NZQA dropping course credits
- Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 16:18
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You may have heard NZQA is dropping it’s credits for Massage and Aromatherapy courses in New Zealand.
There is a whole raft of alternative therapy course having their NZQA credit dropped. From the information I have been able to obtain from NZQA’s website, the reason these credits are being dropped is due to them no longer being required by industry.
So, what does that mean. Basically any institute currently offering NZQA accredited course for either Massage or Aromatherapy will need to remove those statements.
Course credits are set to expire as of December 2010.
If you completed an NZQA accredited course you will not be loosing your certification based on the removal of the credits, It however does mean that those who enrol in courses after December 2010 will not have any NZQA credits associated with the certification.
Does this mean New Zealand courses are not of a high standard? Well, actually no. There are training institutions whose courses were never accredited with NZQA credits due to the fact the course was actually of a higher standard than those credit NZQA offered.
I suspect this is one of the reasons that “Industry” no longer requires the NZQA credit standards.
Hopefully those institutes that had NZQA credit standards attached to their certification for both Massage and Aromatherapy will bring their course content up higher to be in line with those institutes that are already higher than the NZQA standards.
About the Author
Kimberly has written 17 stories on this site.
I am a qualified Massage Therapist, I qualified in 2006 from UCOL. I work in Palmerston North and I am the producer of the Massage Therapist Central Podcast.
2 Comments on “NZQA dropping course credits”
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Hi Kimberly,
Just came across your website.
What happened was that NZQA didn’t want to carry the massage-related unit standards any more, due to the relatively small size of the group who use them. They wanted them to be transferred to another body (an Industry Training Organisation). Over a period of several years the options were discussed & explored, but at some stage the massage therapy field as a whole chose an ITO. Unfortunately this move was opposed by the other users of these units (naturopathy, and one or two massage schools). The government required a consensus for any move to occur, so transferring the unit standards to an ITO was not possible.
As a result, the educational institutions have been going down another track of setting standards independently of NZQA. At this stage we’re pretty positive about the progress that we’ve made, and many of us are very happy to be free of education based on unit standards.
Keep up the good work
.
Kind regards,
David McQuillan
Programme Coordinator, Otago Polytechnic
Member, Massage Educator’s Group