NCEA reporting sows confusion

by ALAN PERROTT, Education Reporter


Public confidence in secondary schooling is suffering because of professional differences over the NCEA system, says the head of the national principals' association.

Paul Ferris, principal of Kavanagh College in Otago and president of the Secondary Principals' Association (Spanz), said student assessment was now more complex than simply passing or failing a School Certificate exam.

Interim NCEA results are being released this week, but some principals are worried that varying approaches to recording student success will make inter-school judgments meaningless.

Some schools do not pass on information on students who fail subject standards, leading to a claim that low success rates will be masked. But Mr Ferris said concerns over schools not advising the Qualifications Authority of failures did not take into account how the system was intended to work.

"NCEA is not about reporting what students can't do, it's about reporting what they can do," he said.

"[Not reporting failures] may disadvantage schools that have relied on national statistics and comparisons to attract students, but NCEA is not about national comparisons, it is about individual students."

Mr Ferris said his school was not reporting student failures and the NZQA had been clear that it did not need to know of them.

"It is my understanding that the majority of principals in Spanz accept NCEA as the system we have and want to make it work well. To undermine the policy in [a] public forum is not good for public confidence in the system."

He sympathised with parents who liked "league tables", but recommended that parents instead ask principals about their assessment systems, which now differed widely between schools.

Brent Lewis, principal of Avondale College, was critical of the policy of non-reporting, which he viewed as a fundamental flaw in NCEA.

Mr Lewis said his school had enjoyed record levels of bursary success for the past two years - a simple message for parents - but NCEA would make such measures difficult as a school could claim 100 per cent success by not recording failure.

The only way to get an accurate picture of overall student performance was to return to externally-assessed examinations with set standards attached, he said.

Education Minister Trevor Mallard said it was nonsense to suggest NCEA was lowering standards.

"Under the old School Certificate system, many schools did not even bother entering students of lower ability, so the statistical analysis on which comparisons were made has always been very suspect," he said.

But he would release information showing the number of achievement, merit and excellence results obtained by each school as a percentage of the number of Year 11 and Year 12 students.

"This means it will not be possible for a school to look better as a result of not enrolling or withdrawing students."

Mr Mallard said NCEA allowed schools to shape programmes to best suit their students and claimed the new scholarship exam, which will begin this year, may be the toughest in the Western World.

National's education spokesman, Bill English, claimed that NCEA deliberately hid failure and would lead to lower educational standards.

"Parents and teachers alike should be alarmed when the measure that's used to compare schools is being rigged."

What is NCEA?

* The National Certificate of Educational Achievement has replaced the School Certificate, Sixth Form Certificate and Bursary exams.

* Overall success is measured by a combination of internal assessment and external exams.

* All subject areas are divided into standards that earn students credits towards their qualification.

* Schools design standards to suit their students and the particular skill or knowledge being assessed.

* Students who fail a standard may still receive some credits that are retained.