'Merit' from the Greens for NCEA changes
green-party
Tue May 29 2007 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
'Merit' from the Greens for NCEA changes
Tuesday, 29 May 2007, 11:18 am
Press Release: Green Party
29 May 2007
'Merit' from the Greens for NCEA changes
The Green Party is welcoming today's announced changes to the NCEA qualification system. By providing students with the chance to be recognised for their whole year's work with a 'merit' or 'excellence' the Ministry of Education is wisely responding to those critics who questioned NCEA's capacity to challenge all of our students.
"With any new system that introduces changes of such a magnitude it's bound to take a while to assess how it's going and to make the necessary changes. I am very pleased that the Government has chosen to adapt the new system to make it work better and I am hopeful the announced changes will give students and their families a better understanding of the students' achievements and skills," Green Party Education Spokesperson Metiria Turei says.
"The addition of fulltime moderators for internal assessment should both strengthen the credibility of the NCEA and provide students with fairer outcomes.
"The Green Party supports the NCEA as offering a much better, more equitable system for students. We have criticised it in the past for being too employer focused, and some of those concerns are addressed by these changes," Mrs Turei says.
"We hope that schools will be supported in managing students through this fairly major change midway through the academic year. Students started this year with one set of expectations about how they would be assessed and now the goalposts are shifting. We expect the Ministry to provide schools and students with clear information about how the new descriptions of assessments will work, and how students can best work towards a merit or excellence for their year's work under this regime.
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"Most importantly, we believe that a strong New Zealand-based school assessment programme is essential if we are to avoid the development of a two-tier qualification system. