The Changes to NCEA Are A Class War
I’ve written several times about the underlying ideology of the government’s education agenda, that seemingly focusses on exacerbating class differences. Both National and ACT are pursuing this, with the National approach being a little more subtle than the programmes espoused by ACT. While they are taking different roads, the end point is the same.
The majority of students, already disadvantaged by socio-economic factors such as poverty, poor housing, difficulty accessing adequate health, and so on, will be provided with an education that best fits their future of being wage slaves in the capitalist machine.
Those from privileged backgrounds, already well off in comparison to the disadvantaged students, will receive education opportunities that will enable them to continue their privilege and that will ensure the cycle continues – their children will gain the same benefits.
An obvious example is right in front of us, Christopher ‘I’m sorted’ Luxon, the man who today rejected the Te Pāti Maori proposal for a salary freeze for politicians due to the current financial circumstances. The man who claims every benefit coming his way, because he’s entitled.
This article by Trevor Bills was recently published on the Aotearoa Educators Collective substack site.
‘Labour education spokesperson Ginny Andersen, speaking on BHN – Big Hairy News, recently named what has sat just beneath the surface of educational debate in Aotearoa for the past year.
She called the changes to NCEA what they are: a class war.’
I told you in my previous article that Andersen had made a very promising start as education spokesperson.
‘For many educators including myself, that moment landed not as a revelation, but as recognition. It gave language to something that has been felt in staffrooms, in classrooms, and in communities, an unease that what is happening is not simply reform, but direction.
This piece takes that claim seriously. Not as rhetoric, but as analysis.
Because if we are going to use the term class war, we need to be clear about what we mean.’
Trevor then explains what this means in practice.
‘This is not “class war” in the conspiratorial sense. It does not require secret meetings or coordinated intent (not that I would rule either out). It is something more visible, and more difficult to dismiss.
If a series of policy decisions consistently advantages those with existing economic, cultural, and social capital, while simultaneously constraining those without, then we are not looking at isolated reforms. We are looking at a pattern of redistribution. Upward.
That is what needs to be examined, not what is said, but what is produced.’
How do the proposed changes to NCEA fit into this?
‘The proposed and now confirmed changes to NCEA provide the clearest entry point. Framed as a return to “rigour,” these changes emphasise external assessment, standardisation, and a tightening of what counts as valid achievement. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Who would argue against rigour?
However, assessment systems are never neutral. They reward certain dispositions, certain forms of knowledge, and certain kinds of preparation. Exam-heavy systems, in particular, privilege those who have:
- Access to tutoring
- Stable home environments
- Time and space to study
- Familiarity with academic language and expectations
In other words, they privilege those who already possess advantage and access to the cultural capital of the dominant group.’
See what I meant? This is not a level playing field. Students from a privileged background will be automatically advantaged.
This is not new, by any means. The old School Certificate system was scaled to ensure a 50% pass rate, thus automatically forcing 50% of students to either repeat the year, or to leave school to look for manual labour jobs. At least in those days, there were plenty of these kinds of jobs available, but as you’ll be well aware this is not longer the case.
Using some kind of internal assessment system lessens the issues mentioned here.
‘Internal assessment, despite some imperfections, allowed for a broader demonstration of learning. It created space for relational, contextual, and iterative understanding. Removing or reducing that space does not simply “raise standards.” It changes who can meet them. A complete overhaul of NCEA was not required. Changes could have been made that improved rigour whilst still allowing for the diversity of learners.
When viewed in isolation, this might be debated as a pedagogical difference.
When viewed alongside everything else, it becomes something more.’
Trevor then discusses the implications of the changes over the last year or so.
‘What has occurred in education over the past year is often presented as a series of disconnected reforms. But taken together, a pattern emerges, one that operates across multiple levers of the system. This is not a list of reforms to be debated one by one. It is a system, each change reinforcing the next, narrowing what counts as knowledge, who gets to succeed, and what education is allowed to be.’
I’ve highlighted numerous times that Stanford is following a well thought out agenda and has moved with speed to implement this. I’ve also highlighted that this agenda originated overseas and she is following this system that has been laid out for her.
‘1. Controlling What Counts as Knowledge
Changes to the English and Mathematics curriculum from Years 0–10 have emphasised structure, sequencing, and prescribed content. In social sciences and science, there has been a shift toward knowledge-heavy approaches that prioritise recall over interpretation.
This is often justified through appeals to clarity and consistency. But the question is not whether knowledge matters, it does. The question is whose knowledge is centred, and how it is used.
A tightly prescribed, knowledge-heavy curriculum advantages those who arrive at school already aligned with its assumptions. It reduces the space for students to connect learning to their own realities, languages, ancestral intelligence, and lived experiences.
In a world where information is no longer scarce, where knowledge sits in every pocket, the decision to double down on recall over interpretation is not neutral. It reflects a narrowing of what counts as learning.’
Trevor’s next section should also be familiar to you, as I’ve frequently discussed this.
‘2. Eroding Teacher Professionalism
Alongside curriculum changes has been a steady erosion of teacher autonomy.
The Teaching Council has been brought under greater ministerial influence. Public discourse, often amplified through right-wing media, has positioned teachers as obstacles to reform rather than professionals with expertise. Consultation processes have been selective, privileging certain voices while excluding others. This matters because when teachers lose professional agency, education shifts from a relational practice to a technical one. Decisions move away from classrooms and communities, and toward centralised control.
Centralisation, historically, does not favour diversity. It favours standardisation.’
