Chief Executive's Foreword

Top Scholars, the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards and Top Art all celebrate what is best about secondary and tertiary education in New Zealand.

One of the highlights of this year's Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, held at Parliament in June, was the presentation of gifts by last year's Supreme Award winner, Dr Peter Schwartz, to each of this year's awardees. The gifts were given on behalf of some of last year's winners who worked together on the idea. Dr Schwartz said the idea was to engender a sense of community amongst tertiary teachers.

This is exactly what the awards were set up do: promote communication and sharing of best practice among tertiary teachers. As part of this, NZQA publishes a booklet each year that profiles the awardees and their teaching methods. This provides a record of the methodology that they have found works so well for them. The booklet is due out this year. In the meantime you can read about the awards and the outstanding recipients in this edition of QA News.

Over the past few months we have also held the Top Scholars ceremony at Government House in Wellington and organised the annual Top Art exhibition. Both of these events are significant this year, not only because they honour the work of some of our highest achievers at secondary level, but also because they are the result of work done for the final Bursaries examinations last year. This year NCEA level 3 and New Zealand Scholarship have replaced Bursaries. Both Top Scholars and Top Art will be different next year because of the change in the qualifications system. You can read details of both events.

There have been some new NZQA policies announced recently to enhance quality and consistency in education. The first of these is the new policy on fee protection for students. This was revised following the high-profile closures of some private training establishments (PTEs) at the end of last year.

After two rounds of consultation with the PTE sector, the revised policy was approved by the NZQA Board on 6 May 2004. It became effective as of 31 May. A number of new high-level principles and criteria have been added, resulting in changes being made to the different fee protection options. You can read about this in more detail.

Around May, I made a brief visit to China with the Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard and the Ministry of Education CEO, Howard Fancy. This gave us the opportunity to begin dealing practically with some of the issues we face in the international education sector.

Educational shifts are taking place throughout the international education sector, not just in China. The whole sector is growing, and becoming more complex. It demands a move from non-transparency to public transparency; and from a systems-process approach to an educational-outcomes approach. NZQA has a big role to play in responding to these demands.

We also have a role to play working collaboratively with the Chinese and other governments to ensure we maintain a balance between participation and quality.

We have recently hosted a high-level delegation from China's Ministry of Education. The group spent time with our Approvals, Accreditation and Audit group as well as visiting the Capital Language Academy, a Wellington-based PTE to observe the conclusion of an audit.

Both of these visits have provided excellent relationship-building opportunities that will help both countries achieve desired educational outcomes for international students.

Another significant policy change was the decision not to report non-achieved results on secondary interim result notices. This decision followed extensive consultation with schools and will result in all reporting of data about student learning being consistent. This is important for the credibility of our statistics. Read the full story here.

This issue of QA News also reports on the news that there are now one million learners registered on the National Qualifications Framework. There were also over three million credits earned by learners in the first quarter of this year. These are exciting milestones and ones that we are very proud to see happening.

It is proving to be a very busy year for NZQA and we continue to face a number of challenges and opportunities. I look forward to increasing our capability and improving our service and systems as we meet these challenges. I hope you can take the time to catch up on some of our news in this issue.

Regards

Karen Van Rooyen