Urgent Debates — National Certificate of Educational Achievement—Scholarship Examination

I have received a further application for an urgent debate from the Hon Bill English, concerning the Government’s decision retrospectively to introduce distinction certificates so as not to disadvantage students in scholarship subjects. This is a particular case of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility, and in view of the widespread public interest in this matter I am prepared to allow a debate.

Just before Mr English rises to speak, following the conclusion of the debate you have just granted I seek leave for a debate on the Auditor-General’s report, in the same fashion as we would for a normal snap debate.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Is there any objection? There is.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. I ask, who cheated in New Zealand Scholarship 2004? The Government cheated. The Government got a result that was politically embarrassing, so retrospectively, after the scholarships exams were over, the Government stepped in and changed the results. I looked up the situation regarding school exams in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe they are having trouble with their school exams. But even in Zimbabwe the Government has not stepped in to change the results after the exam has been sat. But our Government has. What a shambles! What a disgrace! What a deep disrespect for the young people of New Zealand! Now excellence is recognised if one can embarrass the Government into recognising it. That is the standard, from a Government that interferes in every aspect of New Zealand life. It has decided to become the examiners-in-chief.

What should our young people expect? These young people are our more academic students. They should be able to expect fair and consistent standards. They should be able to expect a duty of care from the adults who make the political decisions and run the bureaucratic process. And they should be able to expect a credible, respected qualification that acknowledges the excellence for which they have striven and which they have achieved. In 2004 what did our best and brightest secondary school students get? They got cynicism and incompetence. From the Government and public agencies they got contempt for excellence and for the enormous efforts they, and their teachers, had made to achieve that excellence, and they got the absurdity of politicians marking the exams. It never happens anywhere else, but I have to say that it fits a pattern of arrogance and incompetence by the Labour Government when it comes to education.

Some Ministers have paid the price. Trevor Mallard, the man who made the political decision to proceed with the New Zealand Scholarship against advice, lost his job because he thought he could persuade parents to put up with the closure of hundreds of schools.

💬 Pansy Wong: What happened?

He had to turn tail, and then the Prime Minister had to take him out of that job. Steve Maharey got sacked because a multibillion-dollar tertiary strategy went completely off the rails. Now we have an Associate Minister Mr David Benson-Pope—or, as one student referred to him: “Dr Rabid Benson-Dope”.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: Ha, ha!

Well, the students’ views actually matter. The warning signals about this started 2 weeks ago. I want to explain it to the House so that members understand the deep cynicism behind the manner in which the Government has tried to manipulate this issue. Two weeks ago, on 26 January, Trevor Mallard announced something quite nice: an extension of the scholarship awards. He introduced some new categories of people who could get awards of $1,000, $2,000, or $3,000. It was a good-news announcement. I thought that it looked good but that, because it came from Trevor Mallard, there must be something wrong with it.

Today I can confirm how cynical that move was. The Minister of Education had thought that around 150 students would become New Zealand Scholars—that is, students who achieved three outstanding passes in scholarship. That is very difficult to do, but perhaps 1 percent of students could do it. What happened? He got a piece of paper from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority telling him that only four students had achieved it. Being Trevor Mallard, he did not sit on his hands; he decided to cook up a whole new scheme of awards to fill the gap. What is really cynical is that the total to be spent on the new scholarship awards is less than the amount the Government projected to spend on the old awards. So the great announcement about all this new recognition of excellence ended up saving the Government $200,000, and it was made to cover up shonky scholarship results. That is what Trevor Mallard, the Minister of Education, says our best young people deserve from him, the guardian of New Zealand’s standards of excellence in schools. It was a cut.

Then we have Mr Benson-Pope. After all the furore, we still do not have the crucial piece of information: how many students sat New Zealand Scholarship and how many passed it. We do not know. The information has not been published. It has not been released. Yesterday we saw a table that compared the number of scholarships with the number of level 3 entries. They have nothing to do with each other, except that the number of level 3 entries is very large, so it makes the variations look very small. I am asking the Minister to give us the results—to tell us how many students entered scholarship and how many passed. He should forget his “teenage boy” spin politics and give young New Zealanders the information they deserve to have.

We ended up with Cabinet marking this year’s New Zealand Scholarship—Cabinet: a bunch of failed, mediocre university lecturers, ex-teachers, and people who want revenge on those who did better at school than they did. I want to ask the Minister what criteria Cabinet applied. Let us pick out one group: art history students. Six of them won scholarships. The New Zealand Labour Cabinet decided to give out another 21. On what basis? Why does the Minister not tell us? Biology students received nine scholarships from 1,000 entries. The New Zealand Labour Cabinet decided to give out another 60—six times as many as the teachers said should be awarded.

On what criteria did the large, Einstein minds in Cabinet decide the futures of our finest young academic students? There was only one criterion: embarrassment. The Minister told the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. The Minister told it to cook up a number big enough not to look embarrassing. I invite the Minister to explain today why no extra distinction certificates were awarded in classical studies or in drama, and why 18 were awarded in French and 21 in art history. Look at this one! In media studies there was one scholarship, and Cabinet decided to give out another 21. On what basis? The Minister will get up and say that it was on the basis of National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 3 results.

I looked at his question and answer sheet, which says that level 3 has nothing to do with scholarship. Scholarship is not even NCEA; it is a completely separate exam. But the answer to another question states that the new distinction certificates were based on the level 3 results. Which answer to which question is right? The fact is that the Minister does not know. What is worse, he does not care. The Minister of Education, Mr Mallard, is responsible for this, because he made the decision that the Government had to proceed with New Zealand Scholarship to prove that Labour stood for excellence.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: No, the member made the decision in 1998.

