Opinion: NCEA overhaul falls short, top school headmaster James Bentley argues
But what has been proposed to replace the NCEA still falls short.
While it is a step up from the current system, it is not the bold reset many had believed was coming. Its architects have been unable to deliver the required high-calibre model that is essential if we are to begin rebuilding trust in our national qualification. It is therefore unlikely that the many schools that abandoned the NCEA system years ago will now reconsider and return to its newly announced replacement.
Then there will be a group that will defend the NCEA, who will argue that it has served our students well and that any change is unnecessary. But we have to be honest with ourselves. The NCEA has not delivered the outcomes its champions promised. Huge achievement gaps have persisted, especially for Māori and Pasifika students.
Many young people have been buried under a mountain of assessments, where chasing credits has often mattered more than learning the knowledge and skills of their subjects. In order to improve pass rates, some schools have developed a habit of offering too many low-value in-school assessments, undermining the integrity of the qualification itself. The relentless pressure to gain assessments has amplified stress levels for both students and teachers.
There was nothing especially wrong with the original NCEA vision; a flexible, standards-based system that could cater to different learning styles and pathways. But over time, it has become so complex and so distorted that it has lost both clarity and credibility.
The flexibility that was once its strength has become a weakness, which has allowed for wildly different student outcomes, to the point that it can be unclear what a student's qualification can actually signify. Students on vastly different pathways can end up in essence with the same qualification, yet the underlying depth and quality can vary dramatically, depending on what subjects or courses they took. This has made it increasingly difficult for employers, universities and even families to understand what the NCEA actually represents.
However, the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) that has been announced seems uncertain about what it wants to be.
Many New Zealand schools now prefer Cambridge or the International Baccalaureate over NCEA. Photo / 123rf
It has replicated the same flaw found in the NCEA system, an insistence that vocational and traditional academic subjects are equitable.
While it is vital that vocational subjects are taught to our students, to continue the pretence that they are all equally rigorous and as academically demanding as, say, physics or calculus is bewildering.
The NZCE does go some way to resolve the NCEA's long-standing imbalance between internal and external assessment; something further exacerbated by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). When assessments can be completed outside the classroom with the help of AI tools, the reliability of internal assessments will invariably be questioned. While exams aren't perfect, they do offer a more secure and fair measure of a student's learning. The qualification designers recognised this and have rightly proposed more emphasis on external assessment.
Nonetheless, it remains unclear how much weighting exams will have on a final subject grade and whether this will be consistent across all subjects.
No doubt, there will be those who claim that advocating for a qualification that is more exam-focused and with a clear distinction between vocational and traditional academic subjects is an attempt to turn back the clock. But perhaps going back in time is not such a bad place to be. New Zealand was once among the top performers in global education rankings.
Teenagers turned up to school regularly, teacher workload was more manageable and students left school with a qualification that, while not without its drawbacks, carried weight and was understood by the wider public.
The current reform aims to restore rigour, fairness and clarity to our national qualification. It is a step in the right direction, but more is required. If we are serious as a nation about giving our young people the tools they need for future success, we must go further. Our students deserve more than NCEA as it stands, and more than what the new qualification is offering.
We have one chance to get this right. Let us not squander this opportunity.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
7 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Letters to the Editor: homeless, Māori words, protecting nature
The Oval tent village. PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON Park your attitude and then show compassion Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including compassion for the homeless, Māori words in school books, and the use of 1080. In reaction to M. Smith's letter about homeless people (14.8.25) I am appalled at your attitude. Where is your compassion? I am sure it is not their ''choice'' to camp out anywhere, particularly in winter. There are a lot of people one pay away from the same predicament, often through no fault of their own. Yes, occasionally people make bad choices in life but even those choices may be influenced by the cards they are dealt in childhood and life in general. If they could pay fines etc they wouldn't be living in destitution. The main concern to M. Smith seems to be the parking restrictions. If that is your only worry then count your blessings that you have a car and, presumably, live in a warm house. We are all human and therefore not perfect, even you. There but for a twist of fate go I. Kay Hannan Oamaru New minister Today's paper (11.8.25) has two glaring examples of why the government needs to introduce a Minister of Unintended Consequences. First ''Disposal of waste expensive problem for op shops'', then ''Backing urged for holiday park housing''. User pays has made disposal of unwanted stuff more expensive for non-students, though the council provides free skips for them in an attempt to keep their rubbish from being left in rentals and on the street when they depart. Others as strapped for cash in other parts of town get no such consideration. They solve their problems their own way, causing clean-up problems for others. Unintended, surprising? Healthy homes standard for rentals is great, except it means ''expensive and fewer''. A weatherproof shed is better than a tent or a shop doorway, but the shed isn't allowed and the people in tents and doorways are, ahem, let's change the subject eh? Rentals should be classified. A-grade, up to current compulsory standard, rent whatever landlord wants to charge. Then other grades with appropriate rent limits. Uninsulated, no rangehood etc. B grade. Shed, container, with access to ablution block, C grade. Even an open implement shed with a sound roof would be better to pitch tents in could be allowed at say $10 a week. The housing shortage is not being solved by waiting for quality rentals to be delivered by the tooth fairy. It's time for politicians and their comfortable department staff to face the reality that grotty shelter, affordable, is better than none. Settling for none isn't OK. K. Nordal Stene Dunedin Not just words The Ministry of Education has recently decided to take out of use the Ready to Read instructional reading book, At the Marae, supposedly