August 3, 2025 • 12 mins
The Government's intends to entirely phase out NCEA within five years.
The proposal would require students take English and Maths in Year 11 and sit a test in numeracy and literacy.
NCEA levels 2 and 3 would be replaced with two new qualifications in year 12 and 13 - a Certificate of Education and Advanced Certificate of Education respectively.
It's the most significant update to secondary school assessments since NCEA was introduced more than two decades ago.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Carrywood and Morning's podcast from News
Talks hed B.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
As you've heard in our news, the government intends to
entirely phase out NCAA within five years. The proposal is
requiring students to take English and mathson year eleven and
sit a test in Numeracy and Literacy. NCAA levels two
and three will be replaced with two new qualifications in
year twelve and thirteen, a Certificate of Education and Advanced
(00:34):
Certificate of Education respectively. This will be the most significant
update to secondary school assessment since NCIA was introduced more
than two decades ago. Minister for Education Erica Stanford joins me. Now,
very good morning to you.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Good morning, how are you well?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Probably not as busy as you. It's been a big morning.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Oh it has been, and We've been building up to
this for a while now. I've been talking with Principles
and my advisory group for almost a year to get
to this point. So it's been a very exciting day.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I bet it has. We talked about the fact that
was introduced more than two decades ago. Is it any
coincidence that the decline in New Zealand's international performance as
regards our education system when compared to others, has been
declining for the past twenty five years.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
It's one of the things I think more importantly is
our curriculum. It coincided with the same time we got
rid of our knowledge rich year by year curriculum and
moved to a sort of three yearly phased competencies based
soft skills curriculum, which didn't dictate what knowledge and skills
needed to be acquired to be successful in a subject.
(01:42):
And that really has been problematic for us, which is
why we when we came into office, my number one
job was to rewrite the English and Mass curriculum at
primary and intermediate and that is now being taught this year,
and now we're doing that for every single curriculum right
up to year thirteen, and it is internationally benchmarked and yep,
(02:05):
it will jump up a level. And I think a
lot of parents will have noticed that in primary, especially
at lower primary maths. But that's because we've internationally bench
liked it because of those falling results that you've mentioned.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
And it is so good that you are doing the
structural foundation work to build up a world class education system. Again,
I have been staggered that young people arrive at secondary
school basically illiterate and enumerate when they get there. This
should not be happening ow on Earth, and a whole
lot of social ills result from that as well, because
(02:41):
if you're a kid who considers themselves dumb, you'd rather
be feared than pitied and off you go.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
That's right, and their life outcomes are just not what
we want them to be. And these are smart kids
who have been let down. And that's why we have
moved to this far more explicit teaching, structured approach and
phonics and a move to a Maths action plan, a structured,
explicit way of teaching maths in a certain way. What
(03:11):
we have really moved away from that maybe clear, is
a student centered, play based sort of projects led where
they sit on bean bags and discuss things in a
group and the teacher is sort of facilitating the learning
rather than the teacher, the professional at the front of
the class who holds the knowledge, who is imparting that
(03:31):
knowledge in a structured way. That the children are gaining
mastery of a subject over time and retaining it in
their long term memory to build up that knowledge, and
that's what we have missed. That's what so many other
countries who have been in decline have missed. And that's
what is now being turned around in just eighteen months.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
It really is, you've done a hell of a lot
of work. You entered office and you got cracking.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
We did. It has been a lot of pace, but
a lot of clarity because we did the work and opposition.
I mean I had a very steep learning curve of
the reading war was. I mean, you go into a
class and ask a teacher about, you know, what is
the reason for the decline of our standards and reading
and they will say to me, minister or member. Back
(04:17):
then it wasn't minister. You know, you know the word
chit and it you have no idea how controversial that is.
Have you heard of the reading was? And that began
my steep learning curve into what has happened in this country?