No, I have looked at the 1998 decision. It said nothing about when scholarship would be instituted. The Minister had to demonstrate that Labour values excellence. He was told time and time again that the system was a shambles. Last year—it is in the minutes of the Secondary Principals’ and Leaders’ Forum—teachers were not entering students because they had no confidence in the exam. But the Minister went ahead, anyway.

At the receiving end are young people who have worked their hearts out to achieve what they believed was a sincere effort on the part of this country to recognise excellence—and the Minister laughs! That has been his attitude all along. This has been all about how to recover from the Government’s embarrassment and not at all about 2,000 of our finest academic minds, who give up their sport, work on Saturday night instead of going out, go to school early, sweat, strive, and ache for it.

The Government let them down. It is an absolute disgrace because this has wrecked the lives of young people who had so many aspirations—aspirations to get out of a life of a low income, aspirations to get into a selective university course that they will not now get into, aspirations that they could walk around with their heads held high because of the recognition this nation gave to them as our best. Now we have an Associate Minister Benson-Pope who cannot tell the difference between his old responsibilities and his new ones—fish and people—and treats both with the same cynicism. I hope he is on TV every night to explain this.

The people who find him most distasteful are the students. That is the feedback that I am getting. The Government failed them. The whole pitch for excellence from Labour has been a cynical political marketing exercise. But the parents, the teachers, and most of all the students will never forget the casual contempt that this Government has shown for their aspirations. Maybe there is one last chance—when Trevor Mallard can get up and say: “I was wrong. I am sorry.” He can address this issue again, but the seventh-former who has just left school cannot. He or she gets one shot. The bumbling bureaucrats—the idiots—are still here to do it all again. The stupid Ministers who do not care are still here. But the students are left with broken aspirations, lost credibility, and a piece of paper, the credibility of which was lost every day that the Government sat on its hands and did nothing.

I tell the Government to rescue the situation. Mr Mallard should get up and say: “I am wrong. I am sorry.” Mr Benson-Pope will not do it. He has blamed everyone except the people who run the system. He is now saying that it is the job of the whole community to fix it, that the teachers are not up to it, and that too many students entered the exams. Everyone is to blame except those mindless bigots in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority who will not accept that there is something wrong. He is another Minister who encapsulates the spirit of his public agency. It is mindless bigotry when anyone who thinks that excellence matters and that young people’s aspirations are important to this country is thought of as some kind of reactionary idiot.

Mr Benson-Pope will find out, because the growing anger about the scholarship results will engulf level 2 and level 3 of NCEA. If he is willing to sit around the Cabinet table and adjust the results for scholarship, what about level 3? What about level 2? What about all those middle students who want the literacy and numeracy credits because that will get them into university? Why can they not get their results adjusted? It is a shambles, a disgrace, and a dishonour to the fine young people of New Zealand.

I welcome this snap debate. The 2004 national scholarship results and the issues they have raised are worthy of debate. I only regret that the contribution we have just heard was so sadly hysterical and self-indulgent.

Assessment in both our education system generally, and more narrowly in our schools, is in transition. It is in transition from a system that fitted a simpler New Zealand, as it once was, to a system that is fit for a New Zealand that is economically and socially much more complex and fast moving. It is a system that is in transition, and we have clearly encountered a difficulty. The Government has moved to ensure that no student is disadvantaged as a result of that, and that is good. But in those subjects where students have done exceptionally well at National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 3 and when the subject is under-represented at scholarship level, we are introducing the distinction certificate in recognition of the student’s achievements.

At the same time, there will be a new distinction award. Students who have a combination of scholarship passes and distinction certificates in any three scholarship subjects will be eligible for an award of $1,500 per year for 3 years. These awards, combined with the package of new awards announced previously, mean that around 215 more students will therefore be eligible for financial rewards of this kind. This largely mitigates the financial impact of the variances in the 2004 results.

It is worth noting that the Government is making serious commitments here. When the scholarship was pegged to the old bursary system about 60 students were awarded substantial monetary awards, whereas now over 500 students will be eligible for significant awards that will make a real difference to their finances for their university studies. Instead of giving large numbers of students token payments of $100 to $200, we are giving more students real financial support.

So that is what we have done, but what is important for the House and the education sector is to calmly and dispassionately assess the underlying issues. There is nothing to be gained by denigrating a system that is endorsed by pretty much everyone—the Post Primary Teachers Association, the Parent Teachers Association, employers, and students. The only group missing is the National Party. The essential point is that we no longer use scaling. The scholarship results that I released yesterday are real numbers. This is very different from what happened in the past. Now we see in the numbers what the students actually achieved, as assessed against the curriculum their teachers taught.

The practical task now for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, for the ministry, for the curriculum setters, for the assessors, for principals and teachers, for our universities, and for other tertiary providers for whom understanding these results is so important, is to look at explaining and reducing this variability. Finding a suitable and appropriate way forward will come from—

💬 Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I realise that the rules on written speeches have been relaxed and I appreciate that nowadays members are allowed to come down to the House and read a speech.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): They most certainly are. That is not a point of order.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: My point is that the process for getting a snap debate is that an Opposition party makes a case and gives that in a letter to the Speaker, who considers the matter. We assumed, somewhat—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): Order!

