A new proposal would replace NCEA Level 1 with a foundational award, and change the assessment system for Levels 2 & 3.
The proposal has a focus on structured learning, with compulsory language and mathematics subjects at Year 11. For the Year 12 and 13 qualifications, students would receive subject grades out of 100 with a letter grade from A to E.
Vocational education and training subjects would be designed by Industry Skills Boards or other industry organisations with support from the Ministry of Education.
Consultation on the proposal closes at 5 pm on Friday 15 September.
The Science Media Centre asked experts to comment.
Dr Stuart Deerness, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, AUT, comments:
“The government’s proposal to replace NCEA represents the latest in a series of major education reforms that raise important questions about policy stability and implementation capacity in New Zealand schools.
“Whilst the desire for greater coherence and consistency in qualifications is understandable, and the idea that the curriculum should lead assessment is promising, this sweeping overhaul risks creating significant disruption. Schools and teachers are already managing multiple concurrent reforms, from curriculum changes to literacy and numeracy requirements. Adding wholesale qualification restructuring to this mix may stretch school capacity beyond breaking point.
“Proposal 3’s shift to a subject-based approach addresses legitimate concerns about fragmentation that emerged from NCEA’s implementation, rather than its original design.
“When students accumulate disparate standards without seeing connections between concepts within a subject area, deep learning suffers. A coherent subject approach could indeed help students develop more integrated understanding and clearer pathways to post-school options. However, this change carries significant risks of reinforcing educational hierarchies. Making certain subjects mandatory whilst limiting student choice inevitably privileges particular forms of knowledge over others. This risks marginalising students whose strengths and interests lie outside these prescribed areas, potentially exacerbating existing inequalities.
“The government’s proposal forces New Zealand to confront fundamental questions about what knowledge we value as a society and for what purposes. Do we prioritise preparing students for university entrance, workforce readiness, or broader civic participation? Without explicit public dialogue about these underlying values, the risk is that default assumptions about “important” knowledge will inadvertently shape policy, potentially excluding diverse ways of knowing and learning that reflect New Zealand’s multicultural society.
“While this move towards a more traditional, rigid structure might ensure that everyone gains access to important knowledge they may not already possess, it could also disadvantage students who do not follow conventional academic pathways, who currently rely more on tailored courses and alternative assessment routes. Careful curriculum design and ongoing evaluation will be essential to ensure this subject-based approach enhances rather than constrains educational equity.
“Removing NCEA Level 1 is not entirely surprising, but there are significant implications that will need to be carefully managed. Whilst the government argues this reduces “high-stakes assessment,” it concentrates all formal qualification opportunities into Years 12-13. For students who struggle academically or leave school early, this creates a qualification cliff-edge that could worsen educational inequality.
“The proposed timeline is ambitious but potentially problematic. Teachers will need extensive professional development to implement both new curricula and assessment systems simultaneously. The admission that achievement rates will likely drop initially suggests inadequate consideration of transition supports.
“From an international benchmarking perspective, these changes may improve superficial comparability with overseas systems, but risk undermining the innovative, inclusive features that made NCEA internationally distinctive.
“Most critically, this represents another example of top-down policy-making with limited sector consultation. Until teachers report feeling genuinely consulted rather than merely informed, educational change fatigue will continue undermining even well-intentioned reforms. Sustainable improvement requires policy stability, adequate resourcing, and genuine partnership with educators who must implement these changes daily.”
No conflicts of interest.
Dr Lisa Maurice-Takerei, Associate Dean Academic, Faculty of Culture and Society, AUT, comments:
“How will government convince schools to meaningfully include Vocational Education and Training (VET)? Schools have historically been reluctant to meaningfully include VET programmes. This has a long and demonstrable history. There is not a strong VET culture in schools except for perceptions of its ‘remedial value’.
“Who will teach the new VET subjects? High quality skills development requires high quality teaching and teachers. There are increasingly few VET teachers, ‘phased out’ in many schools with the introduction of the technology curriculum in the 1990s. VET teachers in tertiary education organisations are generally employed directly from industry. There is no mandatory teaching qualification. VET teachers do not typically have degrees to provide them with entry to Initial Teacher Education programmes. What will their status be in schools and how will they be inducted into the teaching profession?
“Who will develop the standards and programmes and how will quality be maintained? Industry Skills Board members are elected based on their industry experience, business acumen, knowledge of governance etc. They have the backing of and represent industry. Part of the problem with ‘incoherence’, stated in the discussion document is that standards are developed and managed by industry bodies. Tasks associated with standards (e.g. moderation) were, in previous Industry Training Organisations, delegated to people with no educational expertise. This has lowered the trust in VET based educational processes.
“Where is the VET expertise? What models and frameworks inform this reform programme for VET in schools? Robust, legitimate, peer reviewed research and scholarship in VET in NZ is light. Policy transfer is risky. A ‘VET research centre’, with a strong research agenda could provide research informed evidence for policy making. There is the opportunity to make a sustainable difference in VET through research informed by international models and an understanding of the domestic context.
