Editorial: Erica Stanford’s education woes - Covid, truancy and NCEA (again)

Editorial

Education problems are piling up for the Government, from truancy to the long Covid hangover. Now it’s NCEA, again.

The much-troubled National Certificate of Educational Achievement has three levels, roughly matching school years 11, 12 and 13 (or 16- to 18-year-olds). A report by the Education Review Office (ERO) yesterday said NCEA Level 1 was unfair, unreliable and possibly not worth keeping. Difficulty levels varied between subjects and schools, so children had unequal workloads and chances of achieving. Tellingly, ERO head of assessment Ruth Shinoda said: “Last year, students were almost twice as likely to achieve an excellence grade on an internal assessment than an external assessment.”

In a view backed by Education Minister Erica Stanford, Shinoda questioned whether it made sense to assess secondary students for three years in a row. She said students were missing out on key knowledge because NCEA Level 1 was too flexible, allowing students to cherry-pick the easiest credits and do the bare minimum. In many cases, they did not take the foundational courses that allowed them to study at a higher level. Some simply stopped studying for the year once they had achieved the required number of credits.

More than a quarter of schools have already voted with their feet and stopped offering Level 1 for the reasons above. Attempts to make Level 1 more rigorous have received a predictably mixed reaction from principals, with some applauding the move and others complaining their students might leave school with no qualifications at all.

None of this will be news to long-suffering parents and students who have been baffled and frustrated by the perverse logic of NCEA for many years.

Unfortunately, the issues identified by ERO are part of a wider problem across NCEA and the education system. Internal assessment regularly beats external results, raising the suspicion some schools inflate their students’ marks. Rewriting the school curriculum has run into a raft of problems, including students choosing courses to gain NCEA credits instead of essential subject knowledge. In short, the NCEA tail is wagging the curriculum dog.

All this is happening against a backdrop of other crises. Important changes to how children learn to read, write and do maths are being rushed through, probably too quickly for many teachers to get ready in time. A detailed Herald analysis of NCEA and UE results has confirmed every teacher’s personal nightmare - student achievement has been dropping steadily since the Covid pandemic because young teens missed too much time in class. More than a quarter of all state school students aged 16, and about half of Māori, left school without NCEA Level 3 or UE last year. That rising dropout rate is no doubt related to the increase in truancy - more than 80,000 students missed more than three weeks of school in Term 2 this year - which governments have ignored for too long.

Stanford, who has been one of the Government’s best-performing ministers, will argue her reforms are the answer to these problems. She may well be right - teachers who have tried the new approaches are gradually coming round - but she should make every effort to take schools with her. It’s been a tough few years at the chalkface (the PPTA described the Level 1 rollout as a shambles) and many teachers, like their students, need all the help they can get.