And so you know, but we have now introduced structured literacy,
the phonics checks, the results are already coming through. I
(04:37):
had a grandmother come up to me the other day whose
eight year old had not learned to read. This year,
he's learnt to read using structured literacy, and he cannot
stop him from reading. And he now wants to be
a scientist. So it's those those stories and that it's
not just anecdotal, because we're starting to get some data
back and now too, and we're hearing from teachers about
the accelerated progress that we're seeing, and that is just
(05:01):
so excellent to see.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Are the teachers able to keep keep up with the
same pace that you're setting.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
We have been really careful with that so I know
this year we implemented a new Maths and English curriculum
in one year, and it was a lot for many
schools who hadn't done structured literacy before or hadn't done
structured maths. And we've been very careful with this next
phased rollout of the curriculum that goes all the way
up to year thirteen and the new qualification that it's
(05:31):
very carefully staged out so that we have give teachers
the time that they need to learn the new curriculum
and also the new qualifications. That's why the first cohort
who will go through the new qualifications are only in
year eight this year. Next year they will go into
year nine and learn from the new internationally benchmarked qualification
(05:51):
for three years before they hit their first year of
that year twelve New Zealand Certificate of Education.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
It sounds like back to the future, like when I
was at doing school. See you got I did six
subjects outclass did six, the others did five. You had
to do some others were optional, and there was a
pass and fail rate. If you got over fifty you passed,
and if you got over eighty five you were a plus.
It was very easy.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
It was relatively straightforward, and we have moved to a
very very complex system where you know, my daughter says
to me, Mum, I only have to do the excellence questions,
just those two and I get excellence. So I said,
what about the other questions? I don't have to do those,
And parents really struggling to understand it. I certainly did
struggling to understand it, and then struggling to understand how
(06:40):
to help their children navigate through their grades but also
through their pathways and which subjects to take, because in
the end, in many cases, it's not actually full subjects.
It's random credits mixed together to make a qualification without
deep subject learning. So yeah, it does look a little
bit like things we've seen in the past, but we
were maintaining some of that flexibility, so there will still
(07:03):
be those vocational pathways that are strengthened and more highly relevant.
There will still be internals and externals, so we are maintained.
We're taking the good parts of NCA and strengthening them
even further.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
But it's staggering. It's taken this long to fix it,
to change it to because even back in twenty fifteen,
there were so many state schools that were going, you
know what, this doesn't work for us, this is not good.
You know, they were offering the Cambridge the Cambridge International
Exams or the alternatives that they were able to do
because it was not working.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Now and that's why you see so many schools who
have moved away. They've either ditched Level one all together.
And I think it's only sixty four percent of schools
are still offering Level one and moving towards NC sorry
Cambridge or IB and that's Look, it's all for choice
and if they want to do that, but we should
have something that is so world class and so well
(08:00):
leading that people want to be using it. And the
reason they're going to Cambridge is because you know, we
don't yet, but we will. And I take your point
that we've been seemingly complaining about this for a long
time and no one's really done anything. But it is Look,
it's no mean fate to come in and sort of say, actually,
this isn't working. But we do this in New Zealand
(08:21):
so much. We followed balanced literacy where we were telling
kids to look at the picture and guess the word
for decades, even in the face, even in the face
of evidence and data and brain mapping that showed us
that that was not working, and yet we still doubled down.
I don't know why we do that in this country.
Sometimes we have to go, actually, this is not working.
(08:43):
It cannot be fixed. And by the way, our international
comparison countries that we look to who are high performing
are not doing this. They didn't follow us. Maybe we
need to do something different and so, but the key
hour is implementation. I've got to get this right.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah, absolutely, the Yeah, we used to have something great
and it takes a long time to accept that that
has changed. But the idea logues, how are they How
were they able to do so much damage for so long?
Like it's not based on science or data, the ideologues,
it's based on theory, and their own pie in the
(09:17):
sky desperate attempt to carve out a name for themselves
in academia.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Well maybe, And look, I just think who I think
about when I wake up every single day is parents
and their children. Because you know, it's interesting when you
look back over the last little while. Parents inherently knew
there was something wrong. Yeah, they knew that their children
should be sitting exams. They knew they wanted more, they
were more ambitious for their kids. They knew that getting
(09:45):
a credit by having a part time job wasn't right.
And so you know, parents, you know, have been proved
right what you inherently knew. The data does show us,
and we need to do something about it because I'm ambitious,
just as ambitious for this nation's children's are children as
their parents, and so the next steps are really important.
