English Bill: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
English Bill: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
[Volume:624;Page:19450] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance 
. It is good to see that the Government has backed down on its purist ideological model it has been imposing on the students of secondary schools in New Zealand. 
Opposition Member 
: Step one. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: As my colleague has said that is only step one because the big question hanging over the education of 100000 students who will be entering for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) this year is this: how long will it take the Minister to back down and change the way he operates the NCEA? 
Today the Government continued the tactic of stonewalling and obfuscation that it has followed all this year. But members in the House know that as these issues are raised and that as public concern increases the Government will be forced to move in order to make some pragmatic changes to the NCEA. 
I want to remind the House of the series of events that have led to this decision announced today by the Government. In late January I became aware of the fact that there were some odd results in the scholarship exam. They were much talked about around the education sector. The Government apparently did not know anything about those matters so I put them into the public arena. Public concern about the scholarship results was quite substantial. 
The Government was then forced to defend the scholarship exam and it defended it by saying that it would not release the information—that there was nothing wrong with it and that variability such as there was with those results was to be expected. I think that the matter might have rested there if it were not for the fact that many schools and their teachers and students felt cheated. When they saw the results of the scholarship exam they expressed their views very strongly. Many of them went to the media and many of them came to me. 
The Government then tried to cover up what had happened with scholarship. Through questions in the House Opposition members were able to establish that the Minister of Education Trevor Mallard had known for several weeks that there were problems with the scholarship exam results. But even though he knew there were problems he made public statements announcing changes to the scholarship awards without any reference to those problems at all. 
I take this opportunity to lay the blame for the scholarship debacle very clearly where it should lie which is at the feet of Trevor Mallard the Minister of Education. He is the man who right through last year brushed aside every critic labelling them as idiots. He is the man who gave total backing to an incompetent New Zealand Qualifications Authority as it went about the process of implementing the scholarship system which the authority had been told would not work. In fact some of the people from whom the Government took advice for this announcement are the people who told the Government 2 years ago that the path it was going down would not work. 
Trevor Mallard decided to continue anyway. He continued in a way that was reckless of the aims and aspirations of the thousands of young New Zealanders who are our best students. I believe that he knew it would not work very well but he had the arrogance to believe that that would not matter. That is what I believe happened. 
Then a couple of thousand young students in New Zealand ended up with the most bizarre exam results they could get—results where the Cabinet said: “You passed it.” Imagine that! It is like Zimbabwe. The authority did not get the right results; the matter got in the paper because of the authority’s incompetence; and Cabinet stepped in and said: “We will give you a certificate of distinction and you a certificate of distinction.” 
The young people of New Zealand were confronted with the awful spectacle of the Hon David Benson-Pope as chief examiner. Well when he fell asleep in the House people really got to see the Government in action—because that is what the Government did about it; it tried to sleep right through the debate. In the end the Minister succumbed to the pressure and set up the Scholarship Reference Group. 
I have said all along that what those students need in scholarship is a ranking exam because scholarship could not work in the way it was set up. It was set up as if everyone who passed the standard would receive a scholarship but of the students who passed the standard only some would receive money. So they have to be ranked; it is obvious. Last year I asked some of our leading educationalists how that ranking would happen. Well none of them knew how it would happen and that is why we ended up with such a debacle. 
But I have to say that the debacle is not over. There are still 140 school awards to be made under the scholarship system—140 school awards have not yet been made. So this is the situation that confronts students: if three or four students in a school all receive one scholarship all in different subjects only one of them will receive $1500 a year for the next 3 years—$4500. One of them will receive money—but no one knows who it will be or how it will be decided. 
Even now schools are confused. I was rung by a school official today who said: “We have just been asked by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to rank our students so that we decide the top scholar in our school who will get $4500 over 3 years.” I rang another school which told me: “Oh no. The school doesn’t do it; the authority will do it.” So I asked: “How will the authority rank your students to determine the top scholar?”. Well the school had no idea and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has no idea. I have looked through the Scholarship Reference Group report and the Cabinet paper and no one there has any idea. 
So 140 of our top students are now pitched into another lottery. The first lottery concerned whether they would receive a scholarship at all—those ones were the lucky ones; they got it—and the next lottery means that the 140 have to sit around and wait for someone to decide somehow who will receive those top scholarships. The scholarship is worth $4500. That is 450 hours of part-time work at $10 an hour if one is lucky. So it matters. 
Phil Heatley 
: Cabinet will decide! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Maybe my colleague is right. Why do we not get the Hon David Benson-Pope to decide? Why does he not decide? 
Pansy Wong 
: Is he awake enough for it? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well if he is awake—if he can stay awake long enough can he decide? Well I would say no because the Hon David Benson-Pope has shown no interest in students’ welfare or in fairness for students all the way through this whole debacle. 
So when the Minister gets to his feet I want him to explain how those scholarships will be allocated. I want him to tell us how a system that the Scholarship Reference Group says cannot rank students will actually rank them. The House deserves to know today how that will happen because hundreds of students out there are still waiting to find out whether they get the top Scholarship Award for their school. Well that is scholarship! 
The Government will pretend that it has made no changes to its lovely standards-based theology when in fact it has. It has changed the system by doing three things. Firstly it has ranked students. Secondly it has provided gradings or marks as the recommendation here says. Thirdly it has predetermined how many students will get scholarships which is in the range of 2 or 3 percent. I agree with those changes; I welcome the back-down. 
But now we come to the serious issue: how long will the Government try to hold out on the NCEA being unchanged—remaining as it is? Every time Government members get up in the House and say that the Opposition spokesman is talking nonsense and that everything is fine we find within about 2 months that the policy has changed. 
My colleague from New Zealand First Brian Donnelly has had exactly the same experience. He gets up and says certain things. The Government is nice to him for some reason—it always abuses me—but it ends up changing the policy. [ 
Interruption 
] Well the Minister thinks that it is only backward retrograde conservative people who want the change. 
I have a letter from Shirley Boys High School—a very reasonable moderate letter which the Minister was sent—that sets out the strengths of the NCEA but then that essentially says the assessment does not provide fairness for the school’s students. That school is a pretty straightforward middle-of-the-road non-political school. I want to tell the Minister—who is a new Minister a junior Minister and usually a sleeping Minister—that when he gets a letter like that he should take notice. That school is not some den of National voters or some arm of the Business Roundtable; that is a middle-of-the-road mainstream school suggesting that he change the NCEA to provide fairness for students. 
I believe that the Minister should do that and I believe that in the end he will be forced to do that—or the next Government certainly will. He simply needs to change the assessment for our students. 
I have looked at the national results for 2004. The essential problem is that a student’s success in the NCEA depends on picking the right subjects in the right year. 
Stephen Franks 
: And the right school. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Actually it is worse than that. Public confidence in this qualification is now so low that the qualification is now rated according to the school someone went to. I have to tell this House with regret that someone who went to Catlins Area School Menzies College or Blue Mountain College in my electorate will not be rated in the same way as someone who went to Tawa College Avondale College or Massey High School because those are schools people have heard of. They have never heard of Catlins Area School or of Northern Southland College which has only 90 students in its secondary department. 
That is the worst possible outcome for a State education system and that is the irony of this whole issue. Labour which prides itself on its wonderful morality about State education has done more to destroy the NCEA and more to destroy the credibility of our secondary State education and our tertiary State education than any other Government this country has had. Labour has done that through arrogance complacency extremism and a deep ideological attachment to a system that does not deliver fairness and credibility for our students. 
The system keeps the bureaucrats happy. It means that they can go to conferences and say they are the only people in the world doing this. But that does not mean it works. The bureaucrats can go to conferences and say that New Zealand is the only Western country where Cabinet has to decide who passes the exams— 
Phil Heatley 
: And Zimbabwe. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: And Zimbabwe—no in Zimbabwe it never got that bad! They fixed it in Zimbabwe before Mugabe decided on giving out the certificates. 
The system does not work for students and this qualification has no purpose other than to work for students so I welcome the Government’s announcement today. It is a substantial back-down. It is a substantial response to the practical concerns of so many leading educators and that is good. 
The Minister will now try to sound as if nothing has changed as if he listened to nobody as if he were always right and as if none of it ever happened. But I say to the Minister that he should consider his obligation to the public good consider his obligation to the secondary school students of New Zealand and start heeding the advice he is getting about the NCEA so that we can make the qualification work for students. The system needs some practical incorporation of norm reference - type testing and assessment which would underpin the NCEA and make it work in the way many of us want it to work.