Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future

I have received a letter from the Hon Bill English seeking to debate under Standing Order 373 an announcement by the Associate Minister of Education about the future of the New Zealand Scholarship exams. This is a particular case of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility. Given that it relates to a matter of considerable public importance, and that it sets out the Government’s acceptance of most of the recommendations of an expert panel, set up a month or so ago following controversy over the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, I consider that the House should have an early opportunity to consider the matter. I am therefore prepared to accept the application and I call upon Mr English to move the motion.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. It is good to see that the Government has backed down on its purist ideological model it has been imposing on the students of secondary schools in New Zealand.

💬 Opposition Member: Step one.

As my colleague has said, that is only step one, because the big question hanging over the education of 100,000 students who will be entering for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) this year is this: how long will it take the Minister to back down and change the way he operates the NCEA?

Today the Government continued the tactic of stonewalling and obfuscation that it has followed all this year. But members in the House know that as these issues are raised, and that as public concern increases, the Government will be forced to move in order to make some pragmatic changes to the NCEA.

I want to remind the House of the series of events that have led to this decision announced today by the Government. In late January, I became aware of the fact that there were some odd results in the scholarship exam. They were much talked about around the education sector. The Government apparently did not know anything about those matters, so I put them into the public arena. Public concern about the scholarship results was quite substantial.

The Government was then forced to defend the scholarship exam, and it defended it by saying that it would not release the information—that there was nothing wrong with it and that variability, such as there was with those results, was to be expected. I think that the matter might have rested there if it were not for the fact that many schools, and their teachers and students, felt cheated. When they saw the results of the scholarship exam, they expressed their views very strongly. Many of them went to the media, and many of them came to me.

The Government then tried to cover up what had happened with scholarship. Through questions in the House, Opposition members were able to establish that the Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard, had known for several weeks that there were problems with the scholarship exam results. But even though he knew there were problems, he made public statements announcing changes to the scholarship awards without any reference to those problems, at all.

I take this opportunity to lay the blame for the scholarship debacle very clearly where it should lie, which is at the feet of Trevor Mallard, the Minister of Education. He is the man who, right through last year, brushed aside every critic, labelling them as idiots. He is the man who gave total backing to an incompetent New Zealand Qualifications Authority as it went about the process of implementing the scholarship system, which the authority had been told would not work. In fact, some of the people from whom the Government took advice for this announcement are the people who told the Government 2 years ago that the path it was going down would not work.

Trevor Mallard decided to continue anyway. He continued in a way that was reckless of the aims and aspirations of the thousands of young New Zealanders who are our best students. I believe that he knew it would not work very well, but he had the arrogance to believe that that would not matter. That is what I believe happened.

Then, a couple of thousand young students in New Zealand ended up with the most bizarre exam results they could get—results where the Cabinet said: “You passed it.” Imagine that! It is like Zimbabwe. The authority did not get the right results; the matter got in the paper because of the authority’s incompetence; and Cabinet stepped in and said: “We will give you a certificate of distinction and you a certificate of distinction.”

The young people of New Zealand were confronted with the awful spectacle of the Hon David Benson-Pope as chief examiner. Well, when he fell asleep in the House, people really got to see the Government in action—because that is what the Government did about it; it tried to sleep right through the debate. In the end, the Minister succumbed to the pressure and set up the Scholarship Reference Group.

I have said all along that what those students need in scholarship is a ranking exam, because scholarship could not work in the way it was set up. It was set up as if everyone who passed the standard would receive a scholarship but, of the students who passed the standard, only some would receive money. So they have to be ranked; it is obvious. Last year I asked some of our leading educationalists how that ranking would happen. Well, none of them knew how it would happen, and that is why we ended up with such a debacle.

But I have to say that the debacle is not over. There are still 140 school awards to be made under the scholarship system—140 school awards have not yet been made. So this is the situation that confronts students: if three or four students in a school all receive one scholarship, all in different subjects, only one of them will receive $1,500 a year for the next 3 years—$4,500. One of them will receive money—but no one knows who it will be or how it will be decided.

Even now schools are confused. I was rung by a school official today, who said: “We have just been asked by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to rank our students so that we decide the top scholar in our school, who will get $4,500 over 3 years.” I rang another school, which told me: “Oh, no. The school doesn’t do it; the authority will do it.” So I asked: “How will the authority rank your students to determine the top scholar?”. Well, the school had no idea, and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has no idea. I have looked through the Scholarship Reference Group report and the Cabinet paper, and no one there has any idea.

