Dialogue: An ill-planned recipe for academic anorexia

JOHN MORRIS* says the introduction of the new National Certificate of Educational Achievement should be postponed.

Next year a new era of school qualifications will begin. This should be a really positive development, but I fear this is not how history will judge the new National Certificate of Educational Achievement.

An extraordinary feature of this change that will affect generations of students is that very few, not even the PPTA or the Minister of Education himself, want it in its proposed form.

Few are still enthusiastic about it. Many teachers are worried and uncertain. The national certificate will be launched on to a largely unsuspecting student cohort with, at most, lukewarm support from those who will teach and assess it. The vast majority of parents will be confused by it.

The range of opposition is impressive. According to a Herald report, 20 schools are looking to set up a trust to run a separate qualification system.

Auckland Grammar School and 50 other schools have a concerted interest in the Cambridge University international exams. At least one university in New Zealand has discussed setting up its own entrance exams.

The activist and arch-defender of state education, John Minto, has expressed doubts about the national certificate. Low-decile schools have gone public against a scheme designed to help those very schools.

The minister has said he is not happy with aspects of it. A group called Concerned Teachers has been set up to fight it.

A second striking feature is that the national certificate appears to have no expert educational support. All the research papers of which I am aware have condemned it.

Several New Zealand educationalists, including assessment experts Cedric Hall and Warwick Elley, have identified serious weaknesses. International experts, writing in reports published by the Education Forum, have also criticised it.

Officials in the Ministry of Education and the Qualifications Authority seem incapable of effective response.

A third feature of the situation is that nobody is quite certain about important aspects of the scheme - a factor that is hardly surprising because of the frequent shifts in policy.

The development of the national certificate continues in an ad hoc fashion. The minister himself has instigated changes that he calls "political," not educational.

The Leaders Forum has come up with compromise proposals that suddenly become part of the scheme but have no educational or research underpinnings.

The recent announcement that subject marks will be reported is a classic example of political compromise. But it will end up pleasing no one. It won't please those who were enthusiastic about the original concept because, as they correctly point out, marks don't fit within a scheme in which assessments are against standards; it won't please the critics who point out that the introduction of marks is not only inconsistent but, more importantly, won't address basic design faults.

We are advancing (or should I say retreating) into the unknown - into a scheme which has not been tested, which has no successful international precedent, and about which there is much informed criticism.

This year's fourth-formers will be the guinea-pigs in this expensive experiment.

They and all subsequent cohorts will, if we are not careful, emerge from secondary schooling with academic anorexia and worthless qualifications.

As the headmaster of Auckland Grammar School, whatever I say on educational issues tends to be denigrated by the small elite running school education as rantings typical of the headmaster of an archaic and draconian school.

I reject such descriptions, but I am deeply concerned at the de-education of New Zealand that will be hastened by the implementation of the national certificate.

The certificate has many problems:

* The ideological refusal to accept that much assessment requires inter-student comparisons and the consequent attempt to define all education in terms of "standards"

* The lack of a national policy on reassessment

* Unacceptably low levels of assessment reliability

* Limited moderation and lack of consequences for schools making incorrect internal assessments

* Lack of comparability of student assessment between schools and subjects and of qualifications over time

* Use of only four grades

* Difficulties in establishing the authenticity of a student's work

* Workload and assessment overload.

Any one of these could prove to be the Achilles heel, the weakness that brings the whole system to its knees.

How could a qualification with so many fundamental weaknesses ever be seriously considered? It is as if so much energy, time and money has gone into the project that it will be introduced next year regardless of the harmful effects on the education and life chances of our children.

Surely it is absurd to continue with a scheme with no expert support, many serious but unanswered criticisms, no international precedent or local testing, and which, in fact, few now seem to want.

At this late stage the best step would be to postpone the introduction of the national certificate indefinitely, continue with existing qualifications, and go back to the drawing boardusing the best local and international expertise available.

The present system does need reform, but the National Certificate of Educational Achievement would make the situation far worse.

* John Morris is the headmaster of Auckland Grammar School.