NCEA results: Education system has become a political football, not supported or resourced adequately - PPTA

THREE KEY FACTS

The release this week of NCEA results for more than 150,000 young people around the motu is a good time to reflect on the state of our national qualification system.

The Education Review Office (ERO) has panned the revised version of NCEA Level 1, introduced last year, saying it is not working. ERO has suggested another overhaul and warned that it might be time to scrap the first year of the national school qualification altogether.

The NCEA changes aim to make our senior secondary qualification more robust, consistent, inclusive and accessible for students of all abilities and backgrounds. The new NCEA Level 1 was designed by the Ministry of Education to support the vision for NCEA as a broad, foundational qualification at Level 1, with further opportunities for specialisation at Levels 2 and 3.

Change is endemic in education, and teachers do not expect it to be otherwise.

But the two tests for change always need to be whether it is justified by the evidence and implemented properly. In many cases, these two tests are not being met.

In his Cabinet paper of February 2020, bringing in the NCEA changes, then Education Minister Chris Hipkins emphasised the huge shifts required, and committed to the need for adequate support. However, it is questionable whether adequate support has ever been provided.

The challenges facing the NCEA change package now are almost the same as those of 2002 when the NCEA was originally introduced.

Teacher support is fragile due to workload pressures and inadequate resources.

Government policy changes have created additional pressures and workload for teachers and students, and the administrative burden is time-consuming and detracts from teaching time.

Unfortunately, it seems fair to say that the NCEA changes have not been well implemented.

NCEA Level 1 – the first of the changes to be fully implemented - has arisen as a particular concern with recurring problems of insufficient resourcing and time for implementation, and the poor quality of ministry and NZ Qualifications Authority change-management processes.

One option the Government is considering is to abandon NCEA Level 1, but is there evidence that this is the correct choice? And what about the students who leave school after Year 11?

It is imperative that we address the NCEA issues, keeping in mind some of the key reasons NCEA replaced our old qualifications such as School Certificate and University Entrance.

NCEA allows more students to gain qualifications, it values vocational skills and knowledge along with academic learning. NCEA provides a fuller picture of students’ competencies and skills and its internal assessment processes value persistence and hard work over a period of time, as opposed to external assessment where students tend to cram rather than retain knowledge.

PPTA Te Wehengarua, and secondary teachers, have been the guardians of the NCEA over many years, because we can see the undoubted benefits for students. As a standards-based assessment system that is based on the principle that all students should have opportunities to succeed, be rewarded for what they know and can demonstrate and fulfil their potential, the NCEA has clear advantages over the previous qualification system, which had a built-in failure rate.

We are seriously concerned that NCEA has become a political football and has not been supported or resourced adequately.

Students’ and parents’ confidence in the qualifications system is being undermined. There should be a broad consensus among politicians that our standards-based qualifications system is what New Zealand is committed to having, and that the task of government is to ensure that ours is the very best system that can be developed.

Our students deserve nothing less.