So 140 of our top students are now pitched into another lottery. The first lottery concerned whether they would receive a scholarship at all—those ones were the lucky ones; they got it—and the next lottery means that the 140 have to sit around and wait for someone to decide, somehow, who will receive those top scholarships. The scholarship is worth $4,500. That is 450 hours of part-time work at $10 an hour, if one is lucky. So it matters.

💬 Phil Heatley: Cabinet will decide!

Maybe my colleague is right. Why do we not get the Hon David Benson-Pope to decide? Why does he not decide?

💬 Pansy Wong: Is he awake enough for it?

Well, if he is awake—if he can stay awake long enough, can he decide? Well, I would say no, because the Hon David Benson-Pope has shown no interest in students’ welfare or in fairness for students, all the way through this whole debacle.

So when the Minister gets to his feet, I want him to explain how those scholarships will be allocated. I want him to tell us how a system that the Scholarship Reference Group says cannot rank students will actually rank them. The House deserves to know today how that will happen, because hundreds of students out there are still waiting to find out whether they get the top Scholarship Award for their school. Well, that is scholarship!

The Government will pretend that it has made no changes to its lovely standards-based theology, when in fact it has. It has changed the system by doing three things. Firstly, it has ranked students. Secondly, it has provided gradings or marks, as the recommendation here says. Thirdly, it has predetermined how many students will get scholarships, which is in the range of 2 or 3 percent. I agree with those changes; I welcome the back-down.

But now we come to the serious issue: how long will the Government try to hold out on the NCEA being unchanged—remaining as it is? Every time Government members get up in the House and say that the Opposition spokesman is talking nonsense and that everything is fine, we find within about 2 months that the policy has changed.

My colleague from New Zealand First Brian Donnelly has had exactly the same experience. He gets up and says certain things. The Government is nice to him, for some reason—it always abuses me—but it ends up changing the policy. [Interruption] Well, the Minister thinks that it is only backward, retrograde, conservative people who want the change.

I have a letter from Shirley Boys High School—a very reasonable, moderate letter, which the Minister was sent—that sets out the strengths of the NCEA but then that essentially says the assessment does not provide fairness for the school’s students. That school is a pretty straightforward, middle-of-the-road, non-political school. I want to tell the Minister—who is a new Minister, a junior Minister, and usually a sleeping Minister—that when he gets a letter like that he should take notice. That school is not some den of National voters or some arm of the Business Roundtable; that is a middle-of-the-road, mainstream school suggesting that he change the NCEA to provide fairness for students.

I believe that the Minister should do that, and I believe that in the end he will be forced to do that—or the next Government certainly will. He simply needs to change the assessment for our students.

I have looked at the national results for 2004. The essential problem is that a student’s success in the NCEA depends on picking the right subjects in the right year.

💬 Stephen Franks: And the right school.

Actually, it is worse than that. Public confidence in this qualification is now so low that the qualification is now rated according to the school someone went to. I have to tell this House, with regret, that someone who went to Catlins Area School, Menzies College, or Blue Mountain College, in my electorate, will not be rated in the same way as someone who went to Tawa College, Avondale College, or Massey High School, because those are schools people have heard of. They have never heard of Catlins Area School or of Northern Southland College, which has only 90 students in its secondary department.

That is the worst possible outcome for a State education system, and that is the irony of this whole issue. Labour, which prides itself on its wonderful morality about State education, has done more to destroy the NCEA, and more to destroy the credibility of our secondary State education and our tertiary State education, than any other Government this country has had. Labour has done that through arrogance, complacency, extremism, and a deep ideological attachment to a system that does not deliver fairness and credibility for our students.

The system keeps the bureaucrats happy. It means that they can go to conferences and say they are the only people in the world doing this. But that does not mean it works. The bureaucrats can go to conferences and say that New Zealand is the only Western country where Cabinet has to decide who passes the exams—

💬 Phil Heatley: And Zimbabwe.

And Zimbabwe—no, in Zimbabwe it never got that bad! They fixed it in Zimbabwe before Mugabe decided on giving out the certificates.

The system does not work for students, and this qualification has no purpose other than to work for students, so I welcome the Government’s announcement today. It is a substantial back-down. It is a substantial response to the practical concerns of so many leading educators, and that is good.

