Franks Stephen: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
Franks Stephen: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
[Volume:624;Page:19459] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party as an associate education spokesperson in the absence of Deborah Coddington. But I also rise as a parent and as a former pupil of Taihape Playcentre Taihape School and Taihape College. When I came to Wellington at age 18 from Taihape College having had no exposure to any of the students from the so-called “great name schools” I had one thing that allowed me to think I ought to set my sights high at university. It was the fact that I had actually sat university entrance and bursary exam and I could tell where I ranked. I could tell what I should aim for or what I could reasonably aim for against students from the name schools which to me in those days were Palmerston North Boys High School and the Collegiate guys—the ones in our neighbourhood—and of course the Auckland Grammars and the Wellington Colleges of this country. 
I was able to go along despite feeling that I was so much less tested and so much less sophisticated than they would be coming as I did from a school with only six kids in the entire seventh form. Our kids cannot do that. Our kids now have the opposite. Our kids now are only too conscious that they will be judged by the school they went to. They have no way of going out there until they hit the employment world or until they hit university being able to say: “I know that where I went to school doesn’t really matter.” Every message they get says the opposite. So we have the ideologues in a Labour Government re-establishing a class structure in this country built around school—the old school tie network which our generation thought we had managed to kill. We thought that meritocracy was an inevitable product of the way this country was going. Instead we see Trevor Mallard and the Associate Minister David Benson-Pope and all their schoolteacher colleagues in that party recreating a class structure built around where one went to school. 
This is not the full story of what is happening in this country. We also see New Zealand condemning many of its best young people to a New Zealand education ghetto because they will no longer have an internationally recognised qualification to stack up alongside those of other countries and get into scholarships of North America the scholarships in Australia and the best universities around the world. Their success is enough of a signal of our standards. In comparative terms we can all feel confident about our local universities. We now have kids who will spend their first year of university completely wasting their time. There are about 1600 or 1700 kids who do the health science intermediate year at Otago University. From that they get selected to do physiotherapy dentistry or medicine depending on how well they perform. This year for the first time an entire class of kids will have no idea how they might rate against each other. There will be kids there who will go all year thinking that they might be able to hack it for medicine when in fact only 8 percent of them will get there. That is because they have been denied any comparative ranking. Previous generations had School Certificate university entrance if they sat bursary exams and scholarship. Now they will not know whether they are wasting their time aiming at dentistry or at physiotherapy or at medicine. That is just a microcosm of what is happening across this country. 
This system—so-called fairer—is in fact deeply unfair to the kids caught in it and they know it. Members should ask kids how they feel about their qualifications. There is no pride for kids when they go home and show their parents something their parents cannot understand. Their parents know that a whole lot of background knowledge is needed to be able to even compare it with the preceding sibling. My kids have come home and handed me the stuff together and we cannot compare it because this Government is so set against comparisons. It is not just employers tertiary educators or parents; it is the kids who matter most in this and it is the teachers. 
We now know from the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) survey in December which was before this debacle emerged that teachers have lost confidence. Even those who think that the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) model is right do not believe that the moderation can work. They are being worked to the bone they have not been getting the assistance they need from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and they have had an arrogant Minister or arrogant Ministers telling them to lump it. The top students have lost the exam system. It was hated by the teaching profession or some parts of it. Now they have lost that motivation that competitive urge which so appeals to boys in particular that turns academic achievement into something they can honour as much as sport is honoured in this country. 
We honour people who win. We honour them because they are directly scaled against each other not against some abstract standard of the speed of a ball or the distance from which a goal can be kicked or any of the other nonsense achievement standards. They get honoured because they are in the top team or because they are the top 1 percent or 5 percent or 40 percent or 60 percent—because they are not losers. What the exam system gave to kids who were studying was the same kind of buzz. It was particularly important for boys. They have lost that excitement that spur and that reward. The replacement that this team of apologists has cobbled together does not restore that excitement. It is open to gaming. I can look at it as a lawyer right now and say: “If you want to get one of those top scholarships do two tough subjects and take one of the easy ones that not many people take. Take one of the dozy ones.” Geography looks as if it was a dozy one this year. Someone who had not even studied it could get scholarship. But they should take one because the way the system is set up now it will not be able to inter-scale between subjects. The top students will be able to get their three scholarships by doing two respectable subjects and one knitting subject and they will clean up the knitting subjects so that even there kids who might otherwise have achieved something will be denied it because of gamesmanship. This Government will not acknowledge that it has set itself up for permanent failure. 
Kids need to trust assessment. S or N as a mark does not do that. A grading does not do that unless we know that it is competitive and that we are not apologising for competition. Mr Mallard scoffed as he so often does at Cambridge A levels—a Third World qualification he called it. Why would people put themselves through the extra fees and the extra work and why would teachers go through the extra work of a so-called Third World qualification if we had not become a Third World country where people no longer trust the Government’s grading and assessment system They do not trust it. Expats do not want to bring their kids home because they are afraid that they will end up with qualifications that are not recognised around the world. People are sending their kids to Australian universities because they think that the New Zealand universities will be seen as second rate. 
We are ripe for takeover by Cambridge A levels. We are Third World. We have demoralised teachers confused and angry parents schools offered opportunity for competitive marketing based on class universities put to extra trouble employers baffled and a whole generation of kids sacrificed because this Government is so politically correct so ideological so dominated by the teacher unions so afraid to admit failure and go back that it will not do the simple thing that is necessary—and that is straightforward intensively moderated competitive exams designed to scale so that we know who are the top who are the winners who are not and so that we can trust the exams as we did only 10 years ago.