Qualifications Change may be needed ...
... but the fundamentals of a good education for all NZ children seems to be well down the priority list.
This week Erica Standford re-announced qualifications changes. The basics are:
- A “Foundational Award” beginning 2028 to replace Level 1 NCEA.
- New secondary school qualifications for Year 12 (start 2029) and Year 13 (start 2030).
At this point there are more questions than answers and, actually, not a lot to comment on. An initial one from me would be: Will the
Foundational Award be comprehensive enough to be worthwhile for the many students, if they even get it, who do not go on to achieve in Year 12 & 13?
Somewhat the same with the proposed con-current curriculum changes although, if the senior English draft is anything to go by ... not promising.
Curriculum quality and a very good qualifications system is important - but will only bring about small gains if the fundamentals are ignored. In fact, given the complexity and time-lines of the changes - certain groups may be significantly harmed by the implementation process and the nature of the final structures.
I had the privilege of writing about this in the Sunday Star Times last weekend.
Some key points:
There is no doubt that the most important aspects to solve for education in our nation are:
* the development of our children from pregnancy until five years old.
* parental engagement with school/education and the full attendance of our children.
* having high-quality school leadership and teaching through every year level.
* closing the gaps between ethnicities and wealth demographics – gaps that are the highest in the OECD.
* keeping young people in school until 17 years old and ensuring that the vast majority have Level 2 NCEA in the current qualifications structure.
At present the major issues are:
* an increasing number of children are arriving to start school at least two years behind developmental norms.
* our full attendance rates, well past Covid now, hover around 50% for all students and at, or below, 40% for Maori and Pasifika. This is on top of the best estimate of non-enrolled students being 10,000.
* In 2024, 16% of school leavers had no qualification after 13,200 hours of taxpayer funded education. My prediction for the 2025 data that comes out in August is that we will get close to 20% of school leavers with no qualification and a very limited future.
* The gaps are simply not closing. We only have 460 high schools in New Zealand. In 2024, for school leavers, the top 50 schools saw an average of 85.8% of their students having University Entrance. For the bottom 50 schools it was 4.4%. No high school is required to set achievement goals in any year, for leavers, let alone five year progressions.
It should also be noted that both ACT and National promised to reduce the size of our education bureaucracy from roughly 4,000 full-time employees to the 2,700 at which it sat before Chris Hipkins became Minister of Education.
At last count it was 3,939 and climbing.
To this point - NZ young people and their families deserve better - and the cohorts in between all of these changes - already hammered by education under the Covid response - are being neglected. Later this year LEAVERS data is likely to show that the portion of students leaving school in NZ with no qualification at all will rise to 1 in 5.
alwyn.poole@gmail.com