The Minister will now try to sound as if nothing has changed, as if he listened to nobody, as if he were always right, and as if none of it ever happened. But I say to the Minister that he should consider his obligation to the public good, consider his obligation to the secondary school students of New Zealand, and start heeding the advice he is getting about the NCEA, so that we can make the qualification work for students. The system needs some practical incorporation of norm reference - type testing and assessment, which would underpin the NCEA and make it work in the way many of us want it to work.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to correct some of the misinformation around this issue that is constantly being peddled by the National Party spokesman, in the short term, for education. Clearly—and it has become clearer as the days have gone by, including through the newspaper article I quoted at question time—Mr English has demonstrated that he is out of step not only with the mainstream of New Zealand educational thinking but also with the educational philosophy of his own party. Equally clearly, as I said in this Chamber last night, that will be a short-term situation, because Mr Allan Peachey, Mr English’s soon-to-be colleague in the Parliament, holds a view that is diametrically opposed to the one Mr English has been peddling around the community.

It is really important to acknowledge first of all that the introduction of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) took place in the time of this Government’s predecessor, the former National Government. And it is sad, given that fact, that the current National Party spokesman has been so grossly irresponsible in his negative contributions about the issue. No one could find in any of Mr English’s advocacies, statements, or comments to date anything positive about NCEA or any positive suggestion for improving issues that everyone in the country would acknowledge need addressing—issues around scholarship, and lesser but nonetheless important issues around the whole qualifications system—so that everyone is confident that the system is as robust as we have reason to require it to be.

The ultimate sadness for me and for a lot of education professionals is that Mr English, while being out of step with the majority mainstream view in his own party on this matter, has now painted himself into a sad corner as the public voice of the anti-NCEA lobby.

💬 Hon Bill English: Oh!

Well, the covers are off now, because of Mr English’s statements up at the Kapiti coast the other day about scaling. One of the most heinous things the previous assessment system did was manipulate the results of our young people to ensure that 50 percent of every cohort failed. That is what it did, and that is why education professionals in this country demanded year after year—as did responsible business leaders—a more useful educational qualification that was not designed to disadvantage 50 percent of our community. That is why, listening to reason, the former National Government in 1998 introduced the NCEA, the system we have now.

Given the pressures put on the Qualifications Authority by the simultaneous introduction of the scholarship exam and the level 3 qualification, I am delighted that we have had such a positive response from the working party I nominated and invited to consider these matters. Just so that there is no confusion on the part of Mr English on this matter—because one of Mr English’s constant problems is getting it wrong, as the community again and again acknowledges—let me affirm that looking at the issues around 2004, issues such as the allocation of any current scholarships outstanding, was not part of the terms of reference of that working party. The terms of reference of that working party referred to the responsibility that it took on to make sure that we could have no repetition at the end of this year and in early 2006 of what happened in 2004.

The first thing I said when welcoming the first meeting of that working party was that Cabinet could not allow or in any way entertain a repetition of a clearly unsatisfactory state of events at the beginning of this year. I am very proud to be part of a Government that responded extraordinarily quickly and totally appropriately to the potential disadvantage that came from what had always happened in the scholarship exams once scaling was removed. The saddest thing in all of this is that, after that demonstration of how negative scaling is, the education spokesperson for the National Party, Bill English, made it so clear that he now advocates—unlike his party, presumably—a return to scaling.

I will spend a little bit of time setting out exactly what the outcome of those considerations is. It is an outcome that was approved by Cabinet yesterday. First of all, I will dwell on the essential difference between the New Zealand Scholarship 2004 and what is being proposed for students sitting exams this year. The key recommendation of the review group is that the scholarship will now be awarded to a set percentage of students in each subject. That will not vary from subject to subject in general, although I will make a qualification to that shortly. Depending on further Cabinet work on the quantum of scholarships—the number and amount to be awarded—there will be a decision made by the review panel that has been set up by the group on where that percentage is set.

Because that figure will be based on the cohort—the number of students—studying that subject at level 3 of the NCEA, it will be necessary to depart from the target percentage from time to time; otherwise, it would be impossible to preserve the integrity of the exam. For example, with small scholarship entries in a large cohort, and so on, every member in the House could see the potential for everyone who entered a scholarship exam on a raw percentage situation to be a successful candidate. Clearly that would not be acceptable.

Equally, because the exam remains standards-based, it is absolutely essential that the review panel has the capacity to check that standards are being met. So a second level of intervention will also be possible to ensure, as the top candidates are ranked, that all people being awarded scholarships in whatever subject have met a satisfactory scholarship standard.

So is this a fair way of allocating scholarship money? The review panel of very distinguished educators from both sides of the NCEA fence believed so and Cabinet agreed. The recommended solution ensures there is a similar proportion of scholarship awards in each scholarship subject, relative to the number of students studying at level 3. This means that students performing at the top of their subject all have an equivalent chance of receiving a scholarship. Furthermore, there will also be top scholar awards retained, as recommended by the review group.

