration to say that nothing we achieve is possible without their dedication to quality.

A very significant event for the whole sector is the launch of the website for the New Zealand Register of Quality Assured Qualifications. The new website www.kiwiquals.govt.nz is a major resource for all learners and potential learners. It is a complete list of all approved qualifications and providers. It will help learners find and compare qualifications and choose the one that suits them best. It puts New Zealand at the forefront of international qualifications recognition.

KiwiQuals is part of NZQA fulfilling is overarching quality assurance role, but is also a direct result of inter-agency collaboration. The co-operation and input of the Ministry of Education, Careers Services and TEC as well as all the quality assurance bodies have been instrumental in getting this massive project off the ground.

This past financial year has seen us deliver on a number of IT projects including our redeveloped website. The redesign of www.nzqa.govt.nz has been very favorably received. A recent survey of users confirmed for us that the new site is significantly easier to navigate, making it a much better resource for learners and education professionals alike.

The first NCEA results and statistics were published on the web this year. Given the wealth of detail they both contained, online access was crucial. This year's secondary school candidates can now check their 2003 entries and personal details on the web. This will greatly assist schools and NZQA to run this year's assessment round.

NZQA has been involved in an amazing range of activities over the past few months. We have run Top Scholars, Top Art and the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards. We have also issued more than 162,000 Records of Learning.

I hope you enjoy reading about some of these activities in this issue of QA News.

Karen Van Rooyen