“There is a long history in NZ of uncoordinated attempts to fix a range of labour, social and educational problems through Vocational Education and Training. This is one of many. There is an opportunity for real and sustained change if this is done carefully.”
No conflicts of interest.
Associate Professor Kirsten Petrie, School of Education, University of Waikato, comments:
“It is positive to see a move toward a focus on curriculum rather than assessment driving curriculum.
“However, we need to ensure that all kaiako have time to develop an understanding of the curriculum, otherwise we will end up continuing with a ‘teach to the test’ model.
“To make this work, we need to ensure teachers have the time and professional development that is required to understand policy and then make changes to practice.”
Conflicts of interest: None declared.
Professor Stuart McNaughton, Professor in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Auckland, comments:
What’s the evidence for systems like NCEA and for the proposed new system?
“The local data indicate that there is too much variability and flexibility afforded by the current design, and it is difficult to navigate by students and whānau. These have created problems. One which has been recognised in previous reviews of NCEA is the need for an agreed common or core set of skills and knowledge for students completing their secondary schooling.
“The NCEA consultation may lead to better definition of and agreement about these. But one-off exams in general and ranking systems with simple grades are not good assessment tools to capture the complexity of those skills and knowledge. And there are new needs, not well addressed by a more rigid exam system. Take for example the need for digital media and information literacy (to be resilient with misinformation etc…) as an example which is becoming an urgent need to address.
“The most general point here is that the balance between flexibility and core requirements needs to be very carefully designed and tested. The evidence base in our system is very limited for where to strike that balance so that our current equity profile which is not good is made even worse, and there is an urgent need for research and development.”
What’s the impact of changes like these on teachers and schools?
“There are two sets of risks.
“(a) Secondary teachers in our system have high levels of stress through continuous reform (OECD data). Any reform process needs to be designed to so as to reduce stress through careful implementation and resourcing. Teachers also report higher (than other jurisdictions) stress from workload pressure produced by formal assessment regimes. The changes will need to reduce assessment pressure. A final point is that current estimates of time spent actually teaching in secondary schools is below OECD averages, so mitigating the risk of opportunity costs is needed.
“(b) Creating a narrower speciation with high stakes exams has the effect of limiting what is taught, often referred to as a narrowing of the curriculum. There is a desperate need in schools for teaching and learning of social and emotional skills, exemplified by our bullying data which are among the worst in the OECD. We have strengths in areas not able to be assessed by formal exams, examples include being among the top countries in collaborative problem solving on computers. Our system is considered the best in the world for preparing teachers for diverse (‘multicultural’) contexts. If we increase the focus on external exams, then the narrowing of the curriculum may mean that the weaknesses in the system are even less well addressed and the strengths are undermined.”
What are the implications of such changes for international benchmarking and recognition of standards?
“The matter of benchmarking is one that can be solved in a number of ways. But benchmarking against one other international accreditation system for example, runs the risk of not recognising the strengths we have and value (for example the teaching for diversity).”
Conflicts of interest: None declared.
Dr Claudia Rozas, Lecturer, School of Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland, comments:
“The development of the NCEA had reasonable bones in that it sought to rectify the Sixth Form Certificate (the only grades available to a school were those that had been generated by School Certificate the year before), provide opportunities for students who would have struggled with a single high stakes exam at the end of the year, and to foster better teaching and learning practices by making more extensive use of formative assessment (teacher feedback as you go/progress towards the standard).
“However, in its implementation, the NCEA had (possibly unintended) consequences that eroded school subjects by compartmentalising knowledge and skills into discrete standards, feigning equal weighting for knowledge and skills that are not cognitively comparable, and becoming the default curriculum for the last three years of high school and ensured that almost every single lesson was working towards an assessment.
“Moreover, the NCEA potentially created new educational disparities between high and low socio-economic schools due to its intentional flexibility. High socio-economic schools, for example, tend to offer more external assessments than low socio-economic schools. The capacity to create NCEA assessment ‘packages’ for different groups of students also means that not all students have access to the same content. Students could do entire courses in English (for example) and only study film and never read a book.
“The NCEA created an illusion of educational equity through the guise of choice and flexibility, but teaching for equity across a diverse population in an unequal society is difficult. My sense is that we let the NCEA lull us into a false sense of ‘doing the right thing’ for our students without sufficiently thinking about educational equity. Although it is true that some students do better in high stakes exams and others struggle, it is simply not the case that all students in low socio-economic schools are going to struggle with external assessment.
“None of these concerns about the NCEA are to suggest that whatever the government has in mind to replace the NCEA will necessarily be a better qualification framework. Whatever they put forward should be held up to scrutiny in terms of educational merit and its potential contribution to a fairer and more just qualification.”
Conflict of interest statement: “I was a member of the English Subject Expert Group for the Review of Achievement Standards from late 2022 until early 2024 when the Minister for Education halted all work on the NCEA.”