(10:05):
And I want to make sure that parents feel reassured
that the implementation that we're about to undertake is carefully
thought through, carefully staged, carefully managed. Were putting all the
right resources and professional learning and development into the set
that they need to be successful. Because I've got the
last cohort. My son is in year nine. He won't
do the new one. But I know there are parents
(10:27):
out there who've got students an intermediate who will be
the first lot to go through, and I want them
to feel confident that we will be very, very focused
on good implementation so that their young people get access
to this world class education system that they will set
their kids up for success.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I've got a couple of questions here from listeners. I'm
not opposed to changes to the current NCAA system, but
my son is doing Level one this year, had planned
to do Level two next year, Level three and year
thirteen as opposed to IB, which is school also offers.
Will he be disadvantage in coming out of school with
NCAA in terms of his options?
Speaker 3 (11:06):
And the answer to that is everyone will make a
choice on what is best for their children. And my
son and daughter are at a school that offers nca
and IB, and both of them will do n CEA.
That is a choice that I am making because it
is still a good qualification. People still go on. Young
people still go on to Oxford and Cambridge, and there
were two boys recently from Road through A Boys High
(11:27):
School who went to Harvard with n CEA. It is
still a good qualification and We've got that same choice,
and I'm making it as well. But we can be
so so much better because at the moment that the
problem is the inconsistency between what's being learned, how much
is being learned that deep subject learning. And look, there
are some students that IB will work for. It didn't
(11:49):
work for my children and it may not work for others,
but it may work for some others. So that's a
personal choice that parents will make.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And one last question, can you ask, Erica, if there's
bipartisan agreement, nothing worse than another government coming in and
kicking it out again. Our kids and our teachers need consistence,
like I.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Certainly hope there will be, and I've reached out, so
we watch the space, right.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
We'll have to get you in for longer, I think,
because I know a lot of people will have questions
and they are concerned, and they have been paying money.
They didn't have to send their kids to literacy and
numerousy programs out of school because the system was failing them.
They'll be delighted to hear this. I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
I'd love to thank you so.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Much, Minister for Education, Erica Stanford's.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
For more from Kerry Wood and mornings. Listen live to
news talks that'd be from nine am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Carrywood and Morning's podcast from News
Talks hed B.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
As you've heard in our news, the government intends to
entirely phase out NCAA within five years. The proposal is
requiring students to take English and mathson year eleven and
sit a test in Numeracy and Literacy. NCAA levels two
and three will be replaced with two new qualifications in
year twelve and thirteen, a Certificate of Education and Advanced
(00:34):
Certificate of Education respectively. This will be the most significant
update to secondary school assessment since NCIA was introduced more
than two decades ago. Minister for Education Erica Stanford joins me. Now,
very good morning to you.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Good morning, how are you well?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Probably not as busy as you. It's been a big morning.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Oh it has been, and We've been building up to
this for a while now. I've been talking with Principles
and my advisory group for almost a year to get
to this point. So it's been a very exciting day.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I bet it has. We talked about the fact that
was introduced more than two decades ago. Is it any
coincidence that the decline in New Zealand's international performance as
regards our education system when compared to others, has been
declining for the past twenty five years.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
It's one of the things I think more importantly is
our curriculum. It coincided with the same time we got
rid of our knowledge rich year by year curriculum and
moved to a sort of three yearly phased competencies based
soft skills curriculum, which didn't dictate what knowledge and skills
needed to be acquired to be successful in a subject.
