What’s the Real Reason Behind the NCEA Replacement?

1. The change as outlined is just window dressing. Crimson suggested adopting international qualifications on STEM subjects with local standards for history. National as usual has chosen a solution that pleases neither the left or the right.

2. I read that Stanford says that she didn’t understand NCEA which disqualifies her from being a competent education minister in my view. I only have good memories of School C & UE, although I found it easy to pass exams, and as you write some people have skills in other areas. Good teachers and the learning environment make a huge difference in the students results so as you point out improving the financial position of those who are missing out now would probably do more to improve students results than any of this window dressing which can best be described as an attempt to fool the simple minded that they know what they are doing.

   • Very accurate Steve.
     I like that ‘fool the simple minded that they know what they are doing’. According to the latest poll that would be 20% of the electorate who say they’d vote Act or Winston First and the other lame ducks who think Luxon actually stands for something.
     He’s in his element being partied and red-carpetted in PNG. That’s what he thinks he was born to do. That, and hiding from criticism. It happens so often, and he thinks we don’t notice?

     When you break it down to ‘improving the financial position of those who are missing out’ we can see that window dressing is the name of this game.

   • Stanford ,like many employers is too dumb to understand .I spoke to a head teacher at a large college yesterday who is disgusted with the step back to the 1960s .One point he raised was ,why should a student not be given any credits if they obtain a drivers license while at the school or a pass in food tech both of which shows the future employer that the person has a license and can work in a kitchen already .Two things that should be valued by a prospective hospo employer .The same would apply to a kid who has qualifications in hort or ag which are not on Stanfords list for end of year exams .My grandson starts at college next year ,he has to take the 5 core subjects and 4 options from a list of 20 .These options are there to allow the kids to get skills ina chosen career path before they leave school which is what employers have been bleating about for years ,constantly moaning because the kid cant cook a 3 course meal ofr build a house from day one .

3. I’ve reached the point awhile ago where I view every decision made by this bunch of CoCs with deep suspicion and skepticism.

   Nothing they do is designed to actually help society. Rather, there will always be a crony or donor lurking somewhere in the background, ready to receive their pound of flesh.

4. Haven’t there been very rigorous international exams available for very competent children to sit. Our local high school used to offer exams run by the University of New South Wales and I’m sure there were some from even more illustrious places. Passes in those would prepare young people for OE studies sufficiently well.
   Is there still the problem of universities wanting a certain number of bursary points for certain courses, thus forcing children to choose their best subjects for bursary, rather than continuing with more challenging but more difficult classes, in 7th. form, sorry Year 13. e.g. Students forced to drop German at bursary level and take something easier.
   Your assessment of what ‘consultation’ means to this govt. is correct. As you say, they don’t want people who can think, they only want ergonomic units.
   Their uncreative and plodding ‘solutions’ may impress parents, who also don’t understand what a well-rounded education consists of, and do nothing to further ‘knowledge-richness’ nor future productivity. Instead, they will lead to a desire to drop out, later in life. Not many people are satisfied with being ergonomic units for 45 years. Eventually the brain needs something more.
   As many have said, having designated a large number of students as work units only, will there be adequate funding in place and avenues for them to move into gainful employment.
   The possibility of never getting an academic qualification that employers recognise, is still there for many young ones. What does Stanford plan to do with them?
   NZCE probably does need some remedial work now, but is this sufficient or as well considered as it needs to be? Without good consultation, it appears, it won’t be.

5. Oldest child did Cambridge. My other kids did NCEA. He ended up tutoring them (as did Mum and Dad) and had scathing things to say about it. The kids treat it as a joke, and so do employers.

   • most employers are to thick to understand it .They like yourself probably forget how useless their first boss thought they were when they first started work .

     • Have had one of my children through NCEA recently and while he passed clearly the system is flawed and not a surprise to see that standards are falling compared to other OECD countries etc.
       At his school the kids could receive credits for completing a ‘mud run’ and didn’t have to even run so in effect receiving credits for going for a 20 min walk.

     • Correction “ too thick to understand it “
       Yet Gordon is an expert in education.

   • Spot on my kid, was all merits NCEA level 1, top of the class went to IB, struggled, much more rigour but got though, however paid off re prep for university vs his mates who coasted in NCEA.

