NCEA Reform: A High-Stakes Risk for Maori, Pasifika and the poor.
As the great Midnight Oil sung; “The rich get richer, the poor get the picture …”.
And, as the great education researcher, John Hattie, wrote to me yesterday: “It is criminal what they are doing to NCEA … we move backwards. The rich schools won again.”
The National led government has made much of their education progress – but they may have done more harm than good. Especially through the division they have created through involvement with people such as Elizabeth Rata – who seem to ignore that the percentage of NZ’s school age population in 2030 is 30% Maori and 16% Pasifika.
Replacing NCEA is not an argument about credits, grades and certificates. It is a debate about whether we are prepared to confront the educational failure we have already normalised, or whether reform will simply move the goalposts – serve those already doing well and leave the same young people, Maori, Pasifika, poor, SIGNIFICANTLY, further behind.
There is no doubt that NCEA needs improvement. The qualification has been criticised as confusing, inconsistent and too easily reduced to credit accumulation. Employers, parents and some educators want a clearer signal of what students know and can do. On the other hand, there is no wide sector agreement, in fact significant opposition, for wholesale replacement. Many teachers, students and whānau believe NCEA has significant strengths and should be refined rather than discarded
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The proposed direction would shift senior secondary qualifications from a flexible, standards-based model to a more structured subject-based system. Students would need to study five full subjects and pass a required number to gain the new qualifications. The appeal is obvious: simplicity, comparability and a qualification that appears easier to understand. The appeal is also based on influential people who went through another system decades ago. Simplicity is not the same as fairness, and a cleaner system on paper can still be a harsher system in practice.
The most serious warning comes from BERL modelling. It suggests that nearly 15,000 students who currently achieve Level 2 could be exposed to failure under the proposed model because their existing pattern of achievement may not align with the new requirement to pass enough full subjects.
Māori and Pasifika learners are disproportionately represented among those exposed. More than 4,400 Māori students and 2,300 Pacific students who would currently achieve Level 2 are identified as at risk. We already have 18.25% (over 13,000 individuals) leaving school with less than Leve 1 NCEA. Students in higher-barrier schools are around three times more likely to be exposed than those in lower-barrier schools. A reform that increases clarity for the system while increasing failure for Māori, Pasifika and low-income learners is not a reform; it is a redistribution of failure onto the students who have least room to absorb it.
The economic and social impacts for our nation will be enormous.
We need to see this within the wider education crisis. Attendance remains well below 2019 levels. Curriculum and qualification change has been chaotic. Most troubling is the number of students leaving school after 13,200 funded hours without a qualification. Young people who leave without even Level 1 NCEA s face much higher risk of becoming not in employment, education or training (NEETs), lower lifetime earnings and reduced access to further study. The wider social costs are welfare dependency, intergenerational poverty, poorer health, mental health pressure and higher justice-system costs – and a huge tax burden.
The equity question is unavoidable. In recent leaver data 28 percent of Māori students, 19 percent of Pasifika students, 14 percent of European students and 5 percent of Asian students left school with no qualifications. University Entrance outcomes are also sharply stratified. The differences are not explained by aspiration or ability. Parental approaches during pregnancy and the first five years of a child’s life have a massive impact – but there is no intent to address that. Unequal access to quality ECE, stable teaching, subject choice, learning support, continuity, resources and the social conditions that make achievement easier or harder.
NCEA does not solve those inequities, but it does contain forms of flexibility that matter. Schools can build courses around local need, vocational relevance, cultural context and student strengths. Students can demonstrate achievement through different standards and assessment modes. For Māori learners, this can support pathways connected to Te Reo Māori, mātauranga Māori, iwi context and community-based learning. For Pasifika learners, it can support relational teaching, family and community relevance, applied learning and staged opportunities to succeed. A more rigid subject-pass model may unintentionally narrow what counts as achievement.
The problem is not that standards should be low. The problem is that the system repeatedly mistakes rigidity for rigour. Real rigour is not created by making pathways narrower. It is created by ensuring every student has the teaching, time, support, curriculum and relationships needed to meet demanding expectations. If a student fails because the new certificate no longer recognises a coherent applied or blended course that previously led to success, the system has not raised standards; it has changed the rules in a way that may make success impossible for many more students than previously.
Funding is a huge concern. New Zealand’s schools do not begin from equal positions. The funding attached to socio-economic risk is pathetic (EQI), at best. High-decile or high-profile schools can raise substantial additional income through donations, alumni networks and community wealth. A school able to raise millions for facilities and enrichment is operating in a very different reality from a school serving communities with high needs and limited fundraising capacity. If NACT then imposes a major qualification redesign without substantial targeted resourcing, it compounds inequality while calling it reform. They are serving the schools that were already succeeding.
Schools will need to redesign courses, remap standards, change assessment programmes, adjust timetables, prepare teachers and communicate new pathways to students. Estimates place the implementation cost at up to $58 million nationally, before all hidden costs are counted. The schools with the most exposed learners are also likely to have the least spare capacity. The reform will be another burden placed on already stretched communities. It sounds great to National supporters but will be a disaster for poor communities.
There is also a moral problem in the political debate. Too much education policy is shaped by what appears orderly to adults rather than what demonstrably changes outcomes for children. Some parties offer punishment for non-attendance, narrow structural fixes or ideological arguments about ethnicity and the Treaty. Others have presided over decline while speaking in slogans. No party has yet shown sufficient urgency about the students most likely to leave school with nothing. As Cameron Bargie, and others, repeatedly state – education is a significant determinant of New Zealand’s future health, productivity, cohesion and justice. Education policy must be judged by what it does for the lowest-served 40 percent.
NCEA can be made clearer. Literacy and numeracy expectations can be strengthened. Subject learning can be made more coherent. Employers and tertiary providers can receive better information. But these goals do not require stripping away the flexibility that currently helps many vulnerable learners remain engaged. The system should retain credible internal assessment, applied and vocational pathways, culturally grounded learning, and school-designed courses where they meet robust quality assurance.
With their narrow range of supporters National/Stanford can push through these changes but, like a baseball player throwing a grenade – those people will be long gone when the consequences hit.
The government should release full student-achievement modelling, including impacts by ethnicity, disability, school EQI, Māori-medium settings, rurality and prior achievement. It should fund transition support according to need, not distribute assistance as though every school has the same capacity. It should co-design implementation with Māori and Pasifika educators, whānau, learners, iwi and community leaders. Above all, it should test every design decision against a simple question: will this increase or decrease the number of young people leaving school with a meaningful qualification?
New Zealand has already lost too many educational years. The proverb says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. For Māori, Pasifika and low-income learners, we have failed to plant enough of those trees. The answer is not another reform that looks strong from Wellington – or East Coast Bays – but weakens pathways in Flaxmere, South Auckland, Northland, the East Coast or any community where schools are already carrying more than their share of national failure.
The proposed NCEA replacement may yet be improved. But in its current form, the inherent risk is clear: it may make the qualification system tidier while making success harder for the learners who most need the system to work. That would not be equity, rigour or progress. It would be another generation of missed planting.
A country should be judged on what they to for the least of their children.
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