Hon Steve Maharey
Minister of Education

Media Statement

NCEA: Time to Stand up for our National Qualification

Thank you for coming here today.

I have invited you all here today because of the importance of the issue I wish to address: NCEA, our national qualification.

Put simply, my message is that NCEA is an essential component of a 21st century education system. It is our national qualification. And it is an important element in New Zealand's future wellbeing.

New Zealand is transforming into a knowledge-based country.

We need a secondary schooling system geared to getting the best results for every single student.

We need a secondary schooling system that stretches every student.

We need a system that sets high standards, fosters high achievement and provides for life-long learning.

We cannot afford a system that leaves a significant proportion of students with nothing at the end of their time at school, as we had prior to NCEA.

NCEA provides New Zealand with a unified qualification that values both academic and vocational learning.

It sets clear standards, recognises excellence, and delivers meaningful information to parents and employers.

Every student leaves school with a record of what they have achieved and an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

NCEA is central in the move towards personalised learning across our education system.

But it is not enough that I know this.

It is not enough that the overwhelming majority of secondary school teachers and principals share this view.

I believe it is time that educationalists stand up and help convey this message to our communities throughout New Zealand. It is time we built confidence in our national qualification.

I thank those who are making the effort. Christ's College headmaster, Simon Leese, recently wrote in the Press that NCEA's credibility "lies in its capacity to stretch the most able, and to prepare them for higher scholastic achievement. It does that. There is no evidence whatever to the contrary."

It is this message we need to tell, again and again. I am asking for your support because NCEA is too important to leave the debate to the NCEA refuseniks who, for too long now, have used it as a political football.

For too long it has been a punching bag for a few people and organisations who will always be opposed.

And for too long have students, parents, grandparents, employers, and many in the education community been left confused and concerned by the heated debate and discussion around NCEA.

Where there is smoke, these bystanders to the debate must think, then perhaps there must be fire. As an Onslow College student told Radio New Zealand last week, the NCEA debate does impact on student motivation. "The most important thing," she said, "is to not have all this negative press about NCEA."

With all the attention devoted to NCEA over the past five years, the casual observer could surmise that there is nothing much else going on in education.

The casual observers would not know, for example, that there is a new curriculum under development - a rather significant development.

They would not know that innovative new assessment tools are producing significant benefits in primary education.

They would not know that e-learning is sweeping through schools throughout the country.

They would not know that educationalists from around the world come to New Zealand to observe our systems and programmes, such as the Te Kotahitanga Project.

They would not know that new methods, such as the concept of personalised education, are transforming the way our schools think about teaching.

Yet, in the furore around NCEA, exciting developments like these go unnoticed.

For this furore to subside, we need the education community to stand up squarely behind NCEA. It is time that your voices – the voices of the overwhelming majority of the education community – carried the greater weight and were heard. New Zealanders need to know of the clear consensus of schools and teachers in support of NCEA.

The existence of public concern around the introduction of NCEA was to be expected. People are, by nature, change averse – and societies even more so. Today's parents grew up with School Certificate, University Entrance and Bursary. It is understandable that they may wonder why the system needed changing.

The NCEA debate is an example of history repeating itself. Previous changes to secondary school qualifications in New Zealand over the past hundred years have also been met with scepticism and concern.

It happened with the abolition of the Junior Civil Service Examination in 1912, as well as the Proficiency exam, which was used from 1899 until 1937.

When School Certificate was introduced in 1934 as a school-leaving qualification, it struggled for 12 years before being revitalised and gaining public acceptance. This was because it was competing against the Matriculation Exam and, given a choice, candidates favoured the old over the new.

It seems that once the public and teachers gain confidence in a qualification, it develops an entrenched or 'iconic' status, making it inherently difficult to change.

So why did we ditch an entrenched, iconic qualification system and replace it with NCEA? If we knew the difficulties we'd encounter, why even embark down that track?

Simply, we could not afford to not change. School Certificate, University Entrance and Bursary were yesterday's tools. Today's students need to be equipped with the tools to deal not only with today's challenges, but also the as yet unknown demands of twenty and thirty years hence.

