Turei Metiria: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
Turei Metiria: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
[Volume:624;Page:19461] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 When the issue about scholarships first arose the Green Party was very clear on its position that no young person should suffer as a result of the mistakes of the ministry of the Minister and of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We said just a few weeks ago that where any young person has suffered by not receiving the grade he or she ought to have received in the scholarship exam there should be a provision to provide the student with a scholarship so that the student is able to acquire the benefits of his or her extraordinary hard work and level of achievement. We said then—and we still think this—that even if that means that more scholarships are awarded and even if it means that young people who might have only barely got through end up getting a scholarship it is better to make sure that no young person suffers for the stupid mistakes made through a complete failure of planning on behalf of the ministry the Minister and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. That is the only way the Government can restore to families and to the young people whom the Government talks rhetorically about all the time as being the future of this country any faith that the institutions actually care about the education that young people are working so hard to achieve. That is particularly the case given that many of them are about to enter university and will have to pay through the nose for the privilege of continuing their education which the Government apparently thinks is very important. We urge the Government to pursue those ideas—not to award secondary-level scholarships as it has proposed to do but to ensure that all children and young people who are entitled to a scholarship receive one. 
I want to bring the House’s attention to a report that has recently come out from the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) on the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). It is titled 
 Teachers Talk About NCEA 
. It is a research report from a number of focus groups of secondary school teachers—the focus groups were run at the end of last year before the scholarship issue came to light—where teachers gave their very clear precise and very good-quality experiential perspective on the NCEA on how it has been progressing and on the things that need to be done to ensure that it is a successful qualification for our kids in the future. A number of recommendations have come out of that report and firstly I shall refer to two of them. 
The first recommendation is that an external review of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s processes in relation to external assessment is an urgent requirement in order to ensure that all NCEA exams whether they be the general exams or those at scholarship level are of high quality and do deliver acceptable comparability of results from year to year standard to standard and subject to subject. The report recommended that that review should be completed by the end of term 2 of this year in order to ensure that those mistakes do not happen again—that we do not end up with another year’s worth of children and young people sitting their scholarship exams expecting to get the marks they have worked so hard for and then failing to do so because of the failure of the authority to prepare properly. 
The second recommendation that comes out of the report is that the change management processes of the authority and of the Ministry of Education require an urgent review.That would ensure the reports states that in future any changes in standards or other assessment requirements or processes are signalled in a reasonable time frame that allows teachers to adapt their practice without undue pressure. The review would also involve the communication systems in both those agencies to ensure that teachers students parents and the wider community are kept well informed in a timely manner. That would have been very useful if it had happened last year at the time when level 3 of the NCEA and New Zealand Scholarship were being introduced. That required the authority to properly develop good quality processes for that change management but the authority failed to do so. 
We could have reasonably expected that there would be problems with the implementation of level 3 and of scholarship. When any new assessment system is introduced mistakes are made but we did not expect the ministry and the authority to completely fail to have any process in place to deal with those mistakes effectively. At the beginning of this year we heard from the authority it told the Minister about the mistakes but it did nothing about them. The Minister did not do anything about them either. That is not acceptable from a Government agency that is responsible for the scholarships the examinations and the quality of education provided to our young people. The Government’s position on providing quality public education to our young people is nothing but rhetoric if it does not make sure that the agencies responsible for it plan properly for the processes that they know will need to happen. Mistakes will always be made but addressing them needs to be prepared for and planned for. We did not expect the authority to fail so dismally to do anything about it when it discovered that there was a problem. 
Other recommendations have come out of the report on the NCEA. However before I describe any of those I also want to bring to the attention of the House further problems with the NCEA and the failure of the authority of other agencies and of the ministry to deal with the full scope of the difficulties faced by our young people. I have received a letter from Amy Boyce a home-school student from Temuka. She wrote that she is 15 and wants to go university. She knows she will have to get NCEA qualifications in six subjects if she wants to go to university which she most certainly does. However because she is a home-school student she will have to pay over $1000 per course in order to get the NCEA qualifications that will enable her to go to university when she finishes her studies. It is completely unreasonable that young people who for whatever reason find themselves in the situation of being home schooled then discover that they have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to get a public education that enables them to go on to further education—to become members of our society who can make the contribution they want to make to our future. 
That case is just one example of the further problems with the NCEA and of the failure of the ministry to make sure that processes are in place to enable every young person to have access to our education system to get the education that he or she is entitled to and deserves and to be able to progress his or her education into the tertiary sector. That young person Amy Boyce will not be able to get her NCEA if she has to pay $6000 per year to do that. That is not reasonable. It is a way of excluding children from public education and that is not acceptable. 
The Post Primary Teachers Association report goes on to deal with a number of further problems and makes other recommendations. Probably from a school’s perspective the most critical one is the fact that operations grant funding urgently needs to be increased to cover and to manage better the responsibilities that schools and teachers face in trying to implement the NCEA practically—so that schools can teach their students well and the students can sit the scholarship examinations. Schools receive only $5 per child per year as a means of funding to deal with the workload requirements of the NCEA. Five dollars per child per year to deal with the massive amount of implementation that teachers need to do is simply disgusting. This Government needs to make sure that the implementation measures are properly funded so that teachers can do the work that they are now required to do under the curriculum and can provide the quality of education to our children that our children deserve.