A teacher's take: ‘The NCEA proposal gets a Not Achieved from me’

“The Government is proposing to replace the current NCEA with new national qualifications.”

Hearing this announcement from my colleague’s mouth after our school’s Monday morning staff briefing, felt like a stiff uppercut. The anger came quickly. Venting to my colleagues about how much time we had spent learning the refreshed Level 1 curriculum, all for it to be thrown out? Some teachers couldn’t even discuss it straightaway because the sheer fury would derail us from all of the work we have to do.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his posse keep implying that NCEA isn’t a robust qualification. If it really is that easy, wouldn’t everyone pass? But they aren’t because it is not easy. As someone who marks it and has gone through it myself, NCEA is complex and nuanced. No, it is not perfect, but it is far more fit for purpose than its predecessor: School C.

I have not met a single person who either taught or went through School Certificate that has a single positive thing to say about it. We have a whole generation of adults who were traumatised by that system, whether they passed it or not. 

Do we really want to bring a system like this back? Especially when we currently have a system that is adaptable for both our disabled and indigenous youth. A Qualifications Authority report from 2024 showed that students at kaupapa Māori schools achieved better NCEA results than their peers at comparable English-medium schools. So Luxon, is it not robust when Māori ākonga are thriving?

We need an even playing field

We already know that neurodiverse, disabled, Pasifika and tangata whenua are more likely to have educational trauma due to being in learning environments that cater to a more “traditional” and westernised style of learning. 

As someone who was undiagnosed at the time of my secondary schooling, I had a mixed bag experience - even though I was still able to do well academically. I got kicked out of class for talking too much, I got Excellences in one class while I was failing another, I didn’t understand why I found it hard to study and always did worse in my exams than I did in externals.

Schools the media deems ‘prestigious’ and ‘prominent’, which are actually just high decile, are the ones pushing this move behind the scenes. Many of them have already been offering alternative qualifications to NCEA. They know a School C-esque system will work for them and their own; they don’t care that it won’t work for anyone else. And they will still continue to poach our athletes and artists to keep them on top of the scoreboard. Moving the goal posts and calling it a meritocracy, when really it is elitism.

More questions than answers

So they cut disability support funding? But give a surge of resource funding to learning support in schools and put more teacher aides in classrooms? But then scrap the very same qualification that allows many neurodiverse and disabled students to thrive and pass, leaving schools with more options?

What will this mean for students who are unable to regularly attend school due to circumstances out of their control? Mental health issues. Chronic health problems. Family bereavement. Working to help support their families. The list goes on.

And what will happen to supports like Special Assessment Conditions? Will this new qualification allow students with disabilities, learning difficulties, medical issues and sensory needs to have accommodations? We need to even the playing field so those same students can achieve the same standards.

Students who muck around in Year 10 - all of them do, they’re 14 for God’s sake - and therefore, struggle in Year 11, will be written off before they can find their footing. Students who think they want to get into trades at first but then later decide they want to go to university, won’t be able to under this proposed new system. 

Do not let us forget what happened under School C where our young brown people became tools for the labour workforce, whereas their Pākehā counterparts went off to university. Because if you failed School C, (which more than half of Māori students did) then you couldn’t proceed onto to do Sixth Form Certificate which you then needed to pass to move onto attaining Bursary - today’s equivalent to University Entrance.

The Government is using our young people’s education as a political hot potato to distract the public from the fact they’re not doing anything to actually improve our current education system.

The proposal provides more questions than answers and is yet another thing for the public to argue over whilst this government continues to do nothing about the cost of living, unemployment, homelessness and the other important items on the nation’s cursed grocery list.

In the empowering words of my principal: “This proposal gets a Not Achieved from me”.

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