The key question that seems to trouble Mr English is whether this is still standards-based assessment. Yes, it is. Given that NCEA is based on standards-based assessment, it seems to me that that is not only entirely desirable but consistent and logical.

It is true that the Scholarship Reference Group recommended neither for nor against standards-based examination. Given that its recommendations were by consensus, given that it did not vote on these issues, and given that there were representatives of both sides of the NCEA argument on that panel, that is hardly surprising. That is one of the reasons why I think the panel members are to be most highly complimented on their performance, because they did not allow their particular partisan views, which they are entitled to hold, and hold very strongly, to influence unreasonably the deliberations of the panel. I think what they produced is a bit of a beacon for how we can ensure good relationships in education and sensible decision-making. I am sure that that is one of the reasons Cabinet so welcomed the panel’s recommendations.

I turn now to what will happen beyond 2005. Following the interest and public focus on this most important matter, the House can be assured that the Government will continue to closely monitor the developments in this examination, the performance as the years go by, and the implementation this year. The ministry will report to Cabinet on awards criteria for the next 3 years on a regular basis to ensure that the recommendations of the group are being properly followed.

Furthermore, the scholarship review group also recommended the establishment of a national scholarship monitoring panel. The exact detail of its interrelationship with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is being worked out now. That group will have the responsibility of monitoring the consistency and cohesion of the scholarship awards and giving assurance to and confidence in the authority’s and the ministry’s processes to the community, to students, to teachers, and to the Government as a whole.

That panel has two arms. First of all, the monitoring and implementation group will do the detailed work in respect of the examination. Secondly, an independent advisory group will have a wider policy development role.

I think this is a very good outcome. Like most people, we would have preferred the events at the start of this year not to have happened. Like most people, we are assuming that they may well have occurred because of the simultaneous pressure of level 3 being introduced at the same time as the scholarship exam. Whatever the cause, which will be revealed by the State Services Commission inquiry that is also in train, I am confident that there is no likelihood or possibility of a repetition of the unfortunate events of the start of this year. I am sure that most members of the community are very pleased that the Government has acted as quickly as it has and with as much consultation as it has in an appropriate time frame to fix up the problem.

In his speech Mr English queried why it is that when both he and I are saying the same things, the Government is nice to me and not very nice to him. I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I will say, just so he knows this, that probably the manner in which the message is being delivered is the difference between us. Having had something to do with the Rt Hon Wyatt Creech during the establishment of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and the initial work that was done on it, I will make a number of comments around the issue of New Zealand Scholarship and the larger issue of the NCEA. Mr Benson-Pope is not correct in saying that the NCEA was devised to get rid of scaling. Scaling had already been got rid of prior to that—and well and truly got rid of. We also had a standards-based system that was getting in the way of everything. The unit-standard system was threatening to smother everything. We had the anachronistic School Certificate system, which was really a bit of a lottery. We also had Sixth Form Certificate, which was based upon the results that came from School Certificate. If people think that in the past, before the NCEA was developed, we had examinations where 50 percent of students passed and 50 percent failed, I say that is absolutely untrue.

The NCEA was designed to overcome some of the problems that had developed since Sixth Form Certificate had become the sole qualification in the sixth form and university entrance had been abolished. However, in the decision making it was decided that there would be an examination called a scholarship examination to rank out our top students—to recognise excellence in academia. That was the whole purpose behind it. It was always understood, although it was never written in black and white at that particular point in time, that it would be a form of ranking examination—a competitive examination. I sat scholarship over 2 years in my secondary career, with 10 3-hour exams spread over the course of 2 weeks each year. It was a bit rugged. It was decided that for our very top students there would be a series of examinations that would discriminate the very, very best from the very, very good. That is why NCEA level 3 was developed and why New Zealand Scholarship was to be sat in the same year. Scholarship was not for all and sundry, but for the cream of our students. The only way to discriminate between the top students is to have a ranking, scaling-type system. There is no other possible way to do that. We cannot do it on the basis of standards-based assessment.

Unfortunately, all that the October 1998 Cabinet minute stated, when it came to scholarship, was: “There will be a scholarship examination”. It did not state that it would be standards-based. It just stated that it would exist, and it assumed that further policy work would take place. I have questioned whether policy work was done around the issue, and have learnt that in fact it was not. What actually happened was that a gap was left and the bureaucrats were left to make the decisions. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats, particularly those in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, were absolutely committed, almost to the point of irrationality, to standards-based assessment, to the extent that they could not see the inherent weaknesses in standards-based assessment. Those weaknesses do exist, and the problem we have at the moment is that even to this day the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Government are not admitting to the fact that there are inherent weaknesses in standards-based assessment.

