Opinion: Why abandoning NCEA isn’t necessarily clear-cut

Education Minister Erica Stanford’s proposal for significant changes to New Zealand’s senior secondary school qualification, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), comes amidst public concerns about declines in student achievement, confusion about NCEA requirements and its value.

Yet, NCEA is applauded nationally and internationally for its flexibility to accommodate individual student interests and strengths. Furthermore, NCEA was able to continue to certify student achievement during the Covid pandemic that severely disrupted senior school qualifications in other countries.

A particular feature of NCEA is its diverse offering. A wide range of subjects are offered, enabling students to follow their interests related to their intended future pathways into work and life beyond schooling. These pathways are flexible and include a range of vocational and tertiary training opportunities. New Zealand (and the world) benefits from this wide range of knowledge and skill as students can fill niche roles and new emergent employment or entrepreneurial opportunities.

However, greater flexibility and student choice challenge certainty, structure and reliability. Student, and sometimes teacher, choices about various combinations of subjects (and/or standards completed) have led to unintended consequences, like inadequate preparation for, or restricted, future study pathways, or gaps in learning fundamental concepts.

Some of these gaps have arisen from schools and students focusing on attaining the qualification at the expense of improving learning and understanding. These concerns, along with a trend of declining participation in external examinations, have led people to question the dependability of NCEA in certifying student knowledge and capability.

Differences in achievement between internal and external assessments are not surprising, because “internals” are usually less time-restricted and/or completed in familiar environments, under less stressful conditions. Internals often provide choices for students in how they evidence their learning, providing them with greater opportunities to display or apply what they know and can do, and may be completed when the teacher and/or student is ready.

In contrast, external examinations are offered at a set time and date and contain limited choice. They are marked independently by NZQA, increase inter-school reliability since students are assessed under the same conditions and with the same resources, and results are monitored by NZQA to ensure inter-year consistency. When fewer students sit external exams, checks for inter-school reliability are lessened, and people have less certainty about the consistency of results.

Increasing numbers of schools are opting out of Level 1 NCEA and/or choosing to participate in international senior secondary school examinations like the International Baccalaureate and Cambridge. There is a perception that these alternatives are more rigorous or open opportunities to study at prestigious overseas universities.

Such actions overlook New Zealand’s unique cultural heritage and global contribution, and reduce financial rewards available to students progressing to tertiary study in New Zealand, since the number of NZ Scholarships awarded are based on the numbers of students in the NCEA level 3 cohort. Top-achieving students who achieve these challenging scholarships demonstrate excellence, in-depth knowledge of subject(s), critical and insightful thinking to complex cases. Awards include attaining scholarship excellence, top of NCEA subjects, through to premier and the supreme Prime Minister Award, and vary in value from $500 to $10,000.

Students who study and sit NCEA subjects contribute to their New Zealand Record of Achievement (NZRoA), results of which can be included in their CV or job applications as evidence of what they know, can do and how well; unlike other qualification options that typically provide only the subject and grade.

So, what does all this mean for the choice and success of qualifications moving forward? Retain NCEA or change to the proposed New Zealand Certificate of Education, and New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education?

Whatever choice is made, our senior school qualification must be valued, trusted and have credibility for students, whānau, the public, employers, tertiary education providers and internationally.

It needs to enable and recognise the learning of all students, including the neurodiverse and those with special needs, and challenge highly capable students.

It needs to reflect the uniqueness of New Zealand, value equity and respect for our te ao Māori heritage, enhance our international reputation for ingenuity, adaptability, and high performance across a range of academic, sporting, cultural, arts and creative endeavours.

To do so, it needs to have sufficient flexibility to respond rapidly to a changing world, excite students in lifelong learning, equip them with critical thinking, problem-solving and teamwork skills, and ethical decision-making.

The choice with NCEA is ours – are we going to love it or list it?

Professor Jenny Poskitt is a Professor in the Institute of Education at Massey University. She is President of the New Zealand Assessment Institute and the New Zealand representative on the International Educational Assessment Network.

This article was first published in The Post.