New Zealand students ranked above the OECD average in maths, reading and science literacy in the 2022 Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) report.
But there has been a decline in scores across all three subjects in the last 20 years.
We should not move on from the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) without asking how it happened and why we persisted with a scheme so obviously flawed.
If I tell you Trevor Mallard was the Minister of Education in 2002 when the NCEA was implemented, you may think no further explanation is needed.
When he was Speaker of the House, Mallard responded to protesters coming to Parliament by turning on the sprinklers and playing Barry Manilow songs over the public address system.
But, in fairness, the NCEA was not his idea.
I was in Parliament when it was promoted. It was his associate minister, Steve Maharey, by profession a sociology lecturer, who drove it through.
Maharey was a true believer in “cognitive learning”, what he called “personalised learning”, more commonly known as “pupil-led learning”: the notion that children learn by discovering knowledge for themselves rather than being directly taught.
We do learn from experience and finding out information is an important skill. But to master any worthwhile subject, we must first be taught essential foundation knowledge.
A simple example: to write coherently, one must know grammar.
You cannot do chemistry without being taught the periodic table, or mathematics without learning times tables.
The NCEA allowed pupils to choose to skip learning challenging content essential for subject knowledge in favour of collecting soft credits.
It is also unfair to blame only Maharey. In the British comedy Yes Minister, politicians come and go while the real power lies with senior civil servants. So too in New Zealand.
The NCEA was the creation of senior bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education.
It is a department that has promoted a string of fads, from open-plan classrooms, “look-and-guess” reading and that built schools so badly designed they have had to be demolished.
The ministry has created a school system where absenteeism is rife.
Really big mistakes are usually made by clever people. Stupid people are rarely able to make a big mistake.
Those promoting pupil-led learning were clever, articulate and convinced that they knew best. What they claimed is superficially attractive.
Rote learning can crush creativity, but the alternative they imposed was worse.
Act MP Deborah Coddington summed up our view at the time: “One of the most dangerous experiments ever foisted on New Zealand children.”
John Morris, Auckland Grammar headmaster, correctly predicted that the NCEA would mean “the dumbing-down of academic standards”.
Some New Zealand schools have never adopted pupil-led learning, opting for the Cambridge exam instead.
National’s then education spokesman Sir Bill English warned that if problems weren’t fixed, “NCEA will lose credibility”.
This belief that it just needed a few tweaks led the Key Government into continuing with a system that was flawed.
The flaws were visible from the start. Students and schools gamed the system.
In 2004, Cambridge High School claimed a 100% NCEA pass rate by giving pupils credits for picking up litter.
In 2013, nearly 25% of internal assessments were marked incorrectly, yet the credits still counted toward NCEA grades.
In 2017 then Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced a review of the NCEA.
The Government launched a trial of of new NCEA literacy and numeracy tests in 2022.
The results were shocking. More than 40% of students failed at least one test in the June 2023 exams.
The Herald has reported that Labour’s current education spokeswoman, Willow-Jean Prime, didn’t respond to NCEA meeting offers.
By contrast, in just 18 months, Education Minister Erica Stanford has announced the end of the NCEA and its replacement with externally marked exams.
Critics complain this will mean teachers “teaching to the test”.
Exactly. Exams will result in teacher-led learning. Pupils being taught reading, writing and arithmetic, essential for passing exams.
For two decades, NCEA’s designers insisted their system was the future. The future has arrived, and it has failed.
The real lesson is not just that the NCEA must go, but that the political class must never again be permitted to impose unproven ideology-driven experiments on our children.
