Last reviewed on 29 September 2026.
NNWA publishes the name and qualifications of everyone who writes and checks its material. You can see the full teaching team on the faculty page.
Clause one: what you are actually buying
The description of the service. How long it runs, what form the teaching takes, what is delivered, and what happens on completion.
What to look for is specificity. A document that says access to learning materials is describing something very different from one that says a stated number of live sessions with marked assessments. Where the terms are vaguer than the marketing, the terms are what governs.
Clause two: fees and what happens if you miss one
The total, the schedule, and the consequence of a late payment. If instalments are involved, the total payable across the plan rather than only the monthly figure.
Look specifically for what happens on a missed payment: whether access is suspended, whether a charge applies, and whether the whole balance becomes due. None of those are unreasonable; all of them are better known in advance.
Clause three: refunds and withdrawal
The clause people most wish they had read. What you get back and when, usually tapering the further into the programme you are.
Two things matter more than the percentages. Whether there is a cooling off window at the start, and what specifically triggers a refund: your withdrawal, a cancelled batch, or a failure by the provider. The checklist for assessing anyone's version is in the refund policy checklist, and NNWA's own is published as its refund policy.
Clause four: how long access lasts
Particularly for recordings, and particularly if you might fall behind. A course advertised with lifetime access should say so in the terms; where the marketing says lifetime and the terms say twelve months, the terms decide.
This is the clause most likely to matter to a working adult whose month goes badly, which is why it is worth reading before rather than during that month. What the phrase should mean is discussed in what lifetime access really means.
Clause five: what the certificate actually requires
Completion conditions. Whether assessments must be passed, whether attendance matters, whether fees must be fully paid before issue.
That last one is common and reasonable, and it catches people on instalment plans who assumed the certificate arrives with the final class rather than the final payment.
Clause six: what the provider may change
Most contracts reserve some right to change schedule, faculty or delivery. That is normal; running a programme for six months without any flexibility is not possible.
What to look for is the limit. A clause permitting changes to timing and staff is ordinary. One permitting unilateral change to the fee, the syllabus or the qualification awarded, without notice, is not.
Where to find the document
It should be public. A provider that publishes its terms and refund policy openly is making a commitment it can be held to; one that will only send them after you express intent to pay has made that choice deliberately.
NNWA publishes its terms and refund policy openly, which is the minimum standard worth expecting anywhere.
What to do about a clause you dislike
Ask about it before paying, in writing. Some are negotiable, particularly around timing and deferral, and some are not. Either answer is useful.
What matters is that the exchange is in writing and kept. A verbal assurance that contradicts a written term is worth very little later, and the person who gave it may not be there.
The mismatch that should stop you
When the marketing and the terms disagree, and the terms are materially worse. Lifetime in the advertisement and twelve months in the contract. A guarantee on the page and a disclaimer in the document.
This is not a drafting accident; it is a choice about which version is enforceable. A provider comfortable with that gap is telling you how it will behave when something goes wrong, and it is the single clearest signal available before you pay.
If you have already paid and only now read them
Read them anyway, today rather than at the point of a problem. Knowing what the cooling off window is, if there is one, is only useful inside it.
If what you find does not match what you were told, that is worth acting on promptly, and the routes are in what to do if a course misled you.
Terms for a course bought through a platform
A complication worth knowing about. Where a course is sold through a marketplace, two sets of terms may apply: the platform's and the provider's, and they can differ on exactly the clauses that matter, particularly refunds and access duration.
Work out which governs before paying. The usual answer is that the platform handles the transaction and the provider handles delivery, which means a refund may be the platform's decision while access duration is the provider's.
Screenshots, and why they matter
Whatever the terms say, take a copy of the page you bought from. Marketing pages change, and a claim about lifetime access or an included certificate is far easier to raise later if you have the version you actually relied on.
This takes thirty seconds and is the single most useful precaution available to somebody buying any course online. Save the fee page, the course description and the terms as they stood on the day you paid.
The honest summary
Six clauses: the service, the fees and default, refunds, access duration, certificate conditions, and the provider's right to change things. Search for seven words rather than reading the whole document. Ask in writing about anything you dislike and keep the answer. And treat any gap between the marketing and the terms as the most informative thing on the page.