I will give an example of that to the House. It comes from the information we received from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority about level 1 of the NCEA, and is to do with the problem of why there was such a big range in the number of “excellents” given in 2003 and 2004. Here is the standard: “Find unknowns in word or 3-D problems”. The thing is that there were about 5,000 “excellents” in one year, and about 90 in the next. We have to ask whether there was such a big difference in teaching from one year to the next, or whether the difference was in the standard between one year and the next. The problem is actually that there are two standards in the standard as stated, not one, but it is wrapped up as if it were one standard. I will give the House the answer. In the first year of NCEA assessment the examiner chose to assess a word problem, whereby a situation was presented in context and candidates had to translate the practical situation into a mathematical situation. In the second year, the examiner assessed the candidates’ ability to solve a 3-D problem, and stated: “This is an aspect of mathematics which students have always struggled with. The candidates performed very badly in this question in 2003”—that is the second year—“which was not unexpected, as it is conceptually more difficult for them.” Now, if members are hearing what I am saying, they will realise we have, within one standard, two separate standards that are conceptually different, and one is more difficult than the other.

If we can have that kind of difference within a standard, surely we will be presented with huge differences between different standards even within one subject area and across different subject areas, so how can we then use the results to compare students? That is exactly what occurred in New Zealand Scholarship. There was no moderation process or scaling process—and I am sorry, but I still believe that we need to assume that the populations in every subject, particularly in the ones that attract the larger numbers, are equivalent populations if we are going to work this issue out. I believe that the moves that have been made are a step in the right direction, but that they still do not resolve the fundamental problems and tensions that exist as a result of the decisions that have been made.

However, I have to go on and ask who is to blame for the situation. Is it because National did not make the right decisions at the time? Well, National made only one decision, and that was to have a scholarship examination. The problem has to be pointed at the present administration. These decisions should have been made when it took office. Let us face it, some critical decisions about the timing of the NCEA were made by Government members, and I applaud them for that. They got that one right. They could have made decisions in here. They could have faced up to the fact that if one is to have a ranking-comparing examination or test, then one has to have some sort of moderation or scaling process. The Government did not face up to that. It did not make those decisions, and therefore what came out at the end was pretty predictable—in fact, very predictable. Therein lay the problem. I kept on asking why, even after the results came out in January this year and huge problems were noticed in the variability between different subjects, decisions could not have been made to overcome the problems. The issue was that the exams were not marked in such a way that that could be done. There were no marks that could be manipulated. It was not a matter of the scripts going back. The scripts had already been sent back; that was not the problem. The problem was that the grades were marked in a manner that could not then be manipulated statistically in order to get a fair outcome. So we have a situation where people have got scholarships based upon the subjects they have taken, not necessarily on their abilities, and that is unfair on the students. It is unfair both on the students who gained them justifiably, and on the students who missed out as a result of picking subjects that had hard standards.

What this decision now will mean is that in each particular subject area a given number of students will most definitely get scholarships. However, that will not overcome some of that variability between the cohorts themselves, and there will be variability within those cohorts. So I suggest to the Government that this measure will be only a very temporary solution and that there will still be some problems to overcome arising from the decision made today, which will face us at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006. Further modifications will have to be made to this particular examination, particularly in terms of the awards to the top students, because that cannot be done by the present suggestions. I have to go along with what the Hon Bill English said, which is that the problem it leads us to now is not confidence that the examination will yield the results, but the issue of the presumed quality of the school. I am the ex-principal of an area school—Tauraroa Area School—and, because it did not have a town or anything else attached to it, no one would know where it was. If one of my students had got a scholarship, people would have just said they were sorry, but he or she came from a tinpot country school. But, if a student who received a scholarship came from Auckland Grammar, they would have said that because the student was from Auckland Grammar he or she was deserving of it. That is unfair, and that is something that has always been a challenge to our education system. Our education system has always fronted up to ensure that there was equity within the results that our assessment systems produced. That is so that anybody who gets an A, a B, or a C award is judged to be equivalent.