6. Suspect there’s a lot water to pass under the bridge. Telling that an interview on Q&A with Welby Ings preceded the one with Crimson. Both have a point. One size all will never meet everyone’s needs and the NCEA helped in addressing that. Under the old School Cert what was the fail rate? Pretty high if I recall – and even higher among certain demographics. Teenagers shouldn’t be made to feel like failures, as everyone has something to offer. Folk would be surprised at how many of our iconic musicians were dyslexic at school. An outlier perhaps but it covers what Ings was getting at.

   The NCEA is competency based – well it was designed that way if I recall. Grades and percentages are rather different. Achievers will excel but a good many at the other end of the curve will fall through the cracks. Yes, we do need achievers. The more the better. The balance is making sure those who don’t do well academically feel worthy.

   • The failure rate with School Cert would have been 50% because they scaled the results to make it so. It was just a number.
     Yes, everyone has something they are good at. Let’s face it, we can all see the glaring failures of members of this govt. However, people do need to get positive feedback sometime, to feel good about themselves.
     I also agree about musicians and other artists. They have found a creative way to make themselves acceptable and possibly wealthy, but school may not have given them that impression.

     It’s easy to praise bright little achievers. Much harder to find anything nice to say about children who struggle, yet they are the ones who need to be boosted. A varied curriculum may point them to something they can be good at. One dominated by preparation for exams, will stifle many interesting personalities. They’ll leave as soon as they can and go where they are ‘appreciated’ which could be a gang or other anti-social group.
     No, i don’t think Stanford is likely to be the person who solves all these gnarly problems, she’s too blind.

     • yes as I remember there was never an over 50% pass in either school cert or UE .There seemed to be the need to have 50% fail to make the others feel real special .What is going to be the accepted pass rate for the new standards .If all teachers in NZ do a great job the pass rate should be over 90% is that going to be ok for the elite schools if all the slum public bottom dwellers also pass because they had a great teacher .

   • I saw the interview with the fella from crimson ,which is a lobby company who lobby unis to take your kid off your hands for a few years .And for that you pay a small fortune with no garantee your kid will be the next Steve Jobs .He was educated at Harvard as was shane Jones and he spouted hard out just like Luxon and Willis talking mainly shit to pad out what he was saying instead of a direct answer .

7. I can immediately tell the numeracy and credibility or lack thereof of someone who moans about scaling If exam marks. Anyone who does n understand the reason for it, should not be anywhere near education

   • How about doing us a favour and sharing your expertise by explaining the reasons for scaling?

8. jonky will die one day as must we, all but his time of dying will be polluted, haunted by his actions of greed, lies, careless cruelties and his betrayals of trust placed in him and all there for him to see in the dying light of his minds eye.
   That gives me some comfort in a schadenfreude-ish sort of way so not all bad.

   What’s the Real Reason Behind the NCEA Replacement?
   Just remember? We have highly educated people living in cities making huge money and we’re fucked. Think about that for a moment? Can an academic education simply mean being groomed for conformity? I know highly academically educated people who couldn’t change a fucking tyre while their thinking remains fixed and fixated.
   When I were a Lad we’d have wood working classes and cooking classes and we had vegetable gardening competitions. We were taught, in short, to survive well and have fun doing it. Today?
   Oh deary me. Where do I start. The decline into the well educated idiocracy we have now sees us with one-punch morons killing unsuspecting people standing right beside them, we have children abandoning their minds to flickering, instant gratification techno garbage and few of them would know that the chups they chomp on are made from a round thing found in the ground.
   It’s my hope that AI will be able to give us the requirements of academia to fill in the gaps between bouts of thinking and we humans can move on and up, and down, to the better potato.
   ‘Idiocracy’. A prophesy dumbasses. ” Brawndo! Makes spuds grow! ”
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
   FYI
   History of the Potato in Ireland:
   https://wpc2022ireland.com/history-of-the-potato/
   Also
   Potato catching.
   https://www.tiktok.com/@tomgrennan/video/6816753510835604742

   • I would sugest you actually attend your local college for a day ,you will be surprised how wrong you are about the 95% of kids there .Yes there are the usual 5% of rat bags as there has always been ,.The ones I met yesterday were without exception outstanding and the future of NZ is in good hands but may not come soon enough .

     • Agree future of NZ in good hands, the current Coalition Government.

       • NZ has no future in the hands of this govt. As Gordon says, the young people he met were very impressive.
         But the cavalry may come too late to rescue us from the CoC and their dangerous friends.

