Peter Gall: How to compare schools on NCEA

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Opinion

In 2002 the NCEA was introduced as a qualification for New Zealand secondary school students. Now, after ten years of debate, contention, intense scrutiny, development and improvement, the qualification is firmly embedded within our education system. What a pity it is then that so many people outside of the school sector have a poor understanding of even the most rudimentary workings of NCEA.

I cringe every time I encounter commentary that describes NCEA as an internally assessed system. Please explain that belief to the thousands of students that sit their external NCEA exams at the end of each year - in fact, there are more external examinations now than ever existed in the previous disjointed, unaligned set of school qualifications.

Of greater concern is the lack of understanding of what really matters for students as they work towards their NCEA. The most important measure of student achievement is the level of qualification a student has gained when they finally leave school.

We will soon be privy to league tables of schools based on the 2011 NCEA results. Like most of my colleagues, I am not afraid of league tables - we are acutely aware of the relative performance of our students and are able to retrieve that information for our own schools and others.

There is so much NCEA data available and, quite frankly, that is partly the problem. I believe that media personnel have access to such a massive amount of information that it creates confusion and it is a struggle to determine that which satisfactorily compares "apples with apples".

Roll-based data exists which considers those students on the roll as at 1 July. Schools rightly complain about this set of data being used for comparative purposes because it includes students who leave school in the second part of the year and those students who may be doing alternative qualifications, thus giving lower school results.

We now have access to "eligibility" data which considers only those students who are entered for sufficient numbers of credits to gain the qualification. On the surface this seems a fairer measure but schools are able to manipulate their statistics by withdrawing failing students from courses and thereby enhancing their "pass rate".

Quite clearly both sets of data need to be considered and if there are wide variations then that will raise questions. This would be a complex and time consuming task.

NCEA is a "building block" qualification as compared to a "stepping stone" one. Students do not need to complete level 1 before they start level 2. Many students study 2 levels concurrently - for example, they may be doing level 1 mathematics but level 2 English and geography and this is a strength of the qualification.

Using year 11 level 1 results may be useful for schools for internal purposes but is, I believe, a weak indicator of NCEA success and smacks of attempts to compare to the defunct school certificate of years gone by.

Is there then a set of NCEA data that provides a fair comparison between schools? The answer is yes. What would provide a straight-forward basis for league tables is to simply consider the cohort of students that leave a school in a particular year and record their level of NCEA achievement.

What percentage of school leavers from a particular school leave with NCEA level 2? Or leave with the university entrance requirements? Or leave with no NCEA qualification?

Unfortunately NZQA does not produce or publish this data in a timely fashion as it requires information sharing with the Ministry of Education. In fact it is the ministry that eventually publishes this information in their annual benchmark indicators to schools.

With the Prime Minister and successive ministers of education describing NCEA level 2 as the minimum school leaving qualification for students to succeed in the modern world, then the taxpaying public deserves to know how their schools are performing against this measure.

To me it seems to be a fairly straight forward and logical approach that would lead to an improved understanding of NCEA.

Any step in that direction would be welcomed.

* Peter Gall is principal of Papatoetoe High School