Today will be remembered as the day that Bill English won a major victory over David Benson-Pope, and that that Minister tried to duck and dive the very serious matters that were raised under his rule as Associate Minister of Education. David Benson-Pope was caught, yet again, asleep on the job, and he made a complete shambles of the New Zealand Scholarship system. It is fair to say that Mr Benson-Pope probably had thrown to him the biggest hospital pass we have seen in a long, long time. With that hospital pass came the opportunity for him to stand up and be counted, and to take notice of what parents, students, and educators all around New Zealand were saying about the scholarship examination. But that Associate Minister chose to take the easy route and simply back the lines put in place by Trevor Mallard as Minister of Education. When a new Minister arrives in the office of the Ministry of Education, he or she has an opportunity to rethink things, to put a different face to the problem, and to take time to reconsider issues in a way that might make him look considered and—heaven forbid—in touch with what the education system is going through. But the Associate Minister did not do that, and only today has he finally admitted that the Government got it badly wrong.

The changes talked about today require students to be ranked within subjects. However, the point Bill English made in his contribution to this snap debate about the 140 school awards that are still up in the air is an important one. I believe that somewhere in the dark depths of the Ministry of Education is a document that ranks subjects against each other. To me it seems impossible for schools to make decisions about who their top scholar is if more than one student has passed New Zealand Scholarship in more than one subject. In other words, if a school has two or three students who have all attained two scholarship examination subjects, then who becomes the top scholar for that school? That problem, for those in 2004 who did get scholarships, has still not been solved.

I am highly suspicious about the fact that somewhere in the Ministry of Education someone has made a decision about ranking subject against subject. In other words, when it comes to choosing the top scholar from each school, the most academic of subjects sat will count for more than less-academic subjects sat. I challenge the Minister to stand in this House and say that no such ranking between subjects exists. I cannot for the life of me work out how it could not possibly be hidden away in there.

But we should remember what has happened. The Associate Minister has now admitted that standards-based assessment is not an untouchable Holy Grail. For the first 8 weeks that the House has been sitting this year, up until 12 o’clock today, that is not what he has been saying. He has said that ranks and marks could now be introduced, but only after political embarrassment—the hard work of Bill English, forcing his hand, and 6 weeks of questioning in this House, supported by other political parties that shared similar concerns over the way the system had been operating.

💬 Hon Brian Donnelly: You’re allowed to mention it!

I thought it was quite nifty, actually. We should remember that on previous occasions the Associate Minister said that standards-based assessment results could not be used to compare results. On 15 February he said: “I would have hoped by now that the member”—no doubt referring to Bill English—“would understand that in a standards-based assessment regime … with lots of variable factors, such comparisons between years and cohorts are absolutely meaningless.” That is what he said. Well, he has completely changed his mind after considerable political pressure has been placed on him.

We should go back, as my colleague the Hon Brian Donnelly did, and remember the intensity of pressure around this issue for the first 10 to 12 weeks of this year, because now, as we sit on the cusp of April, it is easy to forget the intensity of feeling that came from parents and students from all over New Zealand and who went in absolute despair to the offices of members of Parliament scattered throughout the country. I had secondary school personnel from all over my electorate phoning to say: “This is a shambles.” Parents wanted to meet to discuss how they could sort out the mess of the results that were coming through—results that stated “Absent from exam.”, when the students had sat the exam, and that gave students grades for exams they had never sat. It was a complete shambles.

I have to say that the class of 2004 were guinea pigs for a shambles of an arrangement that David Benson-Pope had the opportunity to fix when he became the Associate Minister of Education. But he would not do it. He took the word of Trevor Mallard—mistake No.1—and carried on implementing, and standing by, a system that was doomed to fail. It was only the reports of the lop-sided results, and the intensifying pressure from Bill English and others in this Chamber, that saw the new Associate Minister of Education, David Benson-Pope, finally announce a review of New Zealand Scholarship—but not before the Government had moved into a major spin mode and announced that it would intervene to arbitrarily offer a new class of award, the distinction award. Well, if I were a 17-year-old student sitting scholarship exams in physics, history, or English, the thought of Marian Hobbs, David Benson-Pope, and Michael Cullen sitting around the Cabinet table deciding whether I was to get a distinction award would fill me with no confidence at all. Neither would it fill any parents in New Zealand with confidence.

We should remember that during the first two sittings of Parliament this year the galleries were packed with students who had sat New Zealand Scholarship in 2004, and the Associate Minister stood in this House and continued to deny there was a problem. Well, I tell him that there was a problem. He was badly wrong. He had an opportunity to correct those matters when he became the Associate Minister of Education. He did not do it.

There was a major back-down today—a major back-down by David Benson-Pope, a major back-down by the Ministry of Education, and a major back-down by the Labour Government. There was a victory for common sense, and a victory for Bill English. At long last students sitting scholarship exams in 2005 will have some certainty. It is just a shame that the students of 2004 were treated so appalling and with such utter disdain by this Government and by that Associate Minister.

