Harvey McQueen: NCEA glitch in a system that works

Most of my friends not associated with education seem convinced that our schools are in a parlous state.

When people learn that I am an education consultant, I often get an ear-bashing. A spate of recent articles and talks have bewailed declining standards in schools. One gets a picture of classroom mayhem and chaos.

But it's not so. Up and down the country, the great majority of students at all levels are getting on with their learning quite satisfactorily. Most parents seem comfortable with their local school. Some are delighted.

A few have grounds for concern. The system has checks and balances to deal with such concerns but they are a bit slow to kick in. I blame creeping centralisation for an increasing inflexibility.

Students grumble, but then they always have. I certainly didn't appreciate my teachers, although I did respect their authority more than today's lot appear to.

Teaching is much harder now than when I started in 1960. Now, information technology offers alternative learning.

Kids say "school's dull". Cleaning your teeth is dull. But necessary. Learning maths is hard. I've never thought of it as dull.

But teachers tell me that students find step-by-step learning more difficult than formerly.

The average attention span has got shorter. Schools have to compete with the hoo-hah of television and PlayStation. Further, they are expected to play an increased role in socialisation.

At this point in the original draft of this article, I began a defence of the NCEA, which has focused discontent. The debate has been noisy, polemical and confused. But the arguments for and against have been drowned in stuff-ups in the policy's implementation.

Any major change has teething problems. But this one appears to have had too many. There has always been the odd blip, serious in itself, but inevitably part of the process considering the magnitude of the task of national exams.

National Party leader Don Brash was right in being annoyed at the history question that had a cartoon figure that looked reasonably like him. Ever since I've been in education there has been the odd outcry like that about a particular question or paper. But what happened in scholarship last year is inexcusably bad news, as well as bad policy implementation.

Right from the start the teachers said the exercise needed more resources and more time. They were right.

I feel let down. The NCEA was introduced by successive Governments. It seemed an approach whose time had arrived. My chagrin is small beer alongside the effect this flawed and unfair process will have on the careers and learning opportunities of hundreds of students.

It will increase resistance to NCEA and make it harder to implement successfully. There is a need to quickly sort out the problems and then let the thing settle down. If you keep pulling up the plant to see how it's growing, it will never become established.

When I started primary school, maths was a series of drills. We worked silently and on our own. Today's youngsters play with shapes. They talk and work in groups. That change reflects what is happening elsewhere.

During those 65 years, how we bank, communicate, farm, travel and relax has changed drastically.

Schools do not remain in a time warp. They also change and adapt. Which is why education is fair game for the critics.

We have all been through the system. We know what we did and we believe we know how we learned. Nostalgia often adds a rosy glow.

People ask, "Why bring in this new-fangled NCEA? Why drop School Certificate?"

When I was a schoolboy there were similar comments about the abolition of proficiency, which meant you couldn't go to secondary school until you reached a certain standard. There was criticism of new-fangled School Certificate - it was no holy cow then.

My concern is that the furore over aspects of the NCEA fuels the perception that things are not in good shape in education. That's not the feeling in most classrooms. Let's not forget that.

It is time that we, as a people, stopped the chorus of criticism of schools. Let's praise what is working well and endeavour to make it even better.

* Writer and poet Harvey McQueen was education adviser to the Lange Government and formerly the executive director of the Council for Teacher Education.