Testing times for NCEA
The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) was brought in about 20 years ago to replace School Certificate, University Entrance, Sixth Form Certificate and University Bursary. Scholarship exams remained.
The change was designed to allow recognition of more than just academic subjects.
There was also a concern the school qualifications were too dependent on external exams.
In the case of School Certificate, sat in year 11, a pupil who might have been working well and passing tests throughout the year but who failed the end-of-year exam would have no qualification to show for that year.
The School Cert exams had been around since the 1940s. Until the early 1990s they were set up so raw marks were scaled to ensure only a certain percentage of pupils passed each subject.
The NCEA, with its three-year levels, plethora of unit and achievement standards and mix of internal and external assessments, also involved a new way of recognising passes. It replaced percentages and A, B, C, D and E grades with achieved, merit, and excellence (and not achieved) grades and a number of credits for each standard.
Credits can be gained through internal assessments during the year and at end-of-year exams.
It has long been criticised.
Parents and prospective employers have found it hard to get their heads around it, the workload for teachers has been immense, and there are concerns the flexibility offered means a pupil can gather disparate credits which do not add up to a coherent core qualification.
There have been concerns too many pupils are turning up at universities without the required entry qualifications and having to undertake foundation studies before they start their tertiary study proper.
Officials are concerned at what they describe as the "increasingly problematic imbalance" between internal and external assessments. Last year only 22% of the results came from external exams.
There have been an increasing number of "no shows" at the end-of-year external exams, where pupils have been enrolled for exams but not turned up. Last year, there were more than 250,000 instances where students did not turn up, presumably because they already had enough credits to pass.
The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the authenticity of internal assessments is also an issue.
Some changes have been made, including the recent introduction of online literacy and numeracy tests which must be passed in order to achieve NCEA.
But these have proved controversial because too many pupils are failing them, and the alternative of completing extra literacy and numeracy credits is only going to be available for a couple of years.
Some schools have opted out of offering the level 1 certificate in favour of other international qualifications.
Just how any revamp might be handled and when it might happen, is unclear.
But both Education Minister Erica Stanford and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon have been keen to emphasise it will not be tinkering, and all options will be on the table.
Reaching consensus on how the qualification system best accommodates those subjects which are not suited to exam assessment and ensures a diverse range of learners are catered for may not be easy.
Changes are coming thick and fast in the education sector and, as much as many might see the flaws in the existing set-up, enthusiasm for more major change now might be muted.
Women schoolteachers, who make up the majority of the post-primary workforce, will still be smarting after the scuppering of their previously lodged pay equity claim as a result of the controversial law change earlier this year.
Ms Stanford says whatever changes are made will need to be "very well communicated, very well staged and very well resourced".
Mr Luxon has stated: "We're going to open it up and we're going to fix it and do it once and do it right".
A bold claim, and one he will be hoping does not come back to haunt him.
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Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns
By John Gerritsen of RNZ Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy. They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests. A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them. Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write. Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey. Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid. "It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent. "Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another. The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding. "Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent. "Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another. "We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal. Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools. An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read. She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget. Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since. "They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said. The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter. "Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said. "Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said. "Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said. She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country. Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch. She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students. "We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said. Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need. She said English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it. Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary. But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal. "There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks. She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy. It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA. Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers.
RNZ News
5 days ago
- RNZ News
Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns
Educators say recent cohorts of teenagers entering secondary schools have had unusually numbers of students who badly need extra help with reading and writing. Photo: Unsplash/ Simeon Frank Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy. They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests . A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy and shared with RNZ showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them. Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write. Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey. Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid. "It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent. "Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another. The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding. "Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent. "Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another. "We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal. Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools. An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read. She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget . Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since. "They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said. The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter. "Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said. "Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said. "Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said. She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country. Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch. She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students. "We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said. Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need. She told RNZ English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it. Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary. But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal. "There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks. She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy. It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA. Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
NZ Herald
25-07-2025
- NZ Herald
Pāpāmoa College to ditch open-plan classrooms after trial shift boosted NCEA results
However, over the past two years, it had been doing 'due diligence' and had trialled relocating senior students into smaller, temporary classrooms, among other changes. 'Our board considered the present environment as a significant barrier to the students' educational achievement,' he said. Students inside one of Pāpāmoa College's open-plan classroom blocks. Since it started trialling more private spaces, its NCEA achievement rates have soared. Using the more private learning spaces led to 'an incredible improvement' in the students' NCEA achievement rates. 'From 2020, Level 1 NCEA increased from 63.5% to 82.4%, Level 2 from 67.5% to 88.3% and Level 3 from 66.4% to 74.2%.' The college was also seeing 'much higher levels of student engagement' and overall enjoyment of teaching and learning. 'We are now proudly amongst other high-performing secondary schools in the Bay of Plenty.' Pāpāmoa College principal Iva Ropati. Ropati said work was due to start in Term 4 to reconfigure one classroom block, and the rest would follow over the next two years. Costs were yet to be confirmed, but the school would use its government property funding allocation and board funding. Meanwhile, one of Tauranga's newest schools plans to stick with its current classroom designs. Taumata School, a full primary in Pyes Pa, opened in 2019. Principal Gen Fuller said returning to using more traditional spaces was 'not a guarantee of success'. The conversation about the two different approaches was 'far more complex' than walls, sliders or classroom layout. Taumata School principal Gen Fuller. 'Let's not oversimplify education to architecture. The real game-changer is what happens within the space … not the space itself." In her view, the 'true levers of student achievement' were the quality of teaching, strong leadership, fidelity of practice, and meaningful partnerships with whānau. Fuller said Taumata School had no plans to retrofit or convert learning spaces into single-cell classrooms. 'Our current design aligns with our pedagogical approach, and we remain confident it delivers strong outcomes for our learners.' She said schools and their boards should not have to 'absorb costs of policy shifts that lack robust consultation, evidence, or dedicated funding'. Tauriko School principal Suzanne Billington said she did not believe an either-or approach was the answer. Tauriko School principal Suzanne Billington pictured in 2021. Photo / George Novak 'We have flexible spaces which allow our staff and students to utilise the best of both approaches as and when needed to benefit learning and cater for different students' needs. 'The ability to use staffing innovatively in co-teaching spaces allows staff to better cater for the learning needs of all students. ' Stanford said the Government knew the most important thing in a child's education was the 'quality of the teacher in front of them'. 'While some schools used their open-plan classrooms well, classrooms are intergenerational assets, so building them to be flexible and adaptable will ensure they will endure beyond the tenure of individual teachers and principals.' She said the ministry was developing standard building layouts after considering New Zealand and overseas research on how different learning environments impacted student engagement, well-being and achievement. This would support 'a shift towards adaptable classroom designs that prioritise student needs and local context, over a one-size-fits-all, open-plan approach'. The Government has established the NZ School Property Agency to manage the school property portfolio. 'Schools can expect improved project delivery and communication, better value for money, and increased transparency' around decision-making, Stanford said. Sandra Conchie is a senior journalist at the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post who has been a journalist for 24 years. She mainly covers police, court and other justice stories, as well as general news. She has been a Canon Media Awards regional/community reporter of the year.
