What use is NCEA level one?

Is it time to get rid of NCEA level one?

That is the question raised by a damning Education Review Office (ERO) report on the newly-revised first year of the national school qualification.

The report said that despite changes introduced this year, level one was not reliable or fair and it was not clear what purpose it served.

It said it was time to consider dumping level one, turning it into a foundation-skills qualification, or making it more academically challenging.

Aorere College principal Leanne Webb told RNZ there was a place for a level one qualification, as long as students were leaving school without level 2.

"If you've got students leaving school and the highest qualification they've got is level one, well, that's better than leaving school without any qualification because it attests to the fact that the student has actually done some formal learning and has achieved something.

"If you were going to just assess in Year 12 and Year 13, surely you would have to make sure that every student stayed until Year 12 and at the moment we're just not managing that," she said.

Webb said any changes had to serve all students, and not just those in high-decile schools.

ERO's report said level one was not academically challenging but Webb said it was after all only level one of a qualification and if schools wanted more of a challenge they could push students to level two.

"Students do actually learn a lot from actually going through that process of being assessed on whatever skills it is that they've learned," she said.

Webb said it was too early for ERO to say the shift to fewer, larger achievement standards this year had not worked.

"It's not even been a year and we haven't even got the first set of results back. So until until we have that data and until we're able to look at the data over the nation it just seems to me that we are making conclusions before we've got anything around which to base them," she said.

"I think it's just too soon to say anything meaningful about the new level one qualification."

'We just need a bit more consistency'

Only about 10 percent of young people leave school with level one as their only qualification, and the review office report said about a quarter of secondary schools would not offer it next year, most of them in well-off communities.

Those figures suggested the purpose of level one was already being decided, with schools increasingly seeing it as being of most use for those who struggled academically.

Post Primary Teachers Association president Chris Abercrombie said if that was the case, it still needed to change.

"If we're going to have a foundational qualification, we need to make sure we get our pathways sorted into either further education, training or work. At the moment that's not really clear. Some schools are doing an amazing job, but it's individual schools working with their communities to do great things and we just need a bit more consistency across the board," he said.

Abercrombie said the union supported level one being an optional qualification and it agreed the qualification needed to be reviewed.

"If it come out as actually there's no purpose, we could scrap it but whatever we do with it we need to make sure that it's clear pathways for all young people so they can reach their goals," he said.

"There's such a small number of students where level one will be the only qualification they ever receive in their life that we need to start thinking about other options."

'Level one has never really had a clear purpose'

Michael Johnston - a senior research fellow at the market-led think tank The New Zealand Initiative - led the ministerial advisory group on English and maths .

He said the ERO report showed level one needed an overhaul.

"NCEA level one has never really had a clear purpose. Some schools like it because they see it as an exit qualification for young people who are possibly not likely to get levels two and three. But what we see in the ERO report is that employers don't trust level one much. They don't see it as a reliable measure of attitude to hard work, nine in 10 of them said it wasn't, and most of them don't think it's a reliable measure of knowledge and skills either.

"So to me, keeping it in place as a an exit qualification for those young people doesn't do them a service because really we need to be aiming to get far more to at least level two," he said.

Johnston said it was time to look at the entire secondary school qualification system.

"NCEA was well-intentioned, but I don't think it's met the the goal of bringing vocationally-oriented education up to the same kind of level of esteem as academic education," he said.

"We've got University Entrance for university-track students. But what about those who might want to go into apprenticeships or trades training? You can do that with NCEA, but there's no really clear pathway and there's certainly no distinct qualification for that kind of education."

Johnston said it might be possible for students to specialise from Year 11, choosing either a university-track qualification or a qualification that prepared them for industry training.

He said a standards-based approach, as currently used in NCEA, probably worked better for skills-based education than for knowledge-based education and was something that could be considered in a rethink of secondary school qualifications.

School Boards Association president Lorraine Kerr said the report confirmed inadequacies that had been known for a long time.

"NCEA has taken far too long to be a qualification that parents and employers can buy into or understand, let alone students," she said.

"Another negative is the perceived impacts and outcomes of NCEA results on schools, in terms of competition between schools such as league tables. We even have schools who pick and choose who sits exams."

Kerr said the same discussions about NCEA were being repeated.

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