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	About the Standards & Accreditation Framework
	National Accreditation Council
	National Community Housing Standards Manual
		Introducing the Standards
		How They were Developed
		Using the Standards


	Using the Standards to improve work practices
	The Standards can be used by community housing organisations as a tool for quality improvement . This might include assisting in:
		Training members of the organisation in good practice
		Evaluating parts, or all, of the organisation’s work
	Using the Standards to assess the work of organisations
	The standards have been designed to both articulate good practice in community housing and be used as criteria for forming judgements about performance for evaluation purposes (either internal or external). An organisation doesn’t need to be applying for accreditation to carry out an internal evaluation. However, it does need to be committed to looking for better ways to do things, with the overall aim of improved outcomes for tenants/applicants and communities served. The accreditation system was designed to have two main purposes
		To encourage continuous quality improvement in community housing, and
		To provide a mechanism for external certification of performance levels at a given point in time.
	The standards and accreditation process therefore have a strong emphasis on quality improvement but also the capacity to assess for accountability purposes. For community housing providers in states/territories where there is no funded Standards and Accreditation Unit, use of the Manual will mostly be an internal process. However, possibilities are being explored by the National Accreditation Council to extend accreditation opportunities to other states/territories.
	Self-Evaluation
	A Self-Evaluation Workbook has been designed to help organisations review and improve the work they do. The Self-Evaluation Workbook can be downloaded here.
		Self-evaluation Workbook March 2004 Doc Word File (517K) Download to Disk

The Second Edition National Community Housing Standards can be downloaded by clicking on the PDF icon. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this item.

NCHStandardsManual2003.PDF
1.1MB

© NCHF 2005

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