Leading high school principals hope a radical education shake-up can win back parents’ faith, but also warn it may give a short-term popularity boost to alternatives such as the Cambridge exams.
Auckland principals Tim O’Connor and Steven Hargreaves last week praised an announcement the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) was being scrapped as “good news for the country”.
The Government plans to replace it with a curriculum focused on English and maths and more standardised teaching and grading.
It would introduce an A to E and 0-100 grading system that Education Minister Erica Stanford claimed parents want because no one can make sense of why an E is a higher mark than an A under the NCEA system.
Macleans College’s Hargreaves served on the Government’s reform advisory group and said while there were still details to be worked out, the overhaul looked positive.
His school allows senior students to study either the local NCEA programme or the British-headquartered Cambridge exams, taught in schools around the world.
He expected uncertainty caused by the NCEA’s scrapping could lead more parents to choose Cambridge’s “stability” in the short term.
That was until the new NZ Certificate of Education qualification was fully up and running.
“I think our students will keep opting into Cambridge probably in slightly bigger numbers for the next few years at least,” Hargreaves said.
The overhaul, which could affect students for decades to come, is open for public feedback for the next six weeks.
It follows years of criticism that the NCEA’s flexibility meant students across the country were being held to different standards and learning varying lessons despite supposedly studying the same subjects.
It also led some schools to abandon the NCEA entirely.
More than 40 schools over the past year offered the Cambridge curriculum either in place of the NCEA or alongside it as another alternative.
Popular inner Auckland school, Epsom Girls Grammar, was among the latest, telling parents it would be offering it as a choice from 2026 after “overwhelming community demand”.
Auckland Grammar offers students the NCEA and Cambridge pathways, with headmaster Tim O’Connor a long-time critic of the homegrown system.
He said many students had coasted under NCEA rather than striving for excellence, which “tarnished” it as a “flexible anything qualification” and led to more than 250,000 skipped exams last year.
Despite that, O’Connor questioned whether the Cambridge pathway would be needed if the homegrown education system was revamped.
“We’re a proud state school and we would support a nationwide qualification if it was going to be rigorous enough,” he said.
Hargreaves, who was on the Government’s reform advisory group, said moves under the proposed reform to have all assignments and exams marked by outside assessors rather than teachers was a positive step towards ensuring fair grading.
He also backed a homegrown pathway but thought it would take time to convince parents to have faith in it.
Mike Waller, principal of private secondary Pinehurst School, which only teaches Cambridge, was another to back the reforms.
However, his school was firmly established in the Cambridge system and had no plans to change.
He believed it was rigorous and as an international pathway serving schools in many countries, was more stable and less susceptible to political changes that homegrown curriculums could be.
The Government proposes axing NCEA Level 1, giving students respite from high-pressure exams in Year 11.
They will instead focus on literacy and numeracy in a “Foundational Skills Award” to build a base for their senior studies.
Year 12s will then seek the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) and Year 13s the NZ Advanced Certificate of Education (NZACE).
The Government said common-sense grading, such as As and marks out of 100, will be clearer for parents, employers, and universities.
The changes kick in for Year 11s in 2028, who will then move into the new senior qualifications in 2029 and 2030.
It comes as the Cambridge pathway’s popularity hit a high point last year with 8000 Kiwi students sitting its November exams and scoring 25 Top in the World awards for being the best in their subject anywhere in the globe.
Despite Cambridge’s success at his school, Hargreaves believed that in a perfect world all local schools would be delivering a national qualification rather than international.
That made the current feedback period critical, given it was concerns over education two decades back that led to the arrival in the country of the Cambridge system.
“If there’d never been any concerns about it 25 years ago, Cambridge would never have arrived on our shores,” he said.