The Qualifications Authority (NZQA) has been accused of moving too slowly in its investigation into courses offered to Indian and Filipino students by Auckland tertiary institution IANZ.
Tomorrow NZQA will begin re-testing 380 foreign students over concerns about the standards they received from IANZ - more than two years after receiving complaints about the institution.
380 students from India and the Phillipines are being re-tested. Photo: 123RF
Murray Heasley worked briefly at IANZ - the International Academy of New Zealand - and said he alerted NZQA to the problems at the start of 2014.
"This should have been dealt with within a couple of months following NZQA procedures," he said.
"There were very serious problems at IANZ that I pointed out in my complaint. I should have made it clear enough that this needed to be dealt with expeditiously. It certainly hasn't been, it's been over two years."
Dr Heasley said the delay was unfair on students who paid thousands of dollars to come to New Zealand and study at the institution.
"The major damage is that students continue to come to the school thinking that they were coming to a school that didn't have these problems," he said.
"This has serious implications for their future employment with possible employers who will look at the qualification, where it's come from, and draw their own conclusion."
The spokesperson for the Auckland International Education Group, which represents 30 private institutions that enrol foreign students, Paul Chalmers, agreed that the delay wasn't good.
He said both NZQA and Immigration New Zealand found it hard to deal with problems at tertiary institutions.
"The major issue is that both the agencies find it difficult to get enforcement into play. It's a case of light-handed regulation meets light-handed enforcement," Mr Chalmers said.
He said NZQA should use under-cover students to gather evidence, but it did not do that.
"It's probably because it's too expensive, but we're seeing now the results of the type of mismanagement of this situation, especially of the poor quality PTEs (private training establishments), that's having its effect in India and we're seeing a much lower turnout in terms of student numbers."
Institutions difficult to police, providers say
The co-chairperson of Quality Tertiary Institutions, a group representing 20 private tertiary institutions, Tommy Honey, said it was not easy for NZQA to police the sector.
"There are a lot of these organisations that are pretty sharp at changing the colour of their spots when they need to, morphing into other things," he said.
Despite that, Mr Honey said NZQA could not rush its investigations.
"I would probably come out in favour of them [NZQA] treading cautiously because any one of our members, we would hate for them to be unfairly targeted with not enough information and people acting just a little bit too quickly to close them down, or put them out of business."
Minister of Tertiary Education Steven Joyce said after receiving complaints about IANZ, NZQA had brought forward an external evaluation and review of the institution by two years in order to examine it more closely.
Steven Joyce says law changes in 2015 have given NZQA more powers. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
However, legal action had slowed down NZQA's work, he said.
"Since that time there's been a series of court cases as IANZ has contested the process and the outcomes of that review, so that's been a bit frustrating for them."
Mr Joyce said he did not agree that NZQA should use under-cover students to investigate institutions, but he said law changes in 2015 had given NZQA more powers.
"They now have more access to the data, they are able to require more data being provided from institutions and they a number of teeth they didn't have back in 2014."
Mr Joyce said tertiary institutions that enrolled only foreign students, and did not receive government funding, were now required to provide figures to the government, and that should also improve monitoring.
NZQA deputy chief executive Grant Klinkum said it investigated IANZ in 2014 and had been working with it ever since.
"We've continued to work with IANZ right through that period to focus on areas of concern, and they have made some changes and some improvements.
"However overall those improvements have not been enough to satisfy us that this is a high performing organisation."
IANZ recently announced it was selling its business to another private tertiary institution, EDENZ.
Other institutions investigated
In addition to its work with IANZ, the Qualifications Authority says it has 12 investigations involving problems with assessment at tertiary institutions.
The institutions are eight private education providers, a polytechnic, an industry training organisation and two wananga.
The authority says the issues range from very minor to more significant and it is not considering re-testing any students at the institutions.