Our Story

New Zealand Tertiary College (NZTC) has been providing quality education for over 40 years, supporting the early childhood education and healthcare sectors.

We began in 1982 with our founder recognising a need for high quality education to support teachers working in early childhood centres. At the time, these teachers were regarded as ‘childcare workers’ or ‘caregivers’, and by establishing the college the profile and professional reputation of early childhood teachers was raised. This decision to educate, and acknowledge, early childhood educators as teachers became the industry norm.

Only 12 students made up the very first class. This doubled when we became the first private training institution to offer a formal early childhood education program, after gaining government approval in 1984. Despite lots of interest and receiving 150 applications from early childhood teachers, the first intake of students for the program was limited to 25 places.

A few years later a pilot group of students were accepted to test the idea of flexible, field-based learning for students working in ECE centres. By 1988 the number of students we could accept had tripled, with students from other ECE providers enrolling in our programs. Almost a decade later, in 1997, we became widely known as New Zealand Tertiary College.

We were established to meet a need in the early childhood sector for qualified early childhood teachers. In 2017, we expanded to include health and wellbeing programs, supporting that same need for skilled staff within the healthcare industry.

Today we:

• have seen over 11,000 students graduate

• deliver 10 early childhood education and 3 health and wellbeing programs

• offer specialist early childhood education postgraduate programs, the first private ECE training provider to do so

• give students the flexibility to study around work and family commitments, through rolling intakes on some programs and our unique online learning environment, NZTC Online

• publish He Kupu (The Word), an early childhood education e-journal with an established global readership of more than 11,400

• have been awarded NZQA Category 1 provider status four times

• offer qualifications recognised by:

  • the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority

  • the Chinese Ministry of Education

  • the Malaysian Qualifications Agency and the Malaysia Ministry of Higher Education

  • the University Grants Commission – Sri Lanka

  • German higher education database Anabin

• have created and gifted te reo resources to ECE centres around the country, including Māori language learning resource Te Reo Māori: He taonga mō ā tātou mokopuna (He Taonga) to help nurture te reo Māori learning and teaching in the sector.