Audrey Young: Credits for crisis control not achieved

The Government's response to the scholarship exam debacle has been all too clever by 50 per cent - or 28 per cent without scaling.

It's a mess and the responsible ministers have exacerbated it.

Education Minister Trevor Mallard and his hapless new associate, David Benson-Pope (who is responsible but surely not to blame because he has only just inherited schools from Mr Mallard), finally found their tongues yesterday.

For days the pair stayed quiet, perhaps in the hope that anxiety over the variation in scholarship subject pass rates would simply evaporate.

They may have hoped that the confusion over the scholarship exam would lead to lack of interest.

It didn't. Instead the confusion and vacuum of reasonable information (the New Zealand Qualifications Authority joined the ministers' silence) has spread anxiety over the assessment regime that replaced School Certificate and University Entrance - the National Certificate of Educational Achievement.

Labour MPs reported that general worry back to Prime Minister Helen Clark. That explains why she forced her way into the case on Monday.

Not with reassurance, however, but with the even more disturbing information that NZQA had failed to keep copies of exam papers it had sent back to students.

The problem has given the anti-NCEA lobby the chance to reopen the bigger argument. It has also given a boost to National and its former leader, Bill English.

It is no wonder Mr Mallard stayed up late on Monday looking through his papers to see if he had been warned about the problem before. Mr English has made one of Labour's toughest look vulnerable.

Confidence in a new system takes time to earn but can be destroyed quickly.

Early intervention by Mr Mallard and Mr Benson-Pope helped to undermine confidence in the system and, consequently, themselves.

When they were alerted to a great variation in pass rates between subjects, their response was to invent two new sets of awards - like giving a patient candy to cure concussion.

It was a knee-jerk action and was evidence that they had no confidence in the outcome of the exam.

The problem is there is no agreement on what caused the problem. The results of the new scholarship exam were not scaled as before to ensure X per cent passed and X per cent failed. So no one knows whether the problem was poor exam setting, poor marking, poor teaching or just a rude discovery that not as many New Zealand kids are as smart at science as scaling might have suggested.

Two inquiries were announced yesterday: one by a sector group that has two weeks to report to Cabinet; the other an independent inquiry to be conducted by people appointed by the State Services Commissioner, with the powers of a commission of inquiry.

Mr Benson-Pope did not mention any of this in Parliament. In the short history of this damaging issue, that is no surprise.

What might have been a smartly handled, quarantined problem has turned into a difficult start to election year for the Government.

And whatever you call it, the result is the same: Fail, or as they now say, Not Achieved.