NCEA Overboard

VIEWS FROM OUTSIDE THE APIARY: IAN FLETCHER 

What to make of the most recent government tinkering with New Zealand’s secondary school education system? Ian Fletcher weighs in with why getting it right is so important, but also so complex.

By Ian Fletcher

Education is big business. The Government proposes to replace the current NCEA system for assessment (testing) in senior secondary schooling (Years 11‑13) with a new qualification framework. This is potentially a big deal: our kids usually only get one shot at a basic education. It matters for individuals, families, the economy and society into the future. Young people in schools now may have 60-70 years of work ahead. So how should we think of these proposals?

New Zealand’s secondary school students are falling down the rankings in maths, reading and writing according to at least one globally recognised student assessment programme.

The Government’s argument is that the current NCEA system has become too credit‑based, too flexible, and lacks coherence and clear public understanding. Basically, standards have fallen and the current qualifications are said to have been devalued.

Is this true? Very likely: there is a system called PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) run by the OECD every three years to test students against global benchmarks. The OECD is a group of generally more developed countries; the OECD itself provides policy advice and testing in a lot of areas, including education. PISA test scores are well regarded.

New Zealand’s scores are deteriorating. In all the test areas (maths, reading and writing) our scores are falling and the gap between well-off kids and kids from poorer backgrounds is widening. This suggests many of our kids are being short-changed by a system that should be doing better.

The most obvious comment is that changing the assessment system won’t necessarily change what young people are taught, nor how they are taught. Nor will it change the social and cultural context of education – for example, greater use of phones and screens means attention spans are falling.

Here, the decision to ban phones from schools is a good one (I’d go a lot further), but we have to be realistic: young people are exposed to a whole lot of changing influences and pressures outside of school. The corrosive effect of social media, especially on girls, is well-established. But there’s no serious attempt to tame these forces.

The government’s ideas for a new testing system won’t fix any of this. What it will do is create a system with more focus on the basics (reading and maths) at the start, and create (or return to, for those of us old enough to remember) more of a pass/fail system at more senior years.

The stuff kids are taught is set out in the curriculum. Here, the idea that there should be a solid base of foundational maths, reading and writing is sensible. How that is actually structured will be the hard part. There are already controversies about changes to, and claimed errors within, the maths curriculum.

My view is that education (like health) is a complex system, but also with an astonishing scope for schools and teachers to make things up as they go along. This is where education and health diverge sharply: if a doctor makes up a procedure and the patient dies, the system asks questions, mostly. If a child fails to learn, the failure unfolds slowly, and there are lots of excuses.

So having a clear assessment system is important to impose some consistent standards and accountability. I think the NCEA system has become devalued, and both easily gamed and hard to understand. But here a big tension emerges: a rigorous assessment system might help keep teachers and schools on track, but it might not give a good insight into young peoples’ development, which is likely to be more nuanced, and affected by home/family, media and other factors. The result may indeed be rigorous, but not insightful and certainly not very fair. This matters, because there is good evidence that fairness is a genuinely shared value across the whole country. Any assessment system has to be accepted as fair if it is to be accepted at all.

“Delegation leads to abdication” warns Ian Fletcher, and thus parents should take active involvement in their children’s education to achieve the best results.

I also think that changing assessment and changing big bits of the curriculum at the same time is a risk – better to change one, then the other.

As well as assessment and the curriculum, the other big variable is how young people are taught – the way teaching is done. Here, I am not an expert, but there is expertise available. To state the obvious, teaching needs to capture, trial and improve the fruits of current research in ways that help young people learn better. This is especially, urgently important as digital technology (not just AI, but that’s part of it) changes our lives and rewires our brains. Current research really matters in a changing world.

This is really important for the whole system: fixing formal assessment without tackling the way teaching is done is a dangerous distraction, and it’s very unlikely to make things better. If we want our kids to learn better, we need to teach them better.

That means better teachers, better paid, and better supported. It means parents who get involved as intelligent customers on our children’s behalf, learning about education, child development and so on, asking the right questions and expecting serious answers, child by child.

Finally, it also means being clear as a community about the values we want the education system to impart. Culture is the piling up of preferences – views about the things we think are good, or bad. Education is a powerful tool for transmitting these choices to young people (and always has been). But there seems to me to be a big risk if we leave it to the professionals. This is not irony: educational professionals should be experts in how to teach, but I want a say in what gets taught. But, again, that means getting involved. Delegation leads to abdication.

None of this is seriously reflected in the new assessment system or the hapless tinkering we see with the curriculum. But both will provide the distractions, the media circuses, and the excuses we will probably use to avoid facing up to the real challenges of giving our kids a decent start.

Ian Fletcher is a former head of New Zealand’s security agency, the GCSB, chief executive of the UK Patents Office, free trade negotiator with the European Commission and biosecurity expert for the Queensland government. These days he is a commercial flower grower in the Wairarapa and consultant to the apiculture industry with NZ Beekeeping Inc.