That requires our education system be dynamic. As systems evolve and as societies change, as new demands and challenges develop in economies here and overseas, so must our education system adapt and change if it is to equip our students for the 21st century.

School Certificate, University Entrance and the Bursary examinations were rigid tools developed in the Fordist society of the 1930s. That system, in essence, provided New Zealand with an educational sorting system. It was appropriate for that time but, by the 1980s, it was no longer so.

The UK academic, Sir Ken Robinson, talks about how education systems must adapt to the changing economic environment in which skills rapidly become redundant as whole industries grow and fall. The previous exam system lacked the flexibility to meet the changing requirements of our developing economy and society.

The emergence, for example, of high youth unemployment in the 1980s meant our schooling system had to adapt to the new demands being placed on it.

No longer were vast numbers of less academic students leaving school at 15 years of age for jobs in the freezing works, the railways, the Ministry of Works, and as rural labourers. Instead, they wanted to be taught. They wanted skills and education. They wanted qualifications.

Our schooling system, therefore, had to adapt for students with a wider range of interests, abilities and aspirations, and an expectation that learning would continue beyond secondary school, throughout life.

These young people and their communities expected more diverse learning options, flexible pathways to qualifications, and formal recognition of a wider range of skills and knowledge than had been traditionally provided by school qualifications.

As John Langley wrote recently, the previous assessment system provided an unreliable method of measuring what children have learned and how well they have learned it.

Rather than filling students with information that we then try to measure, we want students to be able to access, use, and develop knowledge to solve real problems. We need an assessment system that then reveals the full depth and breadth of what students know.

By the mid 1990s, there was wide consensus that the existing qualifications system was unsatisfactory.

In this respect, New Zealand was hardly alone. Almost every country in the developed world has experienced – or is now experiencing - phases of reform of school qualifications.

Modern economies and societies have all been striving to address how to give parity of esteem to academic, technical, vocational study.

We are all faced with the challenge of responding to the growing diversity and numbers of students in the senior secondary school.

We are all looking to balance formative and summative assessments through effective links between assessment and evaluation at each level of the system.

We all want to provide users of qualifications with greater information about student performance.

We need a system that reflects the expansion in knowledge and the nature of the school curriculum beyond a traditional or conventional canon of senior subjects.

We need a system that ensures assessment is fit for purpose and includes more than the aspects of subjects most readily assessed by pencil and paper exams.

We want to increase the involvement of classroom teachers in the assessment process.

And we want a system which motivates more students to achieve and continue learning beyond school, and reduces the proportion of students leaving school with no or low qualifications.

It was to address these issues that, in 1998, the then-National government agreed to the implementation of NCEA.

They did so because they were convinced that it would bring coherence to our national qualification.

They did so because they knew it would mean improved coherence between curriculum and qualifications.

They did so because they knew it would align senior school curriculum and qualifications with the rest of the education sector, providing flexible pathways to both encourage and facilitate lifelong learning.

And they were right.

When Labour took office, we gave our support to the introduction of our new national qualification. Its introduction was delayed to give teachers and the sector more time to adjust – and implementation of the system has been, at times, difficult.

Having said that, however, the introduction of NCEA was never going to be easy. Nor was it the end of the process. Managing our public education system is a process of managing through constant, continual improvement.

NCEA is a dynamic system. It is a system that can evolve and allows for continual improvement as we look to maintain, or achieve, relevance and quality in a rapidly changing society and economy.

It was introduced in 2002. By 2005, it was evident that some problems had emerged. We undertook a full review over 18 months. From those reviews, analysis, consultation, discussion, and careful consideration, we knew NCEA needed further incentives, enhanced transparency, more coherence, and greater consistency.

To be precise, the reviews of NCEA came up with 191 recommendations. Most of these related specifically to one aspect – the examination system – and have been addressed.

The new set of improvements I announced last week will address issues such as student motivation, moderation and consistency, credibility, transparency, and confidence.

These are changes that the sector's most important stakeholders – students and their parents – have been asking for. And we have listened.

We also took notice of some important research into NCEA by Victoria University's Professor Luanna Meyer , which was commissioned by the Ministry of Education.

In general, teachers, parents and students have positive perceptions of the impact of internal assessment on both teaching and student learning; more opportunities for success by lower achieving students who might otherwise have failed; and increased choice and flexibility that can be exercised by students in selecting areas of study and assessment.

