Photo: Unsplash/ Taylor Flowe
Are schools' outdoor education and tourism courses academic subjects or more like skills-based trade training?
The peak bodies for teachers of both subjects fear the government's overhaul of secondary school qualifications will downgrade them.
Education Outdoors NZ (EONZ) and Tourism Teachers Aotearoa New Zealand told RNZ their subjects were on a list of subjects that could be dropped from the Education Ministry's general subject list under the proposed replacement for NCEA.
They said they had been told their subjects might be classed as "vocational", in which case the job of developing a curriculum and resources would move from the ministry to one of the yet-to-be-established Industry Skills Boards.
Both organisations said that would result in their subjects being relegated to filler status for struggling students, rather than being seen as serious options for teenagers.
Meanwhile, Technology Education New Zealand said there was a high risk vocational subjects could be used to fill immediate industry needs rather than equipping teenagers with the skills and knowledge they needed to make meaningful career and study choices.
EONZ chief executive Fiona McDonald told RNZ outdoor education should remain in the general subject list.
"Narrowing it down to a vocational subject is just not doing it justice and will exclude a whole bunch of kids from taking it as a subject," she said.
"A lot of schools either will really reduce down what they offer if it becomes a vocational subject or they won't offer it at all and students will be going back to when it really was just an add-on."
McDonald said more than 370 secondary and composite schools taught outdoor education in a wide variety of ways.
"Some schools will use unit standards to assess things like mountain biking or the real physical-context skills and they might combine those with achievement standards to assess the more knowledge-rich part of the subject," she said.
"We have schools that have massive outdoor programmes that are using solely achievement standards to assess those."
She said achievement standards might include risk management, leadership, weather and navigation.
McDonald said the Industry Skills Board responsible for outdoor education had yet to be set up and would be poorly positioned to develop a school curriculum for outdoor education.
She said it would be responsible for other subjects and would be less well-resourced than the Workforce Development Council it was replacing.
Tourism Teachers Aotearoa New Zealand chair Callum Green said making tourism a vocational subject would undo years of work.
"We worked with industry for four or five years very closely to develop a real future-focused, academically rigourous subject. But what this means now is that this subject will go back to being a unit standard subject and unfortunately in schools it is not seen as being a worthwhile subject for a lot of students, which is very disappointing. It's seen as maybe a bit of a filler subject a lot of the time for schools and for students, and the perceptions of it are not great," he said.
Green said academic study of tourism included things like tourism strategies and systems.
He said downgrading tourism as a school subject made no sense given the importance of tourism to the economy and government plans to increase earnings from it.
"I think it's the second-highest export earner and we know that we need to have great talent coming through to work into the tourism industry to be able to generate revenue for New Zealand and be a great export earner," he said.
"What we were hoping is that if we were still in the academic senior subject area that we would be able to cultivate talent and create great pathways for students to potentially go into tertiary university, polytechnic to learn more, study tourism and then be great leaders," he said.
"The industry we know at the moment is crying out for workers and that links really clearly with the tourism growth road map, which the government and the industry are getting in behind at the moment."
Technology Education New Zealand chair Hamish Johnston said it expected some technology subjects would remain in the senior curriculum but others that were already trades-focused would become vocational.
He said there was a real risk vocational subjects would used to provide a pipeline for immediate industry needs rather than giving teenagers qualifications that provided options for the future.
"Who gets to decide what counts as a vocational education subject? Will that decision be driven by students' interests and pathways or are we going to get economic forecasting where subjects are created or forced into schools simply to meet workforce shortages," he said.
"We are interested in how the new framing will look, but we want to make sure it keeps all doors open for students."
Principal of Mt Aspiring College in Wānaka Nicola Jacobson told Morning Report high schoolers aiming for university would miss out on important holistic development if outdoor pursuits were dropped from the general subject list.
She said schools lacked certainty about whether outdoor education would count towards the Certificate of Education and an Advanced Certificate of Education.
"Students heading down a university pathway wouldn't have that breadth of education that they currently are able to have.
"They might choose sciences, literature, and more academic-based subjects, and subjects like outdoor pursuits might be less popular, which I think would be a shame."
She said they currently have 10 classes of outdoor pursuits students, but expected this would drop significantly if it became a vocational subject.
The government proposed phasing in a new qualification to replace the NCEA from 2028-2030.
It would include a Certificate of Education for students in Year 12 and an Advanced Certificate of Education at Year 13.
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