Opinion: NCEA overhaul falls short, top school headmaster James Bentley argues

The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has been New Zealand's main secondary qualification since 2002. Photo / NZME

THE FACTS

• The Minister of Education announced a major overhaul of the national secondary school qualification.
• The new system, NZCE and NZACE, aims to improve clarity and require full course completion.
• Critics say the reform falls short, failing to fully address issues like achievement gaps and assessment pressure.

After more than two decades of criticism, working groups and reviews, the Minister of Education has recently announced a major overhaul of our national secondary school qualification, drawing a line under the failed experiment that has been the NCEA since its introduction in 2002.

Doing something different from the rest of the world is admirable, but only if it works. The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has not worked to the level we need it to, and the evidence on this has mounted for years. More and more schools are simply walking away from it and looking to overseas alternatives such as Cambridge and the International Baccalaureate.

The promise of reform has therefore sparked real hope among many educators.

There are many positives about the new qualification – the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) and the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education (NZACE). To be taken by Year 12 and Year 13 students respectively, it will be clearer to understand and students will be forced to take entire courses, no longer able to dip in and out of various subjects.

But what has been proposed to replace the NCEA still falls short.

While it is a step up from the current system, it is not the bold reset many had believed was coming. Its architects have been unable to deliver the required high-calibre model that is essential if we are to begin rebuilding trust in our national qualification. It is therefore unlikely that the many schools that abandoned the NCEA system years ago will now reconsider and return to its newly announced replacement.

Then there will be a group that will defend the NCEA, who will argue that it has served our students well and that any change is unnecessary. But we have to be honest with ourselves. The NCEA has not delivered the outcomes its champions promised. Huge achievement gaps have persisted, especially for Māori and Pasifika students.

Many young people have been buried under a mountain of assessments, where chasing credits has often mattered more than learning the knowledge and skills of their subjects. In order to improve pass rates, some schools have developed a habit of offering too many low-value in-school assessments, undermining the integrity of the qualification itself. The relentless pressure to gain assessments has amplified stress levels for both students and teachers.

There was nothing especially wrong with the original NCEA vision; a flexible, standards-based system that could cater to different learning styles and pathways. But over time, it has become so complex and so distorted that it has lost both clarity and credibility.

The flexibility that was once its strength has become a weakness, which has allowed for wildly different student outcomes, to the point that it can be unclear what a student’s qualification can actually signify. Students on vastly different pathways can end up in essence with the same qualification, yet the underlying depth and quality can vary dramatically, depending on what subjects or courses they took. This has made it increasingly difficult for employers, universities and even families to understand what the NCEA actually represents.

However, the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) that has been announced seems uncertain about what it wants to be.

Many New Zealand schools now prefer Cambridge or the International Baccalaureate over NCEA. Photo / 123rf

It has replicated the same flaw found in the NCEA system, an insistence that vocational and traditional academic subjects are equitable.

While it is vital that vocational subjects are taught to our students, to continue the pretence that they are all equally rigorous and as academically demanding as, say, physics or calculus is bewildering.

The NZCE does go some way to resolve the NCEA’s long-standing imbalance between internal and external assessment; something further exacerbated by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). When assessments can be completed outside the classroom with the help of AI tools, the reliability of internal assessments will invariably be questioned. While exams aren’t perfect, they do offer a more secure and fair measure of a student’s learning. The qualification designers recognised this and have rightly proposed more emphasis on external assessment.

Nonetheless, it remains unclear how much weighting exams will have on a final subject grade and whether this will be consistent across all subjects.

No doubt, there will be those who claim that advocating for a qualification that is more exam-focused and with a clear distinction between vocational and traditional academic subjects is an attempt to turn back the clock. But perhaps going back in time is not such a bad place to be. New Zealand was once among the top performers in global education rankings.

Teenagers turned up to school regularly, teacher workload was more manageable and students left school with a qualification that, while not without its drawbacks, carried weight and was understood by the wider public.

The current reform aims to restore rigour, fairness and clarity to our national qualification. It is a step in the right direction, but more is required. If we are serious as a nation about giving our young people the tools they need for future success, we must go further. Our students deserve more than NCEA as it stands, and more than what the new qualification is offering.

We have one chance to get this right. Let us not squander this opportunity.