The Labour Party will wait and see how a radical overhaul of NCEA plays out while the Green Party is opposed to the changes, saying scrapping the decades-long scheme is “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
After a series of damning reports and speculation, Education Minister Erica Stanford and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon unveiled three new certificates of achievement for high school students to replace NCEA levels 1, 2 and 3.
Stanford said NCEA was designed to be flexible and recognise a wide range of learning, but had become too flexible and the complexity of the system had masked poor performance.
Labour’s education spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime said “rushing changes through now for political expediency isn’t the answer”.
She said schools and parents told her they were concerned about “how hasty” the proposed changes were.
“Previous rushed overhauls have led to students being the guinea pigs for failed change – like national standards – so we must get this right."
Stanford said the Government was making changes to the education system at pace. Under the proposal, students currently doing NCEA continue.
Students who are year 8 today will be the first affected by the changes which begin in 2028.
From 2028, year 11 students would work towards a “foundational skills award” rather than NCEA level 1, as they do now. This would be focused on literacy and numeracy, which would remain mandatory subjects.
Year 12 students would study for the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) instead of NCEA level 2 and year 12 students would seek to attain the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education (NZACE) instead of level 3.
Students would do a mix of internal and external exams that add up to a mark out of 100, replacing the current achieved, merit and excellence rankings. That figure aligns to a letter grade such as A, B or C.
For example, a student who received 85/100 in English would get an A while 50/100 in History would get them a C.
The Green Party’s education spokesperson Lawrence Xu-Nan said NCEA was not perfect but it recognised learning took place in different ways.
“Today’s announcement is another classic case of the Government favouring one-size-fits-all approaches. Our education system is too important to be reduced to a single, rigid framework that will leave many behind.
“We haven’t seen any clear case for the scrapping of NCEA - the Government has not made it. We remain entirely unconvinced this is what our school system needs. In fact, it risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
PPTA president Chris Abercrombie was mostly pleased with the changes, particularly plans to created a new and improved vocational pathway.
He was eagerly awaiting more information to understand how students would be impacted. He said the union was only told about the proposal about an hour before it was announced publicly.
Abercrombie said the NCEA system allowed for a lot of discretion when a student failed or was failing - for example, the school and the student could figure out another way to ensure they had enough credits.
“[I hope that] doesn’t disappear. We effectively don’t want an overcorrection or swing so far in the other direction that we end up hurting students.”
Associate Education Minister David Seymour said the changes were “absolutely fantastic.”
“If you haven’t got a compact body of knowledge rigorously tested, passing from one generation to the next, I would argue you’re not doing education the way that you should.
“This is something I think the Government should go hard on and take no backwards steps.”
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.