Secondary school qualification details announced – will the kids be alright?

If you were too busy crying at the fuel pump this week, you may have missed the Education Minister’s announcement of more details about the new national qualification system. Now that more details are out, teachers are starting to worry.  

Here’s what we know so far: 

• NCEA Level 1 is replaced with a “foundational skills award” that will focus on literacy and numeracy.  

• NCEA Levels 2 and 3 are being replaced with the New Zealand Certificate of Education (Year 12) and the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education (Year 13). 

• Students in Years 12 and 13 must take five subjects and pass at least three to attain the qualification. 

• Achieved, Merit and Excellent will be replaced with 6 grades from A+ to E, with a C being needed to pass.  

• Every subject will have an external exam – there will be no more fully internally assessed subjects.  

Current Year 9 students will be the first to sit the new qualifications. You know, the ones who were aged 7 and 8 during the Covid years. Hey, at least they’re used to massive changes and uncertainty, right?  

When the first hints of these changes came in, teachers and parents found themselves in a cloud of further questions. NCEA certainly wasn’t perfect. Would the changes address the problems? What is a pass mark in the new system? Will students have to sit high stakes external exams to pass? What happens to students who don’t pass?  

Now that some of these questions have been answered, teachers are increasingly worried that recognition of their students’ strengths will be lost in a rigid, old-fashioned system that is out of touch with how our young people live and learn.  

Those of us who did the old School Certificate qualification may recognise some of the greatest hits: choosing from a relatively limited list of approved subjects that are one-size-fits-all, forcing all subjects and all students into exams even when that suits neither the subject matter nor the learner (good luck, art students!), and returning to a letter-based marking system that makes no more sense than an Achieved or an Excellence except that it feels familiar to older parents. Ok, boomer.   

This is a classic case of a government over-correction, throwing out the good with the bad for the sake of looking decisive. NCEA was flexible enough for students to focus on their interests and their strengths, allowing them to choose the subjects and the forms of assessment that suited them best. In a more rigid system, students with additional learning needs, who are neurodivergent, who come from diverse cultures and backgrounds, will all be forced to fit into one mould.  

We know that that won’t work because we have tried it before. It will mean more students fail, not because they don’t have deep understanding across a range of subject knowledge, but because we force them to show their learning in an arbitrary, specific set of conditions that suit some students and not others.  

It’s not enough to say that the kids are alright unless all the kids are alright. Our students are diverse, vibrant and adaptable. We need a qualification that matches them, that sets them up for where they want to go in life, that rewards their successes rather than measures their conformity. Erica Stanford can take her one-size-fits-all, exam-fetish, assessment system back to the 1990s where it belongs.