Erica Stanford: Education Minister on the Level 1 achievement dropping while Level 2 and 3 improve

The Education Minister says our NCEA achievement results are ticking up as we climb out of Covid. 

Last year Level 1 achievement dropped slightly to its lowest level in a decade, and Māori fell further behind. 

There were improvements though in NCEA Levels 2, 3, and University Entrance for the first time in five years.  

Erica Stanford told Mike Hosking these students also came through after she became Minister. 

She says they've had that hour of reading, writing, and maths which has helped this incline, but she's really worried about Level 1. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bit of good news around school leavers. I think sort
of seventy six point one percent left last year with
the NCEEA Level two. Now that's up from seventy five
point five, fifty five point five percent left with level three,
which is up from fifty two point eight, forty point
two percent left with the university the entrance up from
thirty eight point six. So is that good? I guess
Erica Stanford's Education minister, and is with us morning?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Good morning?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Are they material improvements that you can go I did that?
Or might you have just got a bunch of kids
born at the right time who happened to do just
a smodge better than the ones born before them.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I think it's showing that that climb out of COVID
that we're saying, Look, I became the minister, and you
know December twenty twenty three, and these students started what
Februe twenty twenty four. So while we had an hour
a day of reading, writing, a maths and a big
focus on on the basics. I think this is the
incline you were starting to say. But the decline, the

(00:52):
bit at the bottom I'm really worried about. You should
is that is decades of decline.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, I just wonder if you've got different groups, two
distinct groups. You've got the kids who will go to school,
some will do better than the others, obviously, then you've
got a group of kids who are destined to go
nowhere from day one.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
I don't think they're destined to go nowhere. I think
we can change their destiny. That's what we're doing with
our huge reform program. The problem is when we knew
these kids last year who left without anything, ten thousand
of them. We knew who they were when they were
in year five and twenty eighteen, when a quarter of
them were at curriculum for mathematics, and nothing happened. That's
why I'm looking at that data that's coming through from

(01:30):
primary school. That's lighting a fire. We've got this huge
reform program, structured literacy, structured maths, all the maths books,
the different way of teaching explicitly, and we're already starting
to see results in phonics, and we'll have some data
out in term three about that. We can see the
results happening. So I don't want to be sitting here
in ten years time or five years time when these
kids hit high school going or they've failed again. It

(01:52):
is a tale of two hearts.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Do we do exit interviews with kids who leave with nothing?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, we don't, probably should, but we do track them
like we can see those who turn up in tertiary
institutions and not many of them do. Many of them
become neats, many of them go on benefit. It's not
a good life outcome when you don't leave an n
CEA or a qualification. The longer you stay in school,
the more likely you are to get something, and the

(02:19):
better your life outcomes. And that's got to be our goal.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, did you hear the Hipkins interview?

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Look, I just missed it. I'm really sorry. I heard
the very beginning when you started to have a go
at him. But I think they My feeling is, look,
I know they've answered all the questions, but the public
owed a level of transparency given what we all went
through that I think they owe it to us to
provide and we're not getting that. That's a shame.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Nice to talk to you, Erica Stamford, Education Minister. For
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