Secondary teachers welcome new timeline for NCEA changes

19 April

Secondary teachers are pleased the Minister of Education has listened to some of their concerns about the need for more time to implement changes to the NCEA successfully, says Chris Abercrombie, PPTA Te Wehengarua acting president.

“We welcome the Minister’s decision to defer the implementation of changes to NCEA Levels 2 and 3 by a year. This will enable the changes to the national curriculum to be more properly aligned with the changes to assessment.

“We had serious concerns about the fact that these changes were being done independently of each other and the cart was being put before the horse. It’s imperative that the curriculum is at the forefront of teaching and learning and the changes being made to it need to feed into the development of the new NCEA achievement standards.

“The new timeline will enable teachers to be involved in the curriculum refresh in a way that isn’t happening now. We are pleased that the Minister understands this and she has listened.”

Chris Abercrombie said the new timeline must include more professional development for teachers. “These are very significant and welcome changes which teachers need to be given time to develop and implement as successfully as possible. Our ākonga deserve nothing less.

“While the Minister’s decision to allow schools to undertake either the new NCEA literacy and numeracy corequisites or keep with a restricted list of existing unit standards for two more years, provides a little more flexibility, we would have preferred a complete deferral of the corequisites.

“We welcome the corequisites as a means of strengthening young people’s literacy and numeracy ability. However, the pilots are showing there is a lot more work needed to ensure that the corequisites are accessible and equitable for all students.

“These corequisites are high stakes for rangatahi – if they can’t achieve them, they don’t get NCEA and their life choices are severely diminished.

“We owe it to our rangatahi to make sure these changes are developed and implemented as best as they can be.”

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