Maintaining accreditation or approval

Overview

To maintain your accreditation or approval, your organisation must continue to meet certain obligations.

This includes continuing to meet eligibility criteria, ongoing compliance with the standards, and notifying us of any significant changes to your organisation.

Review assessment process

Your organisation must undergo regular review assessments with us so we can confirm your eligibility and ongoing compliance with the standards.

Most organisations have a 2-yearly review cycle, except intercountry adoption providers that are required to have a 12-month review cycle.

We may decide to shorten the review cycle if we have concerns or think it's necessary.

There are five steps in the review assessment process.

Step 1: We’ll notify you

We’ll check that you still meet our eligibility criteria and email you about your upcoming review assessment. The email will include a link to the questions you need to answer before the assessment.

Step 2: Complete review questions and upload documents

You’ll have 20 working days to answer the questions and provide us with information for your assessment. You can complete the questions online and upload any supporting documents. You can save your progress and return to it anytime.

If you're a level 1–3 provider, your assessor will contact you to arrange a site visit. They’ll explain what to expect and how long the visit will take.

Step 3: Assessor completes a desk-based assessment

Your assessor will review your information and documents to confirm you still meet the requirements for your level of accreditation or approval.

Step 4: Assessor visits your sites (levels 1-3 only)

Your assessor will visit your sites to see how your organisation operates. During the visit, they will:

talk with staff and observe the service in action,
check facilities, equipment, and documents they can’t view online (like staff files), and
give you feedback.

If your assessor identifies any actions, they will tell you at the end of the visit what to fix and the deadline. If they can’t tell you then, they will notify you as soon as possible.

Step 5: Assessment outcome

We will usually provide your assessment outcome within 30 working days of your site visit (for single site organisations) or 50 working days from the last site visit (for multi-site organisations). We’ll email you a link to log in to the Te Kāhui Kāhu Online provider portal, where you can view your assessment report and any actions you need to take.

For more information on different assessment outcomes, refer to the accreditation and approval overview page.

Accreditation and approval overview – assessment outcomes

Tell us about changes to your organisation

You must let us know about any changes that could affect your accreditation or approval. This includes:

change of ownership
change of legal status (e.g. from sole trader to limited liability company)
change of address, including service delivery sites and branches
change of contact details
change to programmes or services
any serious incident involving a client or staff member

You can update your own information through your Te Kāhui Kāhu Online portal, or you can email us at accreditation@tekahuikahu.govt.nz.

Once we get your update, we will:

Review the information you’ve provided
Contact you if we need more details
Assess how the change may affect your accreditation or approval
Discuss next steps with you

Depending on the change, we may:

simply update your records
change the date of your next review assessment
ask you to re-apply for accreditation or approval
decide you're no longer eligible for accreditation or approval

Typical change outcomes

Here’s what typically happens when your organisation goes through certain changes.

Change of ownership

If a service or programme changes ownership and the new owner is not already accredited or approved, the new owner must submit an application.

Gaining accreditation or approval

Change of legal entity

Depending on the impact of your legal entity change to your service delivery, we will:

update your records, or
assess the change during your next review assessment, or
schedule an immediate assessment, if required

Change of address (including delivery sites and branches)

If your location(s) changes:

we will update your address records, and
we may schedule a site visit to your new location(s) with you, if required.

Change to services

If your services change, we will:

assess whether your current level is still appropriate, and
contact you to schedule a review assessment if you require higher level of accreditation or approval.