Professor Meyer's primary focus was student motivation, and she found that students who commented on opportunities to attain merit and excellence generally expressed perceptions that the system did not adequately recognise achievement of merit and excellence.

Students need to be informed, active, motivated participants in their own learning, and they need a better understanding of how they are progressing.

To achieve this, the government is introducing 'merit' and 'excellence' grades at certificate level. Students who gain sufficient merit or excellence grades for achievement standards will, from this year, receive certificates in recognition of their achievement. To gain an excellence, students will need to demonstrate a depth of learning to a high level.

This change will, we believe, encourage more students to do their best, as opposed to doing just enough to get by. It will also encourage schools to focus on quality teaching and learning to motivate their students to do their best.

Student motivation will also be improved by allowing for, from next year, endorsement by subject areas. Students who receive a certain number of standards at merit or excellence levels in a subject area will be eligible for a merit or excellence endorsement for that subject.

This change will help to address concerns about fragmented courses and could also contribute to improving motivation.

Meyer also noted the importance of learning and teaching on student motivation, hence the importance of the significant resources directed into enhancing teachers' professional development over the past few years.

There will be a modification to the reporting of standards that are 'not achieved' on students' annual results notices. Currently, 'not achieved' is reported on the results notice for externally assessed standards only.

I believe this breeds a lack of transparency into the system. It means the certificates fail to deliver a full, clear picture of a student's performance over the course of a year's study and learning. Parents, teachers, and employers want to understand more fully a student's strengths and weaknesses. Not reporting weaknesses can mean they are not addressed.

We have, therefore, decided that 'not achieved' results will now be reported on the students' results notices.

This change will not, however, be extended to the Record of Learning (now the Record of Achievement). That is a separate record and is designed to be a statement detailing what a student knows and can do through secondary and tertiary learning. Tertiary providers are not required to report 'not achieved'. Moreover, there has been no demand from businesses and employers for this information.

A major improvement which NCEA brought to New Zealand's achievement framework was the introduction of internal assessment at all three levels of assessment. Internal assessment allows for students' full range of capability to be assessed. It is a vast shift from the previous system's reliance on a single, highly-pressurised, three-hour examination to gauge the full worth of a year's learning in a subject.

Concerns, however, have been repeatedly raised about the consistency and reliability of internally assessed work across schools. The assumption being that an internally assessed standard from one school might be considered more worthy than an identical standard from another school, depending on the schools' respective reputations.

Moderation is vital to ensure that assessment and marking are valid and applying similar rigour throughout the school system. There has been criticism that moderators' decisions have been inconsistent, and that the quantity of work moderated is inadequate to clearly determine consistency. This has led to a lack of confidence in the results for internal assessment.

To address this, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority will significantly increase the number of internally assessed standards that are moderated in schools. NZQA will employ fulltime moderators and aim to moderate ten percent of internally assessed standards.

Work is also underway to compare internal and external assessment results. This will provide better data on the nature of internal assessment processes in schools, and identify schools with larger than average variations between external and internal assessment results.

Other improvements being introduced include: aligning the Ministry of Education's reviews of achievement standards with NZQA's reviews of unit standards, the publication of schools' Managing National Assessment reports online, a new tool to help students planning their qualifications, and more support for teachers.

NCEA is already a world-class assessment system, but it can be and will improve with these changes – particularly in the design of the qualification framework, the programme and pathway coherence for students, and the alignment of qualifications with the curriculum.

With these changes we believe we have addressed the key issues that have been concerning critics. But I just want to touch on three issues that have been raised again in the last two or three weeks, because these are issues we will not be moving forward on.

The first two of these involve some sort of credit weighting – either by giving more credits to those who achieve with excellence, or by granting more credits for more difficult subjects. The other is the introduction of grades or marks.

To give higher credit to those who achieve a better quality of result would be unfair as the quantity of work being judged is the same. The higher quality already attracts added benefit in the recognition of merit and excellence.

Weighting for more difficult subjects would be highly contentious and subjective. It would introduce distortions into the selections of courses by students. It would encourage cherry-picking, and undermine the increased coherence we are striving to achieve.

