English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:631;Page:3055] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I want members to know just how serious the problems are in the New Zealand Qualification Authority which is the organisation that we are debating today. It has responsibility for running the qualifications system for young New Zealanders. That means that for 150000 young New Zealanders every year the question of whether they get a fair go from that qualification system is dependent on the integrity of that organisation’s processes. Some of its processes have integrity; it is able to conduct external exams with a couple of million scripts and it delivers results quite competently. But I have been very disturbed to find in recent weeks that the organisation has almost no intellectual integrity about how it assesses the quality of the way it examines young New Zealanders. 
In the Education and Science Committee we had a discussion with Karen Sewell whose main objective seems to have been to do a quick paint job for Minister Maharey in order to make sure there would be no controversy this year. But the New Zealand Qualifications Authority showed that it has no interest in the technical issues around the soundness of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) examinations. It has no interest in validity and reliability—those things are the currency of educational testing. Not only does the organisation have no interest in those areas but it has no ability to assess whether NCEA examinations are fair to our students. 
I asked Karen Sewell one simple question which was how she could assure parents like me that when a student sits an external exam and does an internal assessment on a related standard—which almost every student does—those assessments have about the same level of difficulty. Well she could not give me that assurance. Worse than that she made it clear that she thought it was a stupid question and that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has no interest at all in whether the standards of internal assessment are vaguely similar to the standards of external assessment. 
One of the reasons the authority has no interest in this is that almost any cursory analysis tells us that NCEA is still in many respects unfair to our students. I asked her what people she employed who had expertise in assessment. Well in this vast $50 million budget she says there are two of those people. I have asked people in New Zealand universities who are assessment experts about that and they do not recognise any of those people—they say there are none. Professor Hattie whom the Minister is keen to quote when it suits him—and who has done so incorrectly in a way that misled Parliament—told me that when he did the analysis on scholarship which anyone should do in a public examination system no one in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority knew how to carry out this analysis sufficiently so that he could talk to them about it. He told me that he had never been asked to do and no one has done tests of reliability and validity on NCEA levels 1 to 3. 
That is a disgrace. It is a scandal that we are running a national qualification and national examination system that has high stakes for thousands of students and we are served up waffle and pap by the chief executive who leaned across the desk and said: “You can have confidence.” Well I would say to Ms Sewell that I do not have confidence and I am pleased that she is gone. I say to Minister Maharey that the answers to making NCEA work are not political spin; the answers come from hard-headed analysis of the validity and reliability of the exams and that is not getting done. 
We are running national examination systems without expertise in assessment and we are not using the tools that tinpot Australian states apply to their examination systems relentlessly and forever. We do not do that because we are better! The Minister will get up and go on about School Certificate. Who cares about School Certificate? A whole generation of students and parents have passed through the system since then.