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 1,600 or 1,700 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.

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 $1,000 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 $6,000 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.

I rise on behalf of United Future, to address this matter from, probably, a different perspective, but to note that although we have had a lot of Opposition politicians quick to publicise or to promote what the problems might be, solutions have been very slow to emerge. That is one observation that we have been able to note. United Future has been more focused on how to fix the problems. The committee that examined this has come forth with a solution today and it has been published. I will come back to that to refer to one or two points that the Associate Minister touched on today.

United Future has had a track record of trying to improve the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) programme through the system. Right from the beginning since we were elected, I remember that we—and myself in particular—initiated a select committee inquiry into the implementation of the NCEA qualifications system. It was not so much dealing with it as a system, but addressing the total inadequacies of the support and everything that went through for that—the funding, the personnel, the skills, and everything else. From year one it was obvious that the system was struggling even to exist. We were successful in helping, with the Government, in the 2003 Budget to add at least, I think it was, something like $66 million over the next 4 years to help with operations grants in implementing NCEA. We want to offer specific constructive and common-sense solutions to the problems that have and will still beset the NCEA.

But I think it would be good if we could just refer to what we are looking at here. We are probably looking at a clash of two world views in educational philosophies. Nobody really has got on to how we synchronise these two, which actually cannot truly be synchronised. That is where everyone is trying to harmonise one with the other.

I would like to refer to where these matters began. They began with Socrates and Plato. Plato and Socrates had two different views on how to allow education to take place, and it is from there that we still have two different views in operation. That is why we talk about norm-based or standards-based. They are two entirely different views. When they come together they clash.

I remind the House that Socrates had the concept that children were inherently bad, and the system called education, and educators, were there to help and to correct them. That was his view. Plato had the concept that children were inherently good in terms of education, and the systems that were there made them worse. So what we are looking at today is very similar—the knowledge or norm-based systems that we have had up until now with exams were really where Plato was coming from. We had good children; they needed to be filled up with more information, and therefore be accounted for and assessed in that manner through examinations.

On the other hand, Socrates had what we would call a standards-based system—children were bad, they need to be corrected in all their assessments, life skills, and everything else, and hence the standards-based concept is as old as that.

Today we arrive at a clash of these two ideas, and I do not believe that we have fully solved it. It is important that the House comment on the report the Government has produced today. Other speakers have addressed these comments, but if we are going to have a scholarship system where a percentage is allocated to every subject—if I recall what the Associate Minister said today—it is not then based on scholarship. The Minister stated: “We will allocate a percent of the top people,”—and they do not define how we get to the top people—“and then we will allocate a percent.”

Let us say it is 3 percent, for argument’s sake, of all of those who did the level 3 programme. They cannot be called scholarships; they are basically just selected. It has nothing to do scholarship. I think this is where the clash of ideas still exists in our vocabulary. We call it a scholarship exam when it is not. It is a delusion.

Another thing that I believe the Associate Minister spoke about, by way of conclusion, was that it was based on level 3. Level 3 is not scholarship as we used to know it. It should be, and it is what we tried and experimented with this year with the 2004 exams, a level 4. There should be a level 4 that is quite separate and it should not only just meet, as the Associate Minister proclaimed today, a satisfactory level. I am not sure what that means, and I am sure the students of 2005 will never know what it means. In fact, it will be hidden from them until somebody selects a certain percent on every subject.

It is a terrifying experience not to know whether there are any standards that can be achieved. If everybody went to the lowest possible satisfactory level, the top percent would still be chosen, whatever it was, and I do not think that that is really what it is all about. I applaud the Government for at least having a top scholar award programme built into the whole issue, but I believe that we are not adequately looking at the two philosophies as they clash.

The standards-based programme should finish at level 3, and the norm-based programme should kick in at level 4. I say that because when one goes to university, in particular, it is a norm-based system. So, to integrate the two systems the clash between them needs to take place before the students get to university so that they can understand.

United Future asks for a return to real scholarship exams in their previous format. I do not believe there is any problem with that. A separate scholarship exam system is to find out who are the top students in every subject. Their results can then be compared, they can be ranked, and they can have an order about them. People want to know where they stood as students and so do the universities and others who are taking them on. It is very difficult to go away from that. Scholarship exams should revert back to the norm-referenced systems and, therefore, enable results to be ranked, or even scaled if necessary. This should not jeopardise the NCEA assessment, because the scholarship exams are kept separate.

