Appendix 2: Fees and Financial Assistance 2017
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Fee payment for 2017 is due to NZQA by Wednesday 13 September:The amount you pay to NZQA should match the amount recorded as paid by students in your payment allocations. This amount is reflected in the ‘Paid to School’ column of the Billing Report which can be accessed via the High Security/Billing Report link through your Provider login. Pay this amount, not the total owed by students.
The school form used for the payment of fees can be found here. Contact your NZQA data person (or me) if you don’t know your school’s debtor code. Further information is available here.
Students can make payment online to NZQA: Students can pay their NCEA fees online through their Learner Login. Schools can see all student payments that NZQA has received through the billing file in their high security login. This file is dynamic and shows all payments processed by NZQA to date.
Allocating student fee payments: All student fee payments collected by schools must be correctly allocated in the data file so that this data is recorded against the individual student’s record with NZQA. Fees must be paid before NZQA can award qualifications, including NCEAs and UE, and make these visible to universities and on the Record of Achievement. Students will get a non-payment of fees message in their learner login if fees are unpaid or incorrectly allocated. NZQA also sends a letter to all candidates with unpaid fees in late October.
Check billing report after fees are processed: To ensure student fees have been correctly allocated you must check NZQA’s Billing Report after your fees have been processed by NZQA, and before the end of October. This report shows the total amount of fee money owed to NZQA and how payments have been allocated from the information in your data file. Submit an updated file if you have fee payments that were not recorded in the 1 September file submission and advise your NZQA data person of the changes so they can make any necessary amendments to your payment allocations.
Fee payment for students who have left:If you have a fee payment for a leaver, remember to pay their money to NZQA. If they have left school completely, make sure to leave their NZQA enrolment active when you take them off your school roll. This ensures that their results and any external entries you want are retained. Remember to add a leaving date and reason into your data file.
Fees including financial assistance payment after 13 September:Schools are requested to keep processing financial assistance applications and sending this data with their file until 1 December 2017. All students can make fee payments through their learner login, otherwise they can send the fee directly to NZQA using the candidate fee payment form which is available here.
Late fee:The late fee will be applied from 1 December 2017.
Financial assistanceapplications
The Financial Assistance Handbook provides full details of these processes and can be accessed here.
The application form for financial assistance is available here.
1 September data file: By now you will be collecting fees and processing financial assistance applications. Details for all on-time financial assistance applications must be in your 1 September data file. These should show as “Approved” in the Key Indicator Checklist when your filehasbeen processed. Make sure you check this. NZQA declines applications only when required information is missing. Where applications appear in a status of ‘error’ or ‘pending’ you may be missing the unique application number for 2017, or the benefit, income or multiple student criteria information from your data file.
Siblings at different schools:When siblings from the same family attend different schools, applications for financial assistance must use an identical application number. That way when we receive the application, we can link the siblings. Therefore, the school that receives the family’s application form first should generate the financial assistance application number. They then advise the other school(s) of the application number and sibling details. The other school(s) must override any automatic number produced by their SMS with the identical application number from the first school.
Calculating and allocating financial assistance for multiple candidates: For benefit and income-based applications, the total fee should be divided by the number of candidates and allocated accordingly. Each family member will be allocated the same fee.
For example, three candidates (total to be paid $30): $30/3 = $10 needs to be allocated per candidate.
Calculating and allocating family based applications: The total fee for family based applications will not exceed $200. Allocation of the fee between multiple candidates is not equal for family based applications. The allocation is based upon a pro-rata calculation of the individual candidates’ fee as a proportion of the family total.
For example, a family with two candidates, one in Year 11 and the other in Year 13 sitting 5 Scholarship examinations:
Candidate 1: fee = $76.70; Candidate 2: fee = $76.70 + 5 x $30 = $226.70;
Total family fees = $303.40;
Family-based fee total payable = $200
Candidate 1 allocation = ($76.70/$303.40) x $200 = $50.56
Candidate 2 allocation = ($226.70/$303.40) x $200 = $149.44
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