9. @ bozo. You write ” Yes, we do need achievers.”
   Define ‘achievers’? By who’s definition are people ‘achievers’ ? When achievers achieve, what do they achieve ultimately? Monetary superiority? Knowledge superiority? Market superiority?
   The greatest achievement I think people can attain is Peace. Peace of mind and peace within societies, peace with each other. But the achievers I see now are anything but peace-proponents because there’s no free fucking money in ‘peace’ is there. Just ask trump?
   The thing that makes me queasy about the word ‘achiever’ as used in the above context is that it seems to me to be a nod towards roger douglas’s neoliberalism and neoliberalism can be defined as criminals doing crooked shit within a void of laws yet to be written to protect the general populace. AO/NZ’s own particular iteration of neoliberalism, known commonly as rogernomics, is a crime wave still rolling in while we wait for laws to be written to prohibit such con-artistry from fucking our society. Just look at what we have as political management? A threesome of freaks looking for a show to transmit lies from. A gruesome gaggle of ‘achievers’ using their educations and social positioning to horrifically fuck us on all and every deal they and their lobbyist besties can get their soft pink little hands around.
   This is my interpretation of social and political ‘achievement’. Unity. To be united. @ Maori ( Treaty) @ Farmers.( Money) @ ‘normal’ urban society. Unite. Unity is a defence against influential, single minded, greed motivated ‘achievers’ and those fuckers are arriving daily from the U$A. Just ask the three traitor stooges achievers.

   • Ah… I concede. A throwaway line. What I was getting at was we need people to organise stuff, do stuff, run stuff – competent people. People with skills. And that also is a loaded term. Building a brick retaining wall is not the same as removing a cancerous tumour. But wed we lost as a society without either of them. Or a multitude of others.

     Focusing The high end is obvious. Take the health system for example. Administrators, company reps, nurses, GPs, specialists, surgeons. Low hanging fruit perhaps but it takes a lot of competent people of all sorts to get things done. However we all too often forget the orderlies, kitchen staff, cleaners – not to mention the people who coordinate those services. Everyone should gave a role to play, irrespective of where they fit into the system

     But you’re correct, achiever is a loaded term. It rewards some and disadvantages others. And I take your point about all the other stuff we could do better at. Empathy. Honesty. Environmental awareness. A sense of equity. More. The education system doesnt reward these skills and attributes – although they seem to be equally life skills acquired (or not) over time. But without them even the greatest achievement seems hollow.

     • We need achievers in every sense of the word, that’s plain and simple.

       • Just a shame there are none in the CoC, then.

10. The intention is to attack any sort of vocational education to make it easier for employers to exploit younger tradesmen.

    • or to throw 50% of the kids straight on the scrap heap and call them lazy drop kicks .

11. “Repeat the School C year and hope you passed next time, or leave school to look for some kind of manual labour.” Back in the day Kids were able to leave in the 5th form and get an apprenticeship or undergo vocational training. Now we force them to stay two extra years, when many of them would benefit more from the same options. Especially so these days when apprenticeships can lead to well paying jobs (secret, they could back them too). To make it work would require extra polytechs as many of the ones we had morphed into fee paying Universites. Having taught year 12, I would say a lot of students do better in the final exams having done internally assessed practical projects, especially in the tech field. Hopefully we aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also with the arrival of AI do we know what we are trying to prepare them for? Even in just five years , many of the careers my year 12s were hoping to do don’t exist anymore.

12. Real reason? Just might have something to do with the slide in NZ’s PISA scores since NCEA came in. Plainly it isn’t working.

13. The sociology of work? Now there’s at topic only a brave and committed soul would pursue. But what insights it would give. About the difference between knowledge, skills and competency and their relationship to education, both formal and informal, both in the compulsory and the tertiary sectors. Curriculum and assessment. The relationship between qualifications and employment. The role of educational institutions. The role of employers. The role of on-the-job training. Past, present and future. But definitely future.

    Not to mention the precarity of work – at least a good deal of it- in the modern post industrial world, and the implications for peoples’ lives (and livelihoods). The world of our grandparents has long gone. We know that. educators should know. And politicians should definitely know.

    As if the present isn’t challenging enough what indeed will the future behold? What will paid work in fact look like for many. Will there be any paid work for those who don’t fit into the future molds? More to the point are political leaders up to the challenge – will they listen to a range of educators who profess to know more than they do, but unfortunately are not always on the same page.