I believe that what the Associate Minister has to do now is engage in a strong and vigorous public education campaign to ensure that parents, students, employers, and, certainly, the universities, can understand what is going on through the promotion of a scholarship exam. We should not call them scholarship exams, fraudulently, unless they are scholarship exams. If that were achieved, we would see a better, more relieved public in terms of present students and, certainly, forthcoming students in New Zealand.

I thank Bernie Ogilvy for his thoughtful contribution, but I must say that I disagree with him on two quite important points in that speech. The more important point is that I do not think it is possible to run the scholarship exam as a norm-based system while simultaneously having a reference-based examination for National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 3, because, in effect, that would be requiring both teachers and students to be approaching a curriculum simultaneously from a norm-based and a reference-based system during the year.

💬 Stephen Franks: The Cambridge A students do it—thousands of them.

A few Cambridge A students do it. The Cambridge A student examination reflects very little on the nature of New Zealand society and New Zealand content.

The old scholarship examination, of course, ran alongside the old bursary examination. The old bursary examination was a norm-based system in exactly the same way as the scholarship examination was a norm-based system. So it is actually relatively easy to run the two side by side.

However, I also think what many people have lost sight of in this debate and have never really understood was that part of the mess in last year’s scholarship examination revealed what had been an ongoing series of problems for scholarship in previous years that had not been fully revealed, and, in particular, that pass marks amongst a number of science subjects were extremely low in scholarship. For example, in biology for one year there were no passes at all. Everybody failed that year. That is an absurdity, because, clearly, if an examination has been set to a proper standard, we know that of the number of students sitting biology in a year in New Zealand, some of them ought to be passing. What in fact happened was that heavy scaling—not moderate scaling to take account of variability between markers and variability between standards of examinations from year to year—was occurring to lift people who got under 50 percent up to a mark of 88 or 96. I cannot remember now whether 88 was the top scholarship mark or whether 96 was the top scholarship mark; one was bursary and one was scholarship. However, everything was scaled to the position of either 88 or 96 for many, many years. That is a level of scaling that does an injustice to the notion of scaling as an academic assessment tool.

I think that the report from the reference group—which was an extraordinarily good reference group—is very, very sensible. In particular, I think the proposal that between 2 and 3 percent of students should get a scholarship is appropriate. That is why I disagree with the member saying that this is not a scholarship examination. An examination that leads to somebody getting money, at the end of the day, seems to me to be exactly what a scholarship examination is. I suspect that, unlike many people in the House, I am one of the few who has had one in the past. Also, I think that I am the only person in the House who has ever been a chief examiner for scholarship in a subject. So I do speak with some knowledge about these particular matters, although I have to admit it is from an awfully long time ago.

I think those problems also showed up the difficulty of having examinations being set and marked by university-based examiners setting according to university stage I standards, which are not the same thing as seventh form, at all. In particular, that can lead to, for example, excessive pass rates in subjects like Māori, where stage I Māori is an introductory subject, but seventh form Māori includes both people who are native Māori speakers and many who have been learning Māori for 13, 14, and 15 years previously. Not unnaturally, therefore, there was very high pass mark. Stage I in some subjects is quite different from the seventh form curriculum, and the skills being looked for in stage I science subjects are often quite different from what is being taught in seventh form science subjects, which is why we ended up with some very, very strange pass marks indeed.

Clearly, the situation last year was highly unsatisfactory and, clearly, there was not a good performance on the part of the relevant authorities. Young people in New Zealand do deserve an assurance that the examinations they sit are fairly set, fairly moderated, and fairly marked, and that the marking itself is being fairly moderated.

Finally, for those who still have some starry eyes about these things, let me say that—building on my experience in these matters—to some extent one is still marking the teacher as much as one is marking the student, at times. I remember receiving a set of scripts in the seventh form history examination for scholarship from one particular school—not a million miles from here I might say—in the Wellington region, where they all had it completely wrong. It was clear that this school was the examination centre, so all the students had had the same teacher, and they had all got it completely wrong. The interpretation they gave, while it might have been valid about 60 years before the examination, was well out of date by the late 1970s.

What the marker has to do in that situation is to try to allow for the fact that students have been taught this interpretation and that they are then trying to reproduce as best they can the knowledge that they have acquired. It is a very inexact art, trying to mark subjects such as history or English. In subjects such as mathematics, very small changes in the standard of the examination can lead to very large changes in the number of people achieving certain levels of pass from year to year. So some degree of comparison and moderation is absolutely essential if we are to do justice to young people.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.