💬 Gerry Brownlee: If I cannot make a point here, where can I make it? This is about all of the House.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): You can make it in the debate, but you are not referring to any process that is not within the Standing Orders.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: It surprises the National Party. We did not know there would be a snap debate awarded until the end of question time, but somehow the Minister, who was in the House right through question time, is able to stand up after a snap debate is announced and read a pre-prepared speech. I just wonder how on earth he got the information that the Speaker would allow such a debate.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): I thank the member for raising that. I am sure you were able to say what you wanted to say. It was not a point of order. The Minister is quite within his rights to speak in the way he is and to use whatever guidance he needs.

💬 Rodney Hide: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I ask for a point of clarification. Are members advised of the applications for urgent debate? My understanding is that we know if we have put in an application, but we have no idea whether the National Party has put one in. It is very clear here that someone has tipped off the Government.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: I know that we are in a slightly unusual position because for a number of members it has been some time since they have had the experience of being in Government. The two members who raised points of order have not had any experience at all. This Government always prepares for possible urgent debates, and certainly Governments generally did so in the 1980s. We were ready for this debate yesterday.

Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith: A very serious issue has been raised. It goes right to the heart of the integrity of the Speakership of this Parliament. I was a Minister for 9 years, and what the Hon Trevor Mallard has said is absolute arrant nonsense.

The issue is this: the decision as to whether a snap debate is allowed is the absolute right of the Speaker. What is concerning the Opposition today is it would appear that there may have been advice to a Minister about the outcome of the Speaker’s decision, prior to this Parliament being advised of that decision. I believe that we deserve an absolute assurance that that has not happened, because that goes right to the heart of the impartial Chairmanship of this House. The Speaker is Parliament’s person; the Speaker is responsible to Parliament for making the decisions on snap debates. We honour and respect those decisions, and we must have an assurance that there has not been prior advice to any Minister of the outcome of such a decision.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: I will reply very quickly and it may help members. I am prepared to table the top of the Labour speaking list—something that is most unusual—a list that is circulated before the closing time for debates, which indicates that today Labour had a speaking list and was prepared for debates on scholarships and light armoured vehicles.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: I want to make a comment myself on this matter, because it is an important one. I agree with the member. Yesterday, at the Business Committee, I said, and I know there are members present who were there then who heard me say: “I could write a very good letter, if I were an Opposition member, about this subject.” I made that comment. I then walked out. I have had no other comment made by me and I certainly do not tell the Government what it will be having debates on. It could have had a debate on the LAVIIIs; it could have had a debate on this subject. I judged that one was acceptable and I gave that decision.

💬 Rodney Hide: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Just another question: is it possible for members, before you make your ruling, to discover what letters are in your hands?

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Yes. On this occasion I actually went to Mr Brownlee and said that he put in two letters yesterday, which he did very promptly and very efficiently. I asked whether he wanted me to read out the one that was going to be declined, or just accept the one that was going to be accepted. I did that about 20 minutes before the end of question time.

💬 Rodney Hide: I am sorry, we misunderstood. For example, we did not know that the National Party had put in two letters. Is it possible for members of other parties to discover, before you make your decision, which letters are before you for consideration?

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Only if those parties tell those members. I do not tell anybody anything.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I just make it very clear that this little issue probably has arisen, not in a way to try to impugn you at all, or, more important, the office of the Speaker. I just want to suggest that it is rather disappointing in a debate like this, where there is such public interest, that a Minister does resort to a very tight script in the offering that he makes to the House. It does, I think, lead to members becoming a little bit concerned that the nature of the comment being made is less than genuine.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Let me just say that as far as I am concerned, if I had been Minister of Education and with the events that have occurred I most certainly would have been preparing for a debate, and I would have been preparing very tightly and closely.

Now, as far as the speech is concerned, the member knows there is no rule against the reading of speeches. I do not particularly happen to agree with that ruling, but that is the rule of the House. I was listening on the radio to what the Minister was saying. He was in no way going against the Standing Orders, and I want just to repeat that as far as I am concerned I most certainly did not discuss this issue with the Minister.

In our schools, we need to ensure that students are being correctly prepared for these examinations that rightly target our academic elite. In particular, we need to form judgments about where the scholarship requires skills and aptitudes that are different from level 3 NCEA, and, if so, deliver these to our students. The 2004 New Zealand Scholarship science exams placed a very high premium on abstract discursive writing in the language of science, but did they place too high a premium on it? That is a question for all of us to ask and, in due course, answer. How does that relate to the skills required for a top-end career in the sciences?

Before I discuss the wider context of this issue, it is important to briefly put to bed the question of accountability. I am not particularly interested in witch-hunts or blame. I want better options from here on. I have made clear to the Qualifications Authority and the ministry that the Government should have learnt about this issue sooner. That is something that they need to look at in terms of their management systems. That said, they do have their sleeves rolled up and are getting on with what needs to happen next. I will be taking an extremely close interest, as members will understand, in the results of that work.

Likewise, I have no desire to criticise the nation’s teachers—far from it. They are as hard-working and as passionate in their professional commitment as they ever could be. The fact that we have made the extraordinary progress we have with the introduction of this system, over 3 years, is testimony to that. The fact of the matter is that NCEA and the qualifications framework reforms of the last few years have been vast. The pace of change has been very fast, possibly too fast. So it is no surprise that there have been rough edges. What I am looking for now is consolidation, refinement, and a maturing evolution of systems. And I am looking for the education sector to forget its squabbles, and to stay on task.

New Zealand is not the New Zealand for which the old system of School Certificate was created. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s our economy was very simple: a system that failed half the kids had behind it a picture of an economy in which the bright kids went on to go into the professions, and the rest went into a trade learnt from on-the-job apprenticeships, or they spent their working lives essentially as unskilled labourers, farm workers or shop workers, and the like. So half pass - half fail was a cull for picking winners and losers and managing privilege; something pretty keen to the philosophy and minds of the Opposition.

We are not in that world now, and our education system cannot be either. Our economy is now high-tech and skills-based. The demand for unskilled labour is now very limited, even when the economy is booming. Most people now do some kind of tertiary training after they leave school. Most people retrain many times in their working lives. Very few people indeed work for the one firm for 40 years. In this world, schools need to tailor their tuition programmes to fit local interest, the local economy, and, above all, the individual abilities of the youngsters they are teaching. Education must liberate, not standardise, and that is what NCEA enables. So instead of pupils just doing, say, fifth form biology and so on, they do a series of papers, or standards, customised by the individual school to meet their particular needs. Then the results are reported, standard by standard, in detail in the records that young people bring to prospective employers, and the like. This is better than just, say, 70 percent in English, 60 percent in physics, 50 percent in chemistry—all scaled, of course, to mean very little indeed. In fact, scaling was often a technique for making people look better than they really were, and for masking bad teaching and dreary curricula.

Some say NCEA is dumbing down education. In fact, the opposite is true—NCEA is tough; it demands much more of the students than the old system. NCEA also in no way impedes bright kids from racing ahead—indeed, it encourages them. If a bright child wants, he or she can take some particular papers or standards at a more advanced level than his or her chronological age would suggest. Individual programmes can be tailored to a youngster’s strengths and weaknesses, and this, again, fits an economy and a society that wants to encourage diversity, unlike the National Party. An assessment system that said half of the population were failures will not do. Everyone has value, everyone has abilities, and in the fast-paced digital economy of today, no one can be wasted. Our education system must help all young people, not just those going into the professions. It must help them to find and nurture their abilities.

NCEA is clearly still controversial. It is very new—just 3 years in practice, and within the education sector people are still learning how to utilise its full potential. But we should be excited by these changes, not denigrating them. I am confident that, as a direct result of NCEA, the New Zealand secondary education system will look very different 20 years from now, compared to today, and for the better. Twenty years from now the tuition programmes in our schools will vary more, school by school. Within schools, programmes of learning for individual pupils will be more and more tailored to what each pupil needs, and that is very much something to look forward to.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. This urgent debate has been set down around the scholarship exam, quite specifically. I listened very carefully to every word of the Minister’s contribution, but I did not note him, at any time during his speech, making reference to the scholarship exam that is the subject of this debate. This is the Minister who is responsible for the very issue that the Speaker has deemed of sufficient import to set aside the time of this Parliament. Would it not be proper for the Minister to be asked to address the issue of the debate?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): Whether or not it is proper, the Minister has made his contribution in the way he sees fit. There is no need for further comment on that. We have had a number of comments so far.

So that people who are listening to the debate understand the issues involved, I want to think through a scenario where people are lining up for a 100-metre race and the person in lane 1 has to leap over 1-metre-high hurdles; the person in lane 2 has to leap over 2-metre-high hurdles; lane 3 is covered in old tyres so the person in that lane has to zigzag through them; lane 4 is undulating up hill and down dale; lane 5 is all covered in gravel but the person has to run in bare feet; and lane 6 is clear. I ask the House and people who are listening to this debate whether they believe it is fair that the runner in lane 6 should get the gold medal, because that is exactly what we are confronting with this issue of National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) scholarships. We are not comparing on an equal, level playing field people in different lanes. In fact, there is no moderation across the subjects, and therein lies the problem.

The Minister was asked about this in the House today and he made the statement that he was surprised to find there were no comparability mechanisms between students who were doing different subject areas.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Between the standards.

But that means the same—between the different subject areas that they are doing. In other words, the examinations.

I suggest to the policy makers that it is impossible to get two examinations across two different curriculum areas in any one year, or, in fact, across the same curriculum in various different years, that will be exactly comparable and on which one can make a fair assessment and a fair judgment.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: But you can try.

If the Minister is going along with pursuing the argument that he is, then what he is suggesting, with the results that came out, is that the standards in English in stage 1 at our universities are far, far lower and far easier to meet than those in the sciences and biology, and so on, because of the numbers that were there.

I want to explain to people that when the NCEA was designed, it was always intended that there would be a scholarship examination and that it would be an examination to compare the top students. It would be competitive. It was not to be about standards, it was to be about who the top students were in our particular schools. It does not impact upon NCEA levels 1, 2, and 3; they are a different question altogether and are aimed at different populations. I want to say something about a comment made by David Benson-Pope that shows that he completely misunderstands the issues. He said that we do not want to go into a system where 50 percent are failures. School Certificate was scaled. It was the first obstacle that people had to come to. In this particular case the students who were doing NCEA level 4 have already done NCEA levels 1, 2, and 3 in the same year as they are doing scholarship. This is not about failure; this is about the top echelon—the cream—and it is to decide which of those students coming out of level 3 are the cream. Under those circumstances it is totally valid to scale those and to have statistical moderation across it.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: You’re looking at a scale when you don’t have a number.

Let us face it, we set a number. We set a mean and a standard deviation, as we always did, then we compare those students who are doing mathematics as being an equivalent population to those students who are doing English. Unfortunately, the way that things are set up that is not the case. I find it interesting that given that we have—

💬 Helen Duncan: It wouldn’t work.

Of course it would work! Obviously the member does not understand the basis of scaling and what it is all about. It would also allow comparability from one year to the next. Members should remember that this is not students doing their first assessment in the fifth form, as School Certificate was. This is students at the upper echelon of our schooling system who have already got three qualifications that they have entered for in advance of this. This is purely and simply the top of them.

The problem that we have is the very problem that has been witnessed. People are dead set on the fact that everything must be standards based. Everything does not have to be standards based. In fact, we have to have some sort of absolute comparability, and there is no comparability in this particular circumstance. It really concerned me to hear that the secondary school principals had said that this would not work unless we had these moderation processes in place. They offered their advice to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and they were ignored. It came out in the media yesterday from Paul Ferris that the Secondary Principals Association offered its support in this particular case. That was the advice that was given, and that was the advice that was ignored.

If we go back to the scenario that I raised, after the race is run and the person in lane 6 with the clear lane has been given the gold medal, and everyone moans like heck and says that that is not fair, the Government has come along and said: “We don’t believe that’s fair either, so we will get some pewter medals and paint them gold and give them out to a few other people.” That is exactly what this Government has done. It has come up with some arbitrary arrangement and said that it will hand out a few extra things that are of a lesser standard than scholarship but that at least it might buy the Government some peace.

I say to the Government that it has the capacity to take the results from this year and to statistically analyse them in such a way that we could have comparability across the different subject areas for the students who sat in 2004. If such a process is not put in place we will have a repeat in 2005 regardless, and meanwhile the 2004 students have been treated unjustly, unfairly, and quite wrongly, but at least something has to be done to fix it up for 2005. That is what concerns me a little bit about what Bill English is saying and doing. National is certainly fingering some of the real genuine flaws that have occurred in scholarship. But I do not hear National telling us what it will do about it. What will National do about NCEA levels 1, 2, and 3? Will it keep it?

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Yes.

That is good to know. The Hon Dr Nick Smith has now told the House that National will keep the NCEA levels 1, 2, and 3. What will National do with scholarship? We do not know because at this point in time no one has actually told us. At least New Zealand First has said that we will make the modifications to levels 1, 2, and 3 that have to be made to fix it up but we will stick with it. We believe the philosophy is right and that largely it is on the right track.

However, we do not believe that the thinking process was applied to the NCEA level for the scholarships. We believe that there has to be a moderation process. There has to be a process whereby we can compare the students who sit one subject with those who sit another, and also aggregate their results so that we can make decisions about the top students. Forty-five thousand dollars was given out to a top student and we have no confidence at all that that person is the top student or is just purely and simply a student who picked the subjects for which the examinations that he or she went into were easy. That is not fair, and we will not instil confidence in an assessment system if we have a continuation of that process, where so much is dependent upon the subjects that one picks and not on the actual abilities and capabilities that are demonstrated through the testing and examination process.

The scholarship exam is about finding out who are the cream amongst our scholars. It is not about the first draft. It is about rewarding those particular people and giving them encouragement to take further steps in their studies so that they will pursue university and tertiary studies for the betterment of our nation. The way that we have devised our scholarship exam and the poor thought that has gone into it has weakened the system at this most critical point. We ask that the Government goes back and re-looks at the philosophy behind the level 4 assessment and we encourage it to put some sort of statistical moderation process in place.

The Greens have generally supported the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) system. We think it is a good thing to have moved to an internally assessed system, particularly for Māori students. There has been a notable difference in achievement for them under NCEA compared with their achievement in previous years.

In our view, the elimination of scaling is a very good move. There is a need to focus on the actual achievements of children and young people against their tests rather than to pay blind adherence to a bell curve, which is what happened in the past. In our view, scaling seriously disenfranchises students and creates failures for no other reason than the reporting of statistical niceties.

Our kids are not just statistics; they are precious and we must not allow our system to abuse them in that way. However, we are now faced with another fresh debacle over NCEA scholarships that is exactly that—a form of abuse against those students who have been working so very hard to achieve the best they can. It is, frankly, not good enough.

Children and young people are continuing to pay the price for the mistakes made by adults and Government departments in failing to take sufficient care over their assessments. NCEA has been continually dogged by those kinds of problems. Previous examples include the manipulation—the active manipulation—of the NCEA system at Cambridge High School. Those are not necessarily problems with NCEA itself, but with the way in which it has been implemented. Implementation has been hurried and careless, and for that our young people have paid the price.

The Greens acknowledge that the Minister and the Government have accepted that they bit off more than they could chew, that they made a mistake, and that they have tried to find ways to remedy that. But I do not think that the Government takes particular cognisance of the fact that it is the young people who are suffering here. I support Bill English’s very deep concern that those young people do not have a second opportunity to make the grade to achieve what they needed to achieve this time around. Every time we make a mistake with our education system it is those young people who suffer; they bear the full price for those mistakes. They have absolutely no control over the way the education system is structured, or the exams and the processes that are put in place.

The education system makes no effort to find out from those young people what they need and prefer for their education for the future. Yet young people continue to pay the price for the stupid mistakes that are continually made. This Government continues to pay lip service to the importance of our young people in our future, yet continually undermines their ability to be active and responsible citizens, and leaders of our nation, in the future.

Student loans are another classic example of that failure to recognise the importance of young people and their success. Nothing has been done by this Government, of course, to remedy the serious social, educational, and economic consequences of that system.

In order to remedy the problem that has been created by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and to undo the injustice to our young people by the failure of the NCEA scholarship system, the Government needs to ensure that not one single student entitled to a scholarship is in any way penalised for that mistake. All those who were entitled, or would have been entitled, to a full scholarship, must receive one of the full amount. If that means that more scholarships will be awarded than might otherwise have been, then that is no problem for this Government. It must be no problem. It is no price to pay to ensure that those students are given the recognition they deserve.

The distinction certification that has been suggested by the Minister as a result of the report is not good enough. It is a second-class option for those students, arising from mistakes made not by them but by the education system itself. Scholarships are a critical means of awarding excellence in our students. The Government and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority owe them the recognition they deserve and not a second-class option.

Our kids do not deserve to be discounted. They must not be robbed, either of their financial entitlement or of the benefits of their hard work and commitment over the years. This Government must ensure that no child pays the price for its mistake.

I wish to thank the Hon Bill English for first raising this issue. I think that on both sides of the House everyone shares the concern about this debacle. We should point out that it is not just those who sat scholarship who have been affected but all students, because this is creating the sense that there is a problem with the exam system and a problem with the standards the Government is putting in front of students. I know that from talking to younger students who are well away from sitting scholarship exams.

I think that ACT stands up as the only party that was opposed to the introduction of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). We were opposed to it when the National Party first had the bright idea, we were certainly opposed to it as it was implemented, and we are now looking at it and trying to make the best of a bad deal.

It follows, of course, that the Labour Party has put out a whole lot of spin about how this is not a particular problem, but I ask members to reflect on what the Labour Party would know about standards. What would the Labour Party know about competition? What would the Labour Party know about excellence? What would the Labour Party know about fairness?

The latter is something our young people feel most keenly. They actually know about fairness, and they can immediately see the unfairness of the NCEA scholarship exam. They know about the unfairness of that. [Interruption]

I know that Trevor Mallard wants to call out, divert attention, and play politics with young people’s standards, but I point this out: if one goes away from an external exam, objectively marked, and goes into an internal system where people are graded internally, I guess it fits that if there is a problem it will go up to Cabinet, and Cabinet members will say: “Oh, we’re not happy with those results.” As Mr Donnelly pointed out, they will then take a bit of bronze, paint it up gold, and call it “a distinction certificate”.

Who decided to do that? Was it the markers? Was it the examiners? Was it the teachers? No, it was Cabinet. Cabinet awarded 373 distinction certificates to try to paper over its cock-up.

Anyone can see that when there is an exam, and 641 biology students sit the exam and nine get it, and across the way there is an English exam—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It is a matter of whether the term the member just used is a prescribed term. I do not really want to repeat it, but it is a male bird of a particular type that I think has been ruled out before.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): To make me aware of the term, sadly, the member would have to repeat it—[Interruption] The member will be aware of the word he might have used; if so, he will withdraw it please.

I withdraw. It was a total bungle that the Government oversaw, and I am really just relaying to the House the way that students see it.

The point is this—and I know Mr Mallard wants to break it up—we had 641 biology students and only nine got scholarships. Over in the English exam, one in three students succeeded. Any fool can see that there is a huge discrepancy in that. We know that any fool can see that, because even this Government understood there was a problem.

What did it do? It ran back to Cabinet to ask what it could do to make up for that, and it came up with a whole new award—in Cabinet. So who would get scholarships—no, actually they do not get scholarships; they get something else—was decided whilst Ministers were sitting around the Cabinet table. Members should ask themselves what sort of integrity a system like that has.

Then Government Ministers sat around the Cabinet table and decided how much money each of those students would get. They decided that an extra 64 students would get some money. Where was that decided? It was decided around the Cabinet table, too. Then the Government had the audacity to give itself a pat on the back for being so generous. It reminds one of the cricket match where Helen Clark suggested she was quite generous—because every time someone hit a six the Government gave away another $6,000—but that was not true, either.

The effect of that decision is not just on the students who sat those exams. It brings into question all exams in New Zealand and not in relation to just this problem. If we cannot manage a system for the brightest and best to have confidence in, how can we manage a system for everyone? We should give schools and parents a choice about what system they want. Right now, if that were done, there would not be too many going for NCEA.

I ask Government members, especially Mr Mallard and Mr Benson-Pope, to think of those students who have missed out, those students who have a certificate of distinction, and those students who have sat scholarship exams. They have worked hard, set their sights high, aimed for excellence—and this Government has let them down. So cynical is this Government that it has not apologised or even fingered anyone responsible. It has said that the issue is due to transition and teething problems. It is typical of this Government that it is no one’s fault.

The Government’s response was to put out some positive spin, come up with a new, generous reward called a certificate of distinction, throw a bit of money around, and try to paper over the problem. How can students have any confidence in this system, and how can New Zealanders have any confidence in this Government?

I rise on behalf of United Future to talk a little on this particular matter. The Government has tried to explain this matter away by saying initially, at least, that it has a new system. But if we have a new system that is not fully built on consultation, piloting, and testing, is it any wonder that today we are talking about issues that are full of mistakes? I ask the question, and I am sure many people around the country are asking the same question: who is winning in regard to level 4, and who has lost? The students themselves have not gained. It puts a bad slant over everybody who has sat any of the exams, from level 1 through to level 4. Those students who sat level 1 last year must now be wondering what will happen when they get to level 4. I know from press releases that came out yesterday, as well as earlier, that there is disquiet across the land about this whole subject of secondary education and what it means to children and students who are studying—particularly those who are going on to tertiary education this year, be it at a particular university institution, polytech, private training establishment, or whatever else.

