Colleagues and partners in New Zealand and around the world:

This comes with best wishes for Christmas and the holiday season, and allows me to reflect on this year, and briefly the last ten years, as March 2017 will be the 10th anniversary of our acquisition of International College of Linguistics and a few weeks later ACG Business School. We had 24 staff in 2007: now we have well over 100. In 2007 we had three programmes: now we have over 20, including a postgraduate diploma in business at Level 8. In 2007 we had around 200 EFTS (equivalent full-time students) and last year we hit 1000. We don’t have a 2016 figure yet.

We have seen good growth, but over ten years it has always been generic and steady, in contrast with some of the explosions (and contractions) we have recently witnessed among our competitors.

Some of the highlights of 2016 have been:

• ICL Education Group won the award for Services Exporter of the Year 2016 at the Export NZ awards held in Auckland in June
• Our PGDipBus was approved early this year and launched in June. Already we have over 50 students on it
• We had an excellent NZQA monitoring visit on the Graduate Diplomas
• The NZQA panel visited last month to assess the Master of Business Informatics.
• We have four requirements, two recommendations and four commendations; so are
• well pleased. We expect to have approval early in the new year and to be launching it in July
• Currently over half the business school students are at Level 7 or above and the average age is 27
• Our research activity continues with a third academic journal published this year, this time a peer-reviewed journal
• Last month we received approval from the Chinese government. Apart from the universities and ITPs, only a handful of PTEs are so recognized, and most of them run alternative medicine, chiropractic and suchlike programmes. This is therefore a conspicuous honour and has already produced a flurry of high-level interest
• As a result of our national moderation record over the last few years, we were granted an exemption by NZQA from 2016 external moderation
• Our language school numbers continue to grow
• New Horizon College is now considerably larger with a substantial Auckland evening classes running alongside Napier
• Bridge International College has gained English New Zealand membership
• Auckland English Academy and IELTS Preparation continue to prosper

Thank you to everyone, our staff, our stakeholders, advisory boards and academic partners, and to our retailers and market partners in NZ and offshore, for making 2016 our most successful year yet.

Ewen Mackenzie-Bowie

Chairman

ICL Education Group