Thinking about ‘The Code’ Five Years On

Chris Whelan
Chief Executive
Universities New Zealand – Te Pōkai Tara

In 2019, a tragic event that saw the death of a student go undiscovered for a period of weeks prompted an urgent call by Government to revisit how student health and safety was being monitored.

Three weeks later, then Minister of Education Chris Hipkins announced that he would be updating the Education Act to improve the welfare and care of students living in student accommodation.  And, just eight weeks after that, on 12 December 2019 the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Act was passed unanimously by Parliament and, on the same day, the ‘Interim Code’ was published setting out expectations of education providers that would apply from 1 January 2020.

The ‘Interim Code’ was replaced by a ‘Permanent Code’ at the start of 2022.  Called the ‘Education (Pastoral Care of Tertiary and International Learners) Code of Practice 2021 (the Code), it’s the document we’ve been working to ever since.

I’ve been working with the Code ever since it was first announced and I have some thoughts five years on.

First, it’s been obvious throughout the past five years that there is genuine support for the aims of the Code.  Both the university sector and the other public and private sector providers I work with have all acted and worked in ways that have demonstrated a genuine commitment to student safety and wellbeing.

Second, my experience over that five-year period tells me that the Code as it currently exists is too prescriptive and we have the wrong model for administering it.

The current Code has 39 pages detailing requirements across 22 outcome areas. For universities, the important outcomes are the following ones:

• Outcomes 1-4 – a culture, system, and physical environment that supports learner wellbeing and safety with learner voice feeding into it.
• Outcomes 5-7 – safe, positive, and suitable student accommodation.
• Outcomes 8-12 – meeting the needs of international learners.

All the outcomes specify requirements. For example, Outcome 2: Learner Voice, says that Providers (like universities) must have practices for:

• proactively building and maintaining effective relationships with diverse learner groups within their organisation; and
• working with diverse learners and their communities to develop, review, and improve learner wellbeing and safety strategic goals, strategic plans and practices; and
• providing formal and informal processes for actively hearing, engaging with, and developing the diverse range of learner voices and those of their communities; and
• providing timely and accessible resources to learners to support them and their learner communities to develop the necessary skills to enable them to participate fully in decision-making processes; and
• providing timely and accessible information to learners to increase transparency of providers’ decision-making processes.

These all sound good and sensible, but universities and other providers are all dealing with a wide range of learners in a wide range of contexts.  For example, where a provider is only delivering a short programme of 3-4 months there is little or no opportunity (or learner interest) in doing any of the above.  Other providers have learners who are mostly or wholly online learners - some based offshore and/or mature working people learning part-time off campus. It’s challenging to build relationships with these students or to involve them in planning and the development of processes.

Code administration is mostly done by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) with some aspects sub-delegated to Universities New Zealand where they relate to universities.

There is a large amount of reporting and verification work taking place, but I have yet to see evidence that any of it has actually resulted in better outcomes for our learners.

Universities have large-scale mature systems to ensure the safety and well-being of their learners.  They have had to rewrite some policies and processes to bring them in line with some of the more prescriptive requirements of the Code, but I haven’t yet heard of the Code helping any university identify and mitigate risks they were not already aware of.

Right now, universities and Universities New Zealand are doing frequent reporting to NZQA, but we’re not seeing any evidence that it is actually doing much more than adding to our compliance burden.

Universities go through academic audit once every eight years.  This looks at how quality is built into every aspect of university learning and teaching – including student wellbeing and support.  Academic audit doesn’t take a pass/fail approach to quality assessment but looks to see if there is a genuine quality culture focussed on continuous improvement.  It recognises that universities have finite resources and a need to balance a wide range of needs and preferences and really just looks to see how well they are doing in their strategies, systems, processes, and people.  It makes recommendations (and commendations and observations) but these are all about helping the university itself identify areas for improvement.

NZQA does something similar through the External Evaluation and Review (EER) process that it puts all non-university providers through periodically.

For the Code to be effective, the following changes should be considered:

1. Replace Code Outcomes 1-4 with just one expectation – that providers have a quality culture that is deliberate and effective in the way it delivers learner wellbeing and safety. The Code can and should provide advice and guidance on good practice.
2. Do all Code monitoring and verification through UNZ’s academic audits and NZQA’s EERs. If a provider is identified as having substantial problems or is not meeting requirements, then do more active monitoring and verification.  Otherwise, let providers with strong quality cultures and systems keep on doing the things they already do well without this need for additional compliance cost.
3. Modify all other outcomes as useful good-practice checklists for providers to adopt and adapt depending on the types of learners, and their learning situations.
4. Have mechanisms for fostering and sharing good practices amongst providers.