14. “We”? Probably being a bit generous. A good many of “us” still believe that if educational outcomes can be counted then they must count. The more the better. Test, test, test – measure – compare. Yes, the results count. For something. Good for accountability, the meeting of KPIs … blah, blah, blah.

15. The NCEA does not impress – & I’m with Deming on 50% must fail – stupid even by National Party standards.

    Have no fear though, students that fail whatever replaces NCEA will get to resit after spending a year with some dodgy third tier educator at 4-5 times the cost of going through our school system. That’s the whole point. Graft.

16. We know what successful education systems look like. They’re not all the same, but thery’e are out there. Why don’t we simply copy one instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

17. FFS – these weirdo’s have no imagination and just keep effing around revising what’s already there in front of them. No vision, no plan and no idea.

18. The changes absolutely necessary, the Coalition delivering.
    Teachers Unions dictate the Lefts education policy ie what’s good for the teachers, not what’s good for the students.

    • Nonsense, as usual.

19. I suppose someone has put up this link but to be sure as it sounds interesting.
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/569416/how-influential-nz-schools-hastened-the-demise-of-ncea

20. A comment which I made on Liam Hehir’s “Blue Review” article hailing the government’s decision to drop the NCEA:
    A word of caution. Education systems are designed to fit within a particular social and economic system. The education system of the twentieth century was designed to sort students into classes and, in the case of the higher classes, to rank them within a hierarchy. (The subject of Latin, which had virtually disappeared by the twenty-first century, served that purpose virtually to the exclusion of any other).
    This system was appropriate to a society and an economy which was class based (comprising unskilled and semi-skilled workers, tradesmen and professionals), hierarchical (particularly within the government service, law and medicine) and characterized by permanent employment structures (the permanent public service and established private enterprises).
    That all changed in the late twentieth century. Permanence was no longer a prominent feature of society or the economy. That in turn meant that the importance of hierarchy diminished and the need for sorting into classes was reduced. Personnel were no longer selected for their potential and groomed for greatness. They were expected to perform from the day of enlistment. Process supplanted class and hierarchy. That was a profound change in the economic system which demanded an equally profound change in the education system.
    The metamorphosis was very evident in my own occupation, forestry, in which the State Forest Service had been the dominant employer. In the mid-twentieth century, if you wanted to work in forestry and had School Certificate or were not too far short of it, you could enter the Forest Service Woodsman School. If you had University Entrance you were a shoo-in for the Forest Service Ranger School. If you had a university bursary or scholarship you could be sent to Oxford or Bangor for training, or later on to the New Zealand Forestry School at Canterbury. There was a hierarchy with “Forester” (university trained) at the top. “Ranger” next, then “Woodsman” and under them the unqualified though not necessarily unskilled “Forest Labourer”. (The FS as a permanent employer informally re-sorted its personnel over time. A Woodsman could become a Forest Manager. A graduate could be relegated to a less pivotal role. These reassortments were regarded as necessary but limited exceptions to the general rule).
    With Rogernomics things changed. There was no longer a Forest Service, no Woodsman School and no Ranger School. A polytechnic more or less filled the gap left by the closure of the Ranger School, supplying graduates to the now privatised forest industry which wanted employees ready to start work and earn the company money from their first day. Employers were not interested in training or even retaining staff. It was all about process and performance. To the extent that versatility was required, it could be found in the market rather than in the individual employee. All this made the twentieth century education system somewhat irrelevant to the reformed forest industry. Sorting into classes and ranking into hierarchy was no longer the main aim of the game. It became about the ability to undertake particular tasks, and that imperative filtered down into the education system, through university, polytechnic and into the secondary school.
    I am not saying I endorse the changes in either the economic system or the education system. I am just saying that they go together, and if you try to change one independently of the other you may strike unexpected difficulties.
    It seems to me that the twentieth century education system is still relevant to law, medicine and the pure sciences. (It should be relevant to journalism, but arguably is not).
    Ranking is integral to a gladiatorial profession such as law. Employers have to be able to judge who is most likely to come out on top in a legal battle. That is why schools such as Auckland Grammar which sort into classes and rank in hierarchies remain so important to the top echelons of the legal profession. In medicine, ranking into hierarchy serves as a refinement of the process of sorting into classes as a way of allocating access to the various fields of medical training, and thus the medical profession would also feel the loss of the twentieth century system of education.
    However most of us live in the twenty-first century, the education system needs to reflect that, and employers need to accept it. They can’t expect from gig workers the kind of qualities they would expect from career employees, and vice versa.

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