(01:42):
And that really has been problematic for us, which is
why we when we came into office, my number one
job was to rewrite the English and Mass curriculum at
primary and intermediate and that is now being taught this year,
and now we're doing that for every single curriculum right
up to year thirteen, and it is internationally benchmarked and yep,
(02:05):
it will jump up a level. And I think a
lot of parents will have noticed that in primary, especially
at lower primary maths. But that's because we've internationally bench
liked it because of those falling results that you've mentioned.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
And it is so good that you are doing the
structural foundation work to build up a world class education system. Again,
I have been staggered that young people arrive at secondary
school basically illiterate and enumerate when they get there. This
should not be happening ow on Earth, and a whole
lot of social ills result from that as well, because
(02:41):
if you're a kid who considers themselves dumb, you'd rather
be feared than pitied and off you go.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
That's right, and their life outcomes are just not what
we want them to be. And these are smart kids
who have been let down. And that's why we have
moved to this far more explicit teaching, structured approach and
phonics and a move to a Maths action plan, a structured,
explicit way of teaching maths in a certain way. What
(03:11):
we have really moved away from that maybe clear, is
a student centered, play based sort of projects led where
they sit on bean bags and discuss things in a
group and the teacher is sort of facilitating the learning
rather than the teacher, the professional at the front of
the class who holds the knowledge, who is imparting that
(03:31):
knowledge in a structured way. That the children are gaining
mastery of a subject over time and retaining it in
their long term memory to build up that knowledge, and
that's what we have missed. That's what so many other
countries who have been in decline have missed. And that's
what is now being turned around in just eighteen months.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
It really is, you've done a hell of a lot
of work. You entered office and you got cracking.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
We did. It has been a lot of pace, but
a lot of clarity because we did the work and opposition.
I mean I had a very steep learning curve of
the reading war was. I mean, you go into a
class and ask a teacher about, you know, what is
the reason for the decline of our standards and reading
and they will say to me, minister or member. Back
(04:17):
then it wasn't minister. You know, you know the word
chit and it you have no idea how controversial that is.
Have you heard of the reading was? And that began
my steep learning curve into what has happened in this country?
And so you know, but we have now introduced structured literacy,
the phonics checks, the results are already coming through. I
(04:37):
had a grandmother come up to me the other day whose
eight year old had not learned to read. This year,
he's learnt to read using structured literacy, and he cannot
stop him from reading. And he now wants to be
a scientist. So it's those those stories and that it's
not just anecdotal, because we're starting to get some data
back and now too, and we're hearing from teachers about
the accelerated progress that we're seeing, and that is just
(05:01):
so excellent to see.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Are the teachers able to keep keep up with the
same pace that you're setting.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
We have been really careful with that so I know
this year we implemented a new Maths and English curriculum
in one year, and it was a lot for many
schools who hadn't done structured literacy before or hadn't done
structured maths. And we've been very careful with this next
phased rollout of the curriculum that goes all the way
up to year thirteen and the new qualification that it's
(05:31):
very carefully staged out so that we have give teachers
the time that they need to learn the new curriculum
and also the new qualifications. That's why the first cohort
who will go through the new qualifications are only in
year eight this year. Next year they will go into
year nine and learn from the new internationally benchmarked qualification
(05:51):
for three years before they hit their first year of
that year twelve New Zealand Certificate of Education.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
It sounds like back to the future, like when I
was at doing school. See you got I did six
subjects outclass did six, the others did five. You had
to do some others were optional, and there was a
pass and fail rate. If you got over fifty you passed,
and if you got over eighty five you were a plus.
It was very easy.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
It was relatively straightforward, and we have moved to a
very very complex system where you know, my daughter says
to me, Mum, I only have to do the excellence questions,
just those two and I get excellence. So I said,
what about the other questions? I don't have to do those,
And parents really struggling to understand it. I certainly did
struggling to understand it, and then struggling to understand how
(06:40):
to help their children navigate through their grades but also
through their pathways and which subjects to take, because in
the end, in many cases, it's not actually full subjects.
It's random credits mixed together to make a qualification without
deep subject learning. So yeah, it does look a little
bit like things we've seen in the past, but we
were maintaining some of that flexibility, so there will still
(07:03):
be those vocational pathways that are strengthened and more highly relevant.
There will still be internals and externals, so we are maintained.
We're taking the good parts of NCA and strengthening them
even further.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
But it's staggering. It's taken this long to fix it,
to change it to because even back in twenty fifteen,
there were so many state schools that were going, you
know what, this doesn't work for us, this is not good.
You know, they were offering the Cambridge the Cambridge International
Exams or the alternatives that they were able to do
because it was not working.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Now and that's why you see so many schools who
have moved away. They've either ditched Level one all together.