As for grades or marks, NCEA already provides far more finely-grained assessment. It reports meaningful information about what a student actually knows and can do and how well they know it.

I welcome continuing debate on NCEA. My hope is that the differing viewpoints put forward will be given an appropriate hearing. What is frustrating, however, is when some viewpoints receive attention disproportionate to the overall level of community support for those views.

It reminds one of the debate over climate change, where the minority dissenting view can receive as much media coverage as the findings of the overwhelming majority of scientific analysis. So it is with NCEA.

Wyatt Creech was warned, when he was Education Minister, that the 'examination schools' would reject any system that included a large element of internal assessment. He was told these schools would reject standards-based assessment because they believed it would fail to extend the brightest students.

Yet there is ample evidence – anecdotal and empirical – to show that NCEA does challenge and extend talented, gifted students.

For the anecdotal, look at former Kerikeri High School Dux and Head Boy David Middlemiss. This student has an outstanding academic record to date, including achieving the equivalent of an entire NCEA level one certificate of 80 credits at excellence level. He has been selected as the Girdlers' Scholar for 2007, a prestigious award regarded as the undergraduate equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship which will see him attend Cambridge University.

Also, last month I had the pleasure of presenting the Top Scholar awards for the best performers in Scholarship examinations last year. A few names kept on cropping up - one was Joshua Baker from Newlands College.

Studying under NCEA, he clearly had no motivation issues, picking up two top subject awards for Chemistry and Calculus, as well as a Premier Award. Joshua was the only student to receive that many awards.

And there was also Andrew MacDonald from Rangitoto College – another school utilising NCEA very well - who was the top performing Scholarship student in Science and also picked up a Premier Award.

Recently released empirical research has concluded that NCEA is better than the previous system – and other international examination systems – at identifying students who will do well at university.

Yet – and this is the beauty of NCEA – as well as providing a framework for the bright to pursue excellence, it provides opportunities and pathways for those with more moderate academic gifts.

In the Waikato, Morrinsville College's principal, John Inger, tells of students, who under the old system would have left school with nothing, who are now able to leave school and enter the workforce with NCEA Level 1 - confident in their ability to achieve success.

With the introduction of NCEA we have already seen a significant drop in the proportion of students leaving school with no or very low qualifications, and an increase in the standards students are achieving.

Since 2004, the first year when all three NCEA levels were implemented, there has been a ten percent increase in the number of students gaining NCEA qualifications at all three levels. That is almost 10,000 young New Zealanders.

In terms of increasing Maori and Pasifika student achievement, these groups have seen the number of students gaining at least NCEA level two qualifications rise by 22 percent and 26 percent respectively. These sorts of results are occurring because NCEA is a meaningful, relevant, flexible, and high quality qualifications system.

Students' results have been improving consistently over the past three years, with improvements in achievement in 2006 across all standards and all levels. For example, the percentage of students gaining NCEA level 2 is up 6 per cent - from 57 per cent in 2004 to 63 per cent in 2006.

These are real gains, not just for the individuals but for the country too.

What NCEA also does - better than the previous system and other international examination systems – is meet the ideals that are fundamental to our public education system. As Peter Fraser and Clarence Beeby said in 1939, the government's objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their ability, rich or poor, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.

In 1986, Beeby expressed his hope that New Zealand would enjoy "a school system from which all students will emerge with a sense of achievement, with a feeling of their own worth and with respect for others."

Those values underpin everything we are trying to do. And we will continue to make improvements to provide a dynamic education system that ensures that every New Zealander, regardless of who they are and where they come from, can achieve their full potential and contribute to New Zealand's society and economy in the 21st century.

These are the messages our students and parents need to hear – from me, from you, from principals and teachers across New Zealand. NCEA is a world class qualification system. It is our national qualification system. We can be proud of it. Tell people about it.

In closing, I would like to thank all those who are helping to make NCEA work – the principals and teachers, the employers, school trustees, and the students. It is your efforts, which are making our school system the world-class system it is. I also acknowledge the efforts of the academic experts on NZQA's Technical Overview Group for their advice over the improvements we are making to our national qualification.

Thank you.

ENDS

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