Coddington Deborah: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Coddington Deborah: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:626;Page:21318] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I too want to address concerns about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. These are not just the concerns of this House; they are the concerns of parents all over New Zealand. Since 1990 the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has held itself up as a world leader in assessment; that is what it says it is. It has foisted on us the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) which parents now call “No Chance of Ever Achieving”. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority does not even know what world standards are; it is not even interested in world standards. The NCEA scholarship has been a disaster. NCEA levels 1 2 and 3 have been a disaster. As the Hon Brian Donnelly said the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has been reviewed reviewed and reviewed. The State Services Commission review set terms of reference relating to standards processes and communication. These things should have been in the system long before it got to the stage of a State Services Commission review. They are all basic things that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority could not even get right. 
The purpose of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is to provide “quality assured qualifications”. What other Crown entity is the subject of a Tui billboard? This Tui billboard ridicules one of our most important secondary school qualifications. It says: “I past NCEA Inglish. Yeah right.” 
How shameful for a Crown entity that holds itself up as a world leader in education standards to be the butt of a joke on a billboard that advertises beer! That is about how far it has gone. The chairman Mr Fraser has gone. The chief executive officer Karen Van Rooyen has gone. The Ministers will not take responsibility for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We now have an acting chief executive Karen Sewell who I am reliably informed is a very nice person. But as one prominent New Zealand principal likes to say she was on her way to turning Green Bay High School into the only sole-charge high school in New Zealand. Parents took their children away from that school in droves. There were no standards at that school. In fact it was so bad that when the zoning boundaries were redrawn $50000 was immediately overnight wiped off the value of properties that were brought into the zone of Green Bay High School. That is how bad it was. And now this Minister has allowed his board to appoint someone like that. 
 The problem is that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is so bad now and the level has reached such a poor standard that it will be well-nigh impossible to attract anyone of quality to that position. Who would want to be handed a hospital pass like that? 
What does the New Zealand Qualifications Authority cost us? In 2003 the Government threw $30 million at it. The Minister said that all the problems were due to not enough resources and that it just needed more money. What did the Government do? It threw $52 million more at it in 2004. What was it I ask the Minister—double or quits? Just keep throwing millions at it and all the problems will go away? [ 
Interruption 
] 
Labour’s solution to everything is to just shovel more money at it. Students already pay to sit their qualifications. Despite that when students were very kindly invited by the Minister to be reassessed in the NCEA scholarship disaster would this Minister rescind the $30 reassessment fee they had to pay? At least David Benson-Pope said he would consider rescinding it but no the Minister of Education totally ruled it out. Well why should the Labour Government rescind it? It was just another tax as far as it was concerned. 
The New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Minister were warned and warned that the NCEA scholarship would be unworkable. A non-competitive system cannot be grafted on to a competitive exam. The solution is to give those qualifications back to organisations in the private sector like the New Zealand Education Scholarship Trust which for years has run scholarship with no problems at all. We never saw that on a Tui billboard. We never saw New Zealand bursary university entrance or even School Certificate which had some problems on a Tui billboard. A whole generation of New Zealand students has been subject to an experiment. It is not just an unfortunate experiment; it is a total disaster and they have been severely disadvantaged. It is child abuse of the mind.