And I think it's only sixty four percent of schools
are still offering Level one and moving towards NC sorry
Cambridge or IB and that's Look, it's all for choice
and if they want to do that, but we should
have something that is so world class and so well
(08:00):
leading that people want to be using it. And the
reason they're going to Cambridge is because you know, we
don't yet, but we will. And I take your point
that we've been seemingly complaining about this for a long
time and no one's really done anything. But it is Look,
it's no mean fate to come in and sort of say, actually,
this isn't working. But we do this in New Zealand
(08:21):
so much. We followed balanced literacy where we were telling
kids to look at the picture and guess the word
for decades, even in the face, even in the face
of evidence and data and brain mapping that showed us
that that was not working, and yet we still doubled down.
I don't know why we do that in this country.
Sometimes we have to go, actually, this is not working.
(08:43):
It cannot be fixed. And by the way, our international
comparison countries that we look to who are high performing
are not doing this. They didn't follow us. Maybe we
need to do something different and so, but the key
hour is implementation. I've got to get this right.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah, absolutely, the Yeah, we used to have something great
and it takes a long time to accept that that
has changed. But the idea logues, how are they How
were they able to do so much damage for so long?
Like it's not based on science or data, the ideologues,
it's based on theory, and their own pie in the
(09:17):
sky desperate attempt to carve out a name for themselves
in academia.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Well maybe, And look, I just think who I think
about when I wake up every single day is parents
and their children. Because you know, it's interesting when you
look back over the last little while. Parents inherently knew
there was something wrong. Yeah, they knew that their children
should be sitting exams. They knew they wanted more, they
were more ambitious for their kids. They knew that getting
(09:45):
a credit by having a part time job wasn't right.
And so you know, parents, you know, have been proved
right what you inherently knew. The data does show us,
and we need to do something about it because I'm ambitious,
just as ambitious for this nation's children's are children as
their parents, and so the next steps are really important.
(10:05):
And I want to make sure that parents feel reassured
that the implementation that we're about to undertake is carefully
thought through, carefully staged, carefully managed. Were putting all the
right resources and professional learning and development into the set
that they need to be successful. Because I've got the
last cohort. My son is in year nine. He won't
do the new one. But I know there are parents
(10:27):
out there who've got students an intermediate who will be
the first lot to go through, and I want them
to feel confident that we will be very, very focused
on good implementation so that their young people get access
to this world class education system that they will set
their kids up for success.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I've got a couple of questions here from listeners. I'm
not opposed to changes to the current NCAA system, but
my son is doing Level one this year, had planned
to do Level two next year, Level three and year
thirteen as opposed to IB, which is school also offers.
Will he be disadvantage in coming out of school with
NCAA in terms of his options?
Speaker 3 (11:06):
And the answer to that is everyone will make a
choice on what is best for their children. And my
son and daughter are at a school that offers nca
and IB, and both of them will do n CEA.
That is a choice that I am making because it
is still a good qualification. People still go on. Young
people still go on to Oxford and Cambridge, and there
were two boys recently from Road through A Boys High
(11:27):
School who went to Harvard with n CEA. It is
still a good qualification and We've got that same choice,
and I'm making it as well. But we can be
so so much better because at the moment that the
problem is the inconsistency between what's being learned, how much
is being learned that deep subject learning. And look, there
are some students that IB will work for. It didn't
(11:49):
work for my children and it may not work for others,
but it may work for some others. So that's a
personal choice that parents will make.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And one last question, can you ask, Erica, if there's
bipartisan agreement, nothing worse than another government coming in and
kicking it out again. Our kids and our teachers need consistence,
like I.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Certainly hope there will be, and I've reached out, so
we watch the space, right.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
We'll have to get you in for longer, I think,
because I know a lot of people will have questions
and they are concerned, and they have been paying money.
They didn't have to send their kids to literacy and
numerousy programs out of school because the system was failing them.
They'll be delighted to hear this. I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
I'd love to thank you so.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Much, Minister for Education, Erica Stanford's.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
For more from Kerry Wood and mornings. Listen live to
news talks that'd be from nine am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.