So we do have a question mark. I understand the system is new, but does that warrant the fact that we have dug ourselves into such a deep hole? The system should have been piloted, it should have been administered a little at a time and had all the bugs taken out of it, and therefore something could have been presented to the nation that every student, and certainly every classroom teacher, headmaster, and principal, would feel confident about promoting.

If I had been one of those students who last year sat the Cambridge exams, for instance, or the International Baccalaureate exams, I would be feeling pretty good at this moment. That is not the story that either this Government or anybody in this House wishes to communicate in a negative way. But in reality, the students who sat those exams must be thinking: “Wow, I’m glad no mess-ups have occurred there. There is a standard. We know what we got. We don’t get much money for it, but at least we know what we got in the scholarship sense, in the sense of excellent academic performance.”, and that I think is probably what this whole thing boils down to.

I believe that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has failed the top students in our country, and certainly the teachers who have put everything into grooming their students for the task of entering into tertiary education in particular. Paul Ferris, President of the Secondary Principals Association, said that the country trusted the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to develop an exam that would represent the very best of achievement-based assessment, and it has not done that. It has let us down. That was yesterday’s comment, and here we are in the House reiterating the same thing.

The Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) does not want to be held responsible, because this exam is not its thing; it is not the PPTA’s exam. Then I notice that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has distanced itself, or has not been heard from, since this matter has arisen. So when the president of the Secondary Principals Association states those sorts of things I am alarmed. Yvonne Browning from Southland Girls High School said that this whole thing was such a debacle in her mind and asked whether one subject was worth more than another. In reality some of us have been trying to say, and I am sure the Government wants this to be said, that every subject is on a par for every student and it has attainment built within it.

I heard the Hon Brian Donnelly speaking out very clearly for a system that will give us some hope and some way through all this. The reason why Yvonne Browning asked that question is that she has read, she knows, and we all know, for instance, that nine out of 1,000 biology scholarship candidates passed and 300 out of 900 English students got scholarships. That is way out of kilter. If I am looking at it from the point of view of a parent, an employer, or someone separate from the student, that tells me that English or arts subjects are a far better shot in which to achieve a scholarship than, for instance, biology. I do not believe that is the rational outcome this exam should produce. I do not believe that any previous speakers have come to any other conclusion than what I am saying. This is not a good advertisement of what we call quality education for this nation.

Ministers need to accept responsibility. The blame game we are into needs to get out of this whole issue. We need to look straight at the fact that we need a policy that gives children, parents, employers, universities of the future, and all the other institutions that take on these students, some level of comfort that there is to be an education system that we can be proud of and multiply throughout the world.

From day one United Future’s policy has been to reward educational excellence and to broaden the eligibility of students to receive monetary rewards for excellent academic performance in their final school year. That should not be a new thing to anybody. It is something that we want to make sure this Government looks at, in order to ensure that National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 4 is attended to seriously and that everybody is asked to make input into it and not to be at all shy about it. The more input there is at this stage, the more that will correct students for 2005, and I believe that will then put back a sense of pride in the fact that we have an education system that goes all the way. The fact is that NCEA level 4 provides for prizes worth up to $45,000 apiece. That demands action by this Government.

I will make a very brief contribution in this area. In doing so I congratulate my Associate Minister, David Benson-Pope, and say that it is not often, when one moves on from day-to-day responsibility for a portfolio, that one can look back so soon with relief that one is not the person having to front what is a very serious issue. It is a serious issue, and there are some enormous dilemmas in front of the Government and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority board around it.

As members are aware, a lot of work was done with National Certificate of Educational Achievement levels 1, 2, and 3 to cross-reference and cross-moderate the standards as they were put in place. It is really important to emphasise that the standards were the subject of the moderation, not the examination results afterwards.

That was, overall, very well done, and there were a lot of international compliments. Just to make it absolutely clear, I say that people should not be worried about entry standards. Universities as far away as Yale and Princeton have complimented the level 3 system and said that the richness of the information that comes from it is extremely valuable to them when they make their judgments about entry to university. Entry is done off level 3, and it is done in our own universities off level 3, so people should not get too concerned about that.

By a process that I will accept responsibility for, moderation was not done in the same way. The issue was not raised in a way that prompted me to focus on the difference between the standards set for the scholarship examinations. The standards were set on the basis of stage 1 examinations at university level. Tertiary people were involved in setting the standards in every case, and although I think it is fair to say that there was some comment to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority from secondary principals, I think the full substance of their concerns was not focused on.

It has become clear, especially in the science areas, that people who have a lot of ability to reproduce fact and formulae do not necessarily have the ability to put those ideas across and to discuss issues, especially in high-quality written English, in the way that people who are focused on arts and language subjects have. So a much larger group of people—for example, people who are native speakers of particular languages—fly right through the scholarship exams in those subjects, and one would expect them to. People who have been involved in immersion education in the Māori language, for example, have very high pass rates, because the standard they have reached is so far in advance of the stage 1 standard at university that it is inevitable we get that result.

What we now know—and possibly what I should have realised—is that in the past there was enormous scaling to get physics students over the line. They did not meet the standards set, so for goodness knows how many years in physics—and especially also in biology—there was a scaling up of examination results in order to get the required number of students through. In a similar way, more people met the standard in my own area of accounting, and they were scaled down in order to fit a particular curve.

