KEY POINTS:
Perhaps only the educationist purists who oversaw the contentious, decade-long development of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement will really bemoan the radical shake-up announced yesterday by Education Minister Steve Maharey.
For them, and their ambition of a qualifications framework in which secondary school pupils competed against an objective set of standards, not each other, this was a philosophical defeat. For others, however, it was a much-needed and sensible overhaul of a system that was fraying dangerously.
The most obvious symptom of that disrepair was the number of schools introducing international examination options, a step largely occasioned by the increasing number of academically able pupils who believed the NCEA failed to motivate them to do more than the minimum required to pass. The Government package provides cogent solutions to most, if not all, of the criticisms.
First, there is the motivational tool of new grades. From this year, "excellence" and "merit" will be available for NCEA certificates, rather than a bare "achieved". The same grades will be introduced at subject level from next year. At the other end of the spectrum, pupils will have failures to achieve a credit in internally assessed standards, as well as external examinations, marked on their results notices. This omission always smacked of a type of political correctness that eschews the very notion of failure. Finally, it is acknowledged that what pupils cannot do may be as significant as what they have achieved.
The last people likely to be perturbed by the renewed ranking of pupils against their peers are the students themselves. Their main desire is consistency and certainty, commodities delivered by the traditional examination system, whatever its other shortcomings, but not broad-brush standards. Their wish is further underlined by a boosting of moderation, which is designed to ensure that internal assessment grades in schools are consistent.
Being able to run an accurate rule over pupils from different schools is particularly important for employers. They stand to benefit not only from more intensive monitoring but a new school summary that will include all of a pupil's results, whether "achieved" or "not achieved", in NCEA. This, in sum, will provide simpler, more concise, more complete and more credible information.
Notably absent from the reform package is any attempt to make difficult subjects worth more credits than easier ones. The NCEA's one-size-fits-all approach has been criticised for erasing former distinctions between academic and technical subjects and allowing pupils to cherry-pick easy subjects to get credits, rather than tackling harder options. On balance, however, the decision to do nothing in this area may be wise. Chemistry and physics are obviously more difficult than most subjects, but how do you judge which is the harder? Or which is the more difficult of geography and English? Making decisions in such a vexed field could create more problems than it would solve.
Critics will, with justification, label Mr Maharey's shake-up overdue. Until now, he and his ministerial predecessors have tinkered around the edges rather than address fundamental woes. Their constant refrain, that the NCEA is a work in progress, hardly sufficed when public confidence was steadily eroding.
Nonetheless, this package provides the sort of challenge that should motivate pupils, while also enhancing the system's consistency and credibility. Astutely managed, it should eradicate much of the discontent.
