10-08-2025
Principal not surprised more students leaving school unqualified
An Auckland secondary school teacher says he is not surprised by the increasing rate of teenagers leaving high school with no qualifications, and does not anticipate the situation improving.
Of last year's school-leavers, 16% had no qualifications, the highest figure in a decade.
It equates to about 10,600 teenagers, and is 0.4 of a percentage point more than the previous year and about six percentage points higher than the 10-11% recorded in the years prior to the start of the pandemic.
The percentage of school leavers with no NCEA certificate has been rising since 2020, a trend teachers blamed on the after-effects of Covid-19 lockdowns combined with high employment prompting more young people to leave school earlier than they otherwise would.
Papakura High School principal Simon Craggs said changes to literacy and numeracy standards were restricting students.
"It's not really a surprise to me," he said.
"Since they changed the literacy and numeracy requirements that more and more students, particularly from low socio-economic backgrounds, ESOL backgrounds, Maori and Pasifika, weren't going to be able to access qualifications."
The Education Ministry's figures showed 13% of last year's leavers had not reached the literacy and numeracy benchmark compared to about 10% under the previous requirement in pre-pandemic years.
The figures showed 81% of last year's leavers had stayed at school until the age of 17 or beyond, up from 79% the previous year with bigger increases in retention at schools in poorer communities.
Craggs said the revised criteria for the co-requisite tests, known as common assessment activities (CAAs), had "restricted students".
"There are other factors involved, but I would say it's 90% due to the new CAA tests in particular," he said.
"The problem I have with that is not that we're trying to strengthen literacy and numeracy, the problem is the test itself is very narrow.
"It's not actually measuring functional literacy and numeracy."
Māori had the worst results — 28% left with no qualification last year, compared with 19% of Pacific leavers and 14% of European/Pākehā leavers.
Papakura High School had scrapped NCEA level 1, instead opting for a two-year level 2 programme.
"[Level 1] was too hard for our students to do the co-requisite, get their literacy and numeracy, and get 60 credits," Craggs said.
However because students had to stay longer at school to earn a qualification, a higher number of unqualified students would drop out, he said.
A tight labour market was also limiting the options for young people.
"That's another scary thing," Craggs said.
"A lot of them aren't going into quality employment. They are going into employment, but it's casual, reduced hours, take what you get sort of thing. It's very difficult for them to be accessing quality employment.
"Maybe three or four years ago they could go into a good full-time job, and build a career from that. They're not able to do that at the moment."
Training programmes such as People Potential were proving to be a viable alternative for young people, although spots were tight.
Craggs said he did not believe an overhaul of NCEA would lead to declining rates of unqualified school leavers.
"If we were looking at making some tweaks to NCEA, making it a better qualification, making the literacy and numeracy requirement more [functional] then we might have some more optimism for the future.
"I'm not sure that just dumping NCEA and creating a new qualification which is subject-based is necessarily going to make a big difference to those students."