We now have some honesty around who meets university standards. It is very different, but as I indicated to Mr Donnelly earlier in reply to a parliamentary question, we have to think a bit more about what a degree means now when our university standards are clearly so different from subject to subject.

One of the most basic responsibilities of the Minister of Education and his or her agencies is to provide a fair and consistent examination system. With this monumental botch-up that we are debating today, thousands of New Zealand secondary students have been robbed of their one chance to achieve scholarship at secondary education level because of the arrogance and incompetence of this Government.

Let us just look at how bad the situation is. The Government budgeted on 150 students achieving the New Zealand Scholarship—National Certificate of Educational Achievement, level 4. How many students achieved that level? Four of them achieved it. One could be 10 percent out or even get away with being 20 percent out, but in this instance the Government has it 97 percent wrong.

Let us look at the individual subjects. A subject like biology is crucial to New Zealand. I notice that David Carter, National’s agriculture spokesperson, knows how important it is that we have young people coming along and achieving scholarship level in biology. One thousand students sat the exam, and just nine—less than 1 percent—passed. Yet in English, 250 students out of 900 passed. In media studies, just one student in the whole country was able to achieve the standard. In a subject like accountancy, over 60 percent passed.

Has any Government member been able to provide an explanation as to how we have ended up with such a monumental mess? Let me tell members what the school principals in my area have said about it. The principal of Waimea College—a good, very standard school—said: “It is Mickey Mouse to the point of being ridiculous”. He said further: “To use the teenage language, it sucks.” Another very capable principal, Charles Newton, is absolutely furious and said that the situation is a debacle. Even more important, what about the students? I have not heard one word today from Government members about the most important people in this—the students. Quite simply, the qualification was approved in a botched-up hash afterwards and, as one student at Nayland College said about the issue, that has left students with a dodgy qualification.

So students are saying the qualification is a dodgy, and responsible principals are saying it is Mickey Mouse. But what did the Associate Minister, David Benson-Pope, say? He said that nothing went wrong and that he thinks there has been a lot of scaremongering. He said that “most people are really pleased with the system we have got.” Is it not extraordinary that we have an Associate Minister of Education who has his head in the sand while the future of New Zealand’s best and brightest students is being undermined? Then we listened to his contribution to the debate in the House on the pivotal issue of the well-being of our brightest students. He was given 15 minutes in response, and how long did he speak for? Six minutes! That is all he thought the brightest students of New Zealand were worth—just 6 minutes. Even worse, he did not mention the word “scholarship” once, even though this debate is about New Zealand Scholarship. As well, he did not once mention the students of New Zealand—such was his disgraceful contribution.

💬 Hon Bill English: You’re joking! He never mentioned the students once?

He did not mention the students once. He did say that NCEA was liberating. I wonder how liberating it was for one of the students in my electorate, Kinley Salmon, who is a year 13 student. Everybody expected him to be able to achieve at scholarship level, but he was told he had missed out. He missed his one chance because of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Government’s mess in that area.

The Minister said we should be excited about the results from NCEA. Excited? Should we be excited about a disgrace, about the most incompetent management of our examination system in the whole of the last 50-plus years? There is nothing exciting about it; it is simply a disgrace. He gave us a lecture about the flaws of School Certificate. He said that School Certificate was awful because it failed 50 percent of students. What about his replacement system? In the NCEA biology scholarship exam 99.3 percent of students failed. That sounds like a big improvement to me! But what worries me even more is the way forward that has been indicated.

A moment ago the Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard, made a contribution. He had 10 minutes to explain himself, but he spoke for just 3 minutes. Is that what Trevor Mallard, the Minister of Education, the Minister responsible for the development of the scholarship exam—

💬 Hon Tony Ryall: The architect.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH:—the architect of the scholarship exam—thinks the brightest 2,000 students are worth? The Minister of Education says that this problem is one that has to be solved by the whole community. What sort of wallies do we have on the Government benches, when we have a Minister of Education saying about a fundamental problem with the administration of our scholarship exam that it is not his problem and that the community can sort it out, for goodness’ sake? Simply, that is not good enough, and if that is the best he can do he should throw in the towel and resign this very day.

💬 Hon Bill English: What does he say went wrong?

He said that nothing went wrong. I also want to draw the attention of the House to the fact that it is bad enough that the Government got it wrong but even worse that it went ahead with it after having been advised it was wrong. Bill English tabled in the House the minutes of a meeting of the Secondary Principals’ and Leaders’ Forum from 25 August last year. There was time at that point to do something about it, to fix it, to make a difference. But those minutes show that despite the presence of the chief executive of the Ministry of Education and the head of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and despite sensible principals from around New Zealand saying that the scholarship exam was in deep trouble, the Minister was still pronouncing publicly that it was all OK and that they were just scaremongering.

I say to the Minister that if he can go out and accuse people who have raised concerns about the NCEA scholarship of scaremongering, then it has now become an awful mess. Thousands of students have been robbed of being properly recognised as the best and brightest New Zealand students. He should do no less than resign. In my 15 years in this House, I have not known of any education debacle of this size to impact so negatively on so many students. The Minister must take responsibility. He must front up to those hundreds of students who last year put their heart and soul into their studies and their faith in the Government to be able to administer an exam. But the Government has botched it up and taken away their one opportunity of a lifetime to achieve a New Zealand Scholarship. The Government has failed our young people something dreadful!

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.