because there are too many words in Māori. These words, although in common usage, are apparently going to add confusion for young early literacy learners because they can't be decoded using phonetics, as is being taught. The vowels have different sounds. Well, maybe we need to get rid of a fair proportion of high frequency English words, such as one, the, said, eight, any. It is not helpful if decoding is the main strategy for learning to read. There is a lot more to it than just words. Sue Todd Dunedin [Sue Todd is a former reading recovery teacher and tutor. Ed.] A fair question A large percentage of European primary school pupils learn to speak English, so why are New Zealand primary school-age pupils thought incapable of learning the meaning of the odd Māori word in school texts? Margaret Shaw Mosgiel Bush clad Stewart Island. Photo: ODT files Not ideal but it allows flora and fauna to reign While we would all prefer not to have to use poisons such as 1080, I agree with the Department of Conservation (ODT 9.8.25) that it is the most effective way of reducing predators and allowing native flora and fauna to thrive. When I first visited Stewart Island I was blown away by the bush cover but noted three problems. Firstly the bush was largely silent with little bird sign or noise; secondly there were a number of what appeared to be dead trees; thirdly where we saw deer, the understorey between ground level and deer height was largely a see-through desert with no seedlings, few leaves or branches, and even bark had been eaten. When I returned three years later, in areas where there had been one or even two 1080 drops in the interim, birds and tree orchids were again appearing, and some of the ''apparently dead'' trees were now revealing the magnificent red of flowering rata. If white-tailed deer are genetically rare, live capture them. They should not be able to continue to turn into wastelands the areas where they are browsing, in order that they and a small minority of humans who wish to hunt and kill them have first priority, rather than allowing the rest of us (who are the majority) to enjoy the full restoration of the flora and fauna. Lala Frazer Broad Bay Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@
Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Otago Daily Times
Education reforms and how they affect those in Hufflepuff
"C'S get degrees" was a comment I heard from a student 20 years ago. My reply was "Only if you want to be in Hufflepuff". The Harry Potter reference was not taken well, and I was accused of being judgemental. One of the criticisms of the NCEA qualifications is that it allowed students to settle for mediocrity where some just did enough to pass rather than extend themselves and aspire for excellence. One of my daughters was in the first cohort to go through NCEA, and she would reassure me that she was doing enough to pass, but merely passing was not what I wanted for her. I thought she was smarter than me and so I wanted to see how she could be extended to achieve her potential. A little unfair, as how many of us do achieve our potential? Life is much too interesting to spend all our energy on schoolwork. In the AI environment it may be the right thing to bring back the focus on external exams. However, it is not always the best way to ensure students have understood important concepts or are able to construct a coherent argument. I started attending university in my mid-30s and my internal marks were always high. However, when it came time to sit the exam it would usually knock me back. It was a little disheartening knowing that even though I understood the material well, my discomfort with exams meant that my grades would always drop. I remember the last exam I ever sat, a masters paper on epidemiology and biostatistics where I sat paralysed for the first 20 minutes. Just as well it was a three-hour exam. I have been around long enough to have taught students who have been through both the old School Certificate and NCEA. I haven't noticed a major difference in the ability of students to think about, understand, write and engage with the material I teach. One big change I have noticed, particularly in recent years, is that students tend to be a lot more confident. They are better able to do group and solo presentations, with less hesitancy and embarrassment than students from 25 years ago. I think NCEA contributed to that. One of the problems with the new structure is that it reminds me of when I started high school back in 1975 when we were sorted into two streams. An academic stream for those doing French or Latin and a general stream for those doing more vocational subjects like woodwork, metalwork and agriculture. The problem with these vocational-type streams is that you are asking 12-year-olds to almost set in stone their future vocational path. I am worried that the new curriculum will not give people a wide enough education to be able to change careers. Many people change careers every few years — I changed careers five times in my first 20 years after leaving school. While we are on education, the removal of the book At The Marae from schools because it has too many Māori words is astounding. The Māori words in question are, marae, karanga, wharenui, koro, hongi, karakia and kai. Most children will go to a marae and I don't know how you can talk about going to a marae without using Māori words. Having looked at the book I noticed it also had words derived from French, Latin, Norse and Old English/German. We have so many words in the English language derived from other languages that the inconsistencies are a mine field of pronunciation — take the letters "ough" in tough, trough, though, thought, through. What a pleasure it must be for beginning readers to come across Māori words where all the vowels are consistently pronounced. My children went to te kōhanga reo and then a total immersion Māori language school, although English was the primary language at home. My 5-year-old was so used to picking up Māori books and reading and understanding them that she decided she wanted to teach herself how to read English. The Māori language is a far easier language to learn to read than English because the vowels are always pronounced the same way. My daughter had gained the skills and confidence to read in Māori. Because she could speak English she picked up the book Are You My Mother?, published in English and Māori and proceeded to teach herself to read English by going back and forward between the two versions. The confidence in reading Māori words dramatically increased her ability to read English. There seems to be a dismissal of many things Māori in this coalition government, relegating Māori language and aspirations to the second-class status it had when I was growing up. Disappointing when they can actually benefit all. — Dr Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in the University of Otago's social and community work programme.
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- NZ Herald
Māori wardens play vital role in natural disasters, push for more volunteers
Māori wardens have long served the Hawke's Bay community. More volunteers are now needed, including to play a vital role in future natural disasters. There is a push to have 500 Māori wardens volunteering by 2027 across the Te Piringa Manatōpū region, which spans from Hawke's Bay to Wellington. At
