Education Minister David Seymour says NCEA changes will challenge students more

Associate Education Minister David Seymour says changes to NCEA will challenge students more, which he believes can only be a positive thing.

The government announced sweeping changes to school qualifications on Monday, including the end of the NCEA system that has been in place for more than 20 years.

The National Certificate of Educational Achievement will be gone by 2030, replaced by a basic literacy and numeracy award at Year 11, and the Certificate of Education and Advanced Certificate of Education at Years 12 and 13.

The new certificates would be standards-based, like the NCEA is, meaning every student passes if they demonstrate the required knowledge or skills, but they would have to study at least five complete subjects and pass four of them to get their certificate.

Seymour said students wanted to be challenged more, and the overhaul to the NCEA system will provide that.

"I was really interested to listen ... there were some students who seem to make a virtue of NCEA's easiness, as they saw it," he told First Up.

"But there was a strong current running through those comments from the students. There was actually a desire for a bit more challenge.

"One of the things that will happen is that by having a subject-based system, where there's a body of knowledge that you have to learn, where there's exams that are objectively assessed, I think that that extra challenge is going to be there.

"I think for those students and for the country as a whole, that can only be a positive thing."

Seymour said the only real predictor of where New Zealand's going to be in 30 years' time is the amount of knowledge that is passed from one generation to the next.

He said there is an element of the European system in the changes.

"There, they have more vocational pathways and I'm not saying that we're introducing a particular country system, but there's a hint of it.

"That if you're somebody who wants to do something more practical, and I look at the prospects of people coming out of their studies, and I often joke, I wish I'd been smart enough to choose being an electrician over an electrical engineer, because it's those tradies that everyone's so short of."

Seymour sympathised with educators having to adapt to a new policy change, to allow everyone impacted to catch up.

But he is confident support will be on hand as they map out the overhaul.

"I'm sure that as the implementation rolls out, that support will be at the forefront of the government's mind," he said.

"But we haven't got to the point right now, we're just consulting on the shape of it. What I would say is that, because we are going back to something that is subject-based, I think some people might say it's a bit more prescriptive, then it's going to be clearer to educators, this is what the curriculum is. This is how it's assessed."

Seymour said there will be less work do "creating bespoke pathways".

"I think that's something generally, that after the New Zealand curriculum came out in 200 - since we've had a unit-based assessment for most of this century - it's actually been harder for teachers because we don't have, 'here's the body of knowledge, here's the assessment, go to it.'

"We've had a lot more background work for educators to work out what the pathway actually is for each student, and I hope that this approach will be welcomed."

Macleans College principal and ministerial advisory panellist Steve Hargreaves said the changes provided more clarity and he expected it to be implemented correctly.

"I think this is going to be phased really well, we do have a pretty long lead in," he told Morning Report.

"We're going to get the curriculum first and that's how it should be, so we learn what to teach and how to teach it before we start designing the assessments.

"There is a lot going on in primary school, but from what I can hear from my colleagues there, those changes to structured literacy and numeracy are landing really well."

Hargreaves said students will join high school better prepared, and that teachers he had spoken to were really positive about the changes.

He also believed it would encourage students to extend their stay at secondary school.

"This is a bit of a guess, but I think it might lift the de facto leaving age," he said.

"Now, if there's this indication that, well, you've got Level 1 and that's some kind of a leaving certificate, then students might head out the door.

"But now with the sort of the base level achievement occurs at Year 12, then I think we will see more students staying on."

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the problems the government had identified were ones he agreed with and were also raised during their review pre-Covid.

He said there needed to be changes and was interested in trying to find a consensus on how best to move forward.

"My request of the government is that they take the time to get their decisions right rather than try and rush them because the NCEA itself was rushed," he told Morning Report.

"It was actually introduced by a National government, and I think the rushing of the introduction of the NCEA is part of how we've landed up in this position in the first place, so, let's get this right."

Hipkins said he accepted responsibility for the review they did into NCEA Level 1 that the changes weren't fully implemented in the end.

He said there was a lot of debate about whether the then Labour government should scrap Level 1 when the review was conducted.

"We had really strong representations from schools and from some employers that they still wanted to see Level 1 in the system," he said.

"The current government have decided to do away with that ... a lot of schools had stopped teaching Level 1 already."

Hipkins said even though the process played out over three to four years, he conceded it wasn't perfect, and was more reason for the current government to take its time now and ensure it is implemented correctly.

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