Coddington Deborah: General Debate 
Coddington Deborah: General Debate 
[Volume:626;Page:21158] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I should have taken a point of order before but I will say it now. I could have assisted the Hon Maurice Williamson by telling him that I actually tabled those documents yesterday. 
New Zealand’s education standards have never been so low. Our qualifications system is a disaster. We spend more than $8 billion on education. It is not Government money; it is taxpayers’ money. It is taken from hard-working New Zealanders to pay for education. The Education Review Office is charged with checking that New Zealand children get a good education. But this morning in the Education and Science Committee during the estimates of the Education Review Office in Vote Education Review Office’s statement of intent was a comment made by the Auditor-General’s office: “The ERO is still to clearly define what constitutes educational improvement in its statement of intent.” If the Education Review Office does not know what educational improvement is how on earth can it monitor it? 
Why does the Minister not do something about this situation? This Minister has overseen such a disaster in education yet he will not listen to the very people who do know what is going on in education—that is the parents. Parents certainly know what improvement in education is. They know whether their children are learning to read write and add up. They know whether their children are getting better or worse at it. The reason the Minister will not listen to parents or give them choice or a say is that he does not want to hear what they have to say. 
A thousand and one randomly selected parents were given the chance to say what they thought in a Colmar Brunton survey taken in August 2004. The survey found amongst other things that 79 percent of parents—nearly 80 percent of parents—believed that schools should be free to offer an alternative exam to the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). Only 31 percent of parents said they had confidence in the NCEA. It is not just the NCEA’s scholarship that is a disaster; it is the whole NCEA system. We had a gold-plated international standard qualification in New Zealand bursary and we have thrown it away. We had a good scholarship system run by the private scholarship trusts and we have thrown that away. It would be very easy for the Minister to bring those things back. Let us start to put some rigour back into our qualifications system. 
We have seen the chairman of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority depart and the chief executive depart but the buck stops with the Minister of Education. Our New Zealand secondary education qualifications are just a disaster for the students for employers and for universities trying to sort out their intake of students. 
We have seen damning reports all around. The State Services Commission report highlighted significant risks bad advice and sloppy policy. From there down we have had the Macleans College report which said that the NCEA is in crisis. The Macleans College report showed that a student’s success or failure depended on which year he or she sat the NCEA and which school he or she went to. How unfair is that? This whole generation of students is going through this guinea pig system and it is so unfair. 
Warwick Elley who for years has campaigned against the NCEA has come out with another report which states: “After 3 years of NCEA in operation the upshot is a divided community. Many schools have boycotted the scheme and many teachers who supported the idea have lost confidence in it. Meanwhile the university bursary examination has been abolished and replaced by something which will now be looked at with suspicion by employers and by universities here and overseas.” 
The Minister said airily yesterday in the House that schools do not have to offer the NCEA. That is only true of schools where affluent parents can afford to have their children take Cambridge exams or International Baccalaureate. We should be offering choice to all parents not just to affluent ones. Professor Alan MacDiarmid a Nobel laureate has said that the NCEA scholarship is a disaster for science in New Zealand. What puzzles me is that all these people who got where they are now because we had a rigorous standard in secondary school qualifications and exams—they got there because of those exams—now want to foist this politically correct one-size-fits-all system on us. It is time to dump the NCEA. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.