We ensure the quality of our qualifications in two ways – through moderation and accreditation.

National moderation

Moderation ensures that all our assessors and accredited tertiary education providers are making accurate and consistent decisions about our trainees’ competency against our unit standards. This means we can reasonably say that our trainees’ abilities are being assessed fairly and consistently across the country. 

We use a peer moderation system that works like this:

• The assessor or accredited tertiary education provider (TEO) gives us a sample of a trainee’s completed assessment.
• We circulate the assessment sample to another assessor or TEO for peer moderation. We match assessors and TEOs for areas of speciality or discipline. For example, youth work assessors moderate each others’ assessments.
• All assessors meet together once a year to discuss their feedback from the peer moderation process and to share best practice examples.
• All peer moderations are reviewed by our national moderator and returned to the original assessor. 

If you want to know more about this process, please contact us or visit our pages for assessors and education providers.

Accreditation for the National Qualifications Framework (NQF)

If a TEO wants to assess their students against our unit standards, they must first become accredited on the National Qualification Framework (NQF). This means the TEO is considered capable of assessing these particular standards on the NQF.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) is responsible for the NQF and makes the final decision to accredit a TEO. However, we must support the TEO’s application before NZQA will consider it.

If you want to know more about this process, please contact us or visit our pages for tertiary education organisations.