QA News #43 - NZQA initiates greater support for NCEA in schools [ NZQA ]

October/November 2002 Issue 43

QA News Homepage

	Features
•	Chief Executive's Foreword
•	Sixth form qualification arrangements for next year
•	New Zealand universities endorse NCEA
•	Nelson College reaping rewards of preparation
•	School leavers gaining NCEA level 2 this year
•	NCEA in Otahuhu
•	Students speak out on NCEA
•	Environmental course highlights NCEA flexibility
•	NZQA initiates greater support for NCEA in schools


•	Assessments at the National Kapa Haka Festival
•	NCEA accepted by local and overseas universities
•	Assessment and moderation case studies
•	Framework prioritisation and Register projects
•	Heinz Wattie's Hastings staff graduate and grow
•	NMIT goes organic
•	Government workplace trainees target
•	Brochures available from NZQA

NZQA initiates greater support for NCEA in schools

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) is strengthening the support it provides schools and teachers implementing the NCEA with two key initiatives.

NZQA's latest efforts to support teachers implementing the new national secondary qualification system focus upon the:

•	appointment of additional School Relationship Managers (SRMs)

•	development of NZQA's NCEA website as an essential delivery mechanism of resources and information.

The increase of NZQA's SRM team will enable more visits to schools and ensure that teachers can approach the assessment of student performance for the new qualifications with greater confidence.

SRMs are the first point of contact for all schools and each SRM is currently responsible for about 50 schools. Because SRMs collectively visit every school in the country, they can provide well-informed feedback on how each school's systems compare with what other schools are doing and offer advice and guidance based on a thorough understanding of the national picture. Schools comment on significant benefits from SRM visits, providing heads of department with external feedback on their policies and procedures, and senior management with objective reports on assessment and moderation arrangements throughout the school.

The team will be enlarged as rapidly as possible, enabling NZQA to provide a more responsive ongoing service.

The last year has seen a huge growth of content on NZQA's NCEA website. Originally launched in June 2001, the site was aimed at introducing NCEA to the community and to provide teachers with resources to help them with the move to the new system. The site complemented NCEA material also on the Ministry of Education (MoE) and Te Kete Ipurangi (TKI) websites.

Today the site includes a huge range of resources that include achievement standards, assessment samples and assessment specifications as well as an online version of the Assessment and Certification Rules and Procedures. While a lot of feedback has been very positive, it has become clear that some users had real issues with finding and downloading information.

As a result NZQA has initiated a series of projects to improve usability, has been collaborating with the MoE and TKI about issues across all three sites and has distributed a survey to all schools to get a clearer view of how the NCEA website can better deliver resources.

A series of quick hits projects have resulted in improvements to date that include:

•	the addition of a "downloads" page (from the homepage) to provide quick access to downloads for achievements standards and exemplars

•	an indication of download time on a typical link

•	improvements to the usability of the site search results

•	clearly identified links to sites external to the NZQA NCEA site

•	improvements to the clarity of the navigation on the site - this has included providing relative font sizes to allow users to increase font sizes.

Further improvements currently being worked upon include the:

•	possibility of extending the search function to include off-site NCEA content and resources (that is, those on the MoE and TKI sites)

•	prototyping of a "request a printed copy" button to add functionality to download pages.

In addition to the ongoing quick hits projects, a separate downloads project is investigating ways of optimising the download facilities that are so essential to the delivery of resources to teachers.

NZQA is aware that some improvements will be of limited value to users who rely on limited technology and limited telecommunications.

NZQA welcomes feedback, via the NCEA Helpline (0800 623 243) or via our NCEA contact page.

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Page updated: 12 December 2002