Coddington Deborah: National Certificate in Educational Achievement Moratorium Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: National Certificate in Educational Achievement Moratorium Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:606;Page:4055] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I rise to support Donna Awatere Huata’s bill. I do not think it actually goes far enough. I think we should go further and allow schools that want to dump the National Certificate of Educational Achievement to do so. It is always such a delight to return to this House and find that the standard of debate is as high as ever and that members are so concerned about standards of education that they use a debate about such an important thing as a national qualification for petty point-scoring nasty bickering and misrepresentation of other members. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes I did go to the Education and Science Committee; it was one of the first select committees— 
Darren Hughes 
: Once. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: I am not on that committee; I was a substitute. It was one of the first select committees I went to and I did say that I would be putting in a minority report—I did not say that it would be a negative report—and they all had a good cackle at my expense. I hope it made them feel very proud of themselves that they were so helpful to a new member. But I suppose that that is just typical of the cackling crones in this House. 
I find it appalling that members who were considerably advantaged by national examinations like School Certificate and bursary are now forcing the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) on to New Zealand youngsters. It is what a leading secondary school principal in New Zealand John Morris has called the most dangerous experiment ever foisted on to New Zealand’s children. The NCEA—the name just about sums it up. It is just an “achievement” but the Minister calls it a triumph. 
I wonder whether any of those members who speak so knowledgeably about it have read this article by Warwick Elley an emeritus professor of education who is writing in the latest  
Education Review 
. He writes that the assessment system does not pass and that our students deserve better. Now Warwick Elley is not some right-wing ideologue. He is not even political about this issue and as I said this is an issue that is above politics. But he writes that despite the Minister being pleased with the first NCEA results “a cursory glance at the summary statistics is enough to show how arbitrary and basically incredible the whole system is.” In that article which I think every member of this House who is interested in education should read Warwick Elley systematically sets out exactly why the NCEA is a shoddy sub-standard subjective non-qualification. 
All this bill is trying to do is delay implementing the NCEA. Yes it possibly is a bit late for level 2 but what about level 3? I notice that none of those people who use that excuse to oppose the bill bothered to pass an amendment to draw it out further. All this bill is saying is that we should proceed with caution. There is no need to rush this qualification on to secondary schools one year after the other because that is dangerous. It forces level 2 and level 3 on to the same students who sat level 1. Those students are being used as guinea pigs and they will leave school not with School Certificate or Sixth Form Certificate or even bursary but a smorgasbord of nebulous qualifications that look like this sheet. Nobody can make head or tail of this record. There are no percentages. There is no clear direction to students to employers or to parents of how well the students did. It just describes what they did: “interpret historical sources” or “estimate and determine probabilities”. 
Helen Duncan says there has been very little complaint about the NCEA. Well she should have come to the ACT select committee inquiry that we took around the country. We heard from people like Martin Cooney the ex-Post Primary Teachers Association president who damned this qualification as a social engineering experiment foisted on to New Zealand children by the left-wing ideologues in the Ministry of Education and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. [ 
Interruption 
] That was from one of Labour’s guys—not from one of ours. Byron Bentley the principal of Macleans College in Auckland calls it the biggest fraud perpetrated on New Zealand schools. A teacher at Macleans College said that the NCEA was like a new drug being dumped on the market with no trials and no peer reviews.