This is why Erica Stanford has removed teacher control of the New Zealand Teachers Council, to ensure she can mandate that teachers ‘do what they are told’.
‘3. Withdrawing Material Support
At the same time as expectations are being raised, material supports are being reduced. Funding for school lunches in high-equity index schools has been cut, from $5.63 per student (Years 0–3) and $6.60 (Years 4–8), to $3.46 per student under the current government. This is not a marginal adjustment. It is a significant reduction in support for students who rely on schools not just for education, but for wellbeing.
You cannot meaningfully talk about raising achievement while lowering the conditions that make achievement possible. Unless failure is expected. Or, at the very least, accepted.’
Exactly. Hungry kids won’t learn. Given the current situation with rapidly rising fuel costs, inevitably leading to higher food costs, this will only get worse. You will, of course, be aware that the minimal moves the government has made to assist some families with an increase to Working With Families funding, increases the disadvantages even more. Never mind, Luxon, et al, are ‘sorted.’
We know that Professor Elizabeth Rata believes in 19th century English educational values – does this also mean she and the government also believe in 19th century economics, with clear demarkation between the rich and the poor, between employers and workers?
What’s next? Work houses for the destitute? Where is the Charles Dickens of the 21st century?
The next section covers the changed role of the Education Review Office – I wrote about this in my previous article:
Erica Stanford’s Takeover of New Zealand Education Continues
‘4. Shifting from Support to Surveillance
The role of the Education Review Office (ERO) has also shifted. Where there was once a stated focus on partnership, working alongside schools to build capacity and support equity, we are seeing a return to compliance, intervention, and punitive oversight. The language increasingly resembles that of Ofsted in the UK, where inspection regimes have been widely criticised for narrowing practice and increasing pressure without improving outcomes.
Crucially, these interventions disproportionately target high-equity index schools. Schools serving communities experiencing poverty, housing instability, and systemic inequity are being held to the same benchmarks without corresponding investment in addressing those underlying conditions.
The result is predictable. The system identifies failure, but not its causes. It then responds to the failure without looking at the wrap around services required to make systemic societal change to address the perceived failure.’
Exactly. Yet another plank in the system that is aimed at increasing educational inequality. How do these people sleep at night?
‘5. Creating Parallel Pathways
At the same time, we see the reintroduction and expansion of charter schools, accompanied by a lack of transparency and concerns about conflicts of interest.
Charter schools are often framed as providing “choice.” But choice is never evenly distributed. When public systems are narrowed and pressured, and alternative systems are introduced alongside them that receive more funding and less oversight, the result is not innovation. It is stratification.
Those with resources navigate options. Those without remain within an increasingly constrained system.’
Ask yourself why Seymour has been so keen to establish charter schools, or back in his previous time in government, he used the euphemism ‘Partnership Schools’. What is his agenda? Why is it necessary to establish charter schools? I can tell you that providing equality of education is not high on his list of priorities,
‘Education has never been neutral. As Paulo Freire argued, it can function either to domesticate or to liberate. What we are seeing is not a return to basics. It is a reassertion of control.’
I’ve mentioned Friere several times, and his analysis is as accurate as ever. The current agenda is to control our students.
At the risk of breaching Godwin’s Law (as an online discussion grows longer, the likelihood of someone making a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis increases), consider the following comment by US philosopher Jason Stanley (an expert in fascism), in light of the government’s moves to restrict curriculum content (all three governing parties have expressed this in one way or another)
‘So for fascist politics to be maximally effective, you need a certain kind of education system that tells people that their country is like the greatest ever. And as I show in the book, Hitler is extremely clear about this in Mein Kampf, he speaks in very clear terms about education and the necessity of having an education system where you promote the founders of the nation…”
And
‘And hey, in the United States we already had an education like system like that. So if that is your background education system, then you can set up great replacement theory. You can say America’s greatness is because it had these great white Christian men. And so if you try to replace those men, if you try to replace white Christian men in positions of power by non-whites or women, or non-white women most concerningly from this perspective, then that’s an existential challenge to American greatness.’
Reflect on the government’s moves to remove diminish Maori influences – Seymour and Peters especially have been very vocal on this, then add in Elizabeth Rata’s determination to recolonise the New Zealand education system, and you can see we are making small steps along this road.
Back to Trevor’s article:
‘At this point, the debate often shifts to intent. Did policymakers mean to create inequity? Do they intend to disadvantage certain groups? But intent is not the most useful lens here. Because regardless of intention, the outcome is what matters.
If the cumulative effect of policy is to concentrate advantage and distribute constraint, then we do not need to resolve questions of motive to name what is happening. We can observe it.’
And
‘We are living in a time where knowledge is more accessible than at any point in human history. Artificial intelligence can draft, summarise, and retrieve information in seconds. The idea that education’s primary function is to transmit fixed bodies of knowledge is increasingly untenable.
Yet, the system is moving in exactly that direction. More prescription. More standardisation. More emphasis on recall. Less dialogue. Less inquiry. Less space for interpretation. This is not simply outdated. It is misaligned with the world students are entering.
Unless, of course, the goal is not to prepare students to navigate that world, but to regulate how they move within it.’
Trevor concludes
‘We are not looking at neutral reform. We are looking at direction.
And if that direction consistently produces greater stratification, if it makes it easier for some to succeed and harder for others to even participate, then the term “class war” stops being rhetorical. It becomes descriptive.
The elephant in the classroom is not that this is happening. It is that, until recently, we have not been willing to name it.
The question is what we do now Ginny has named the changes to NCEA a class-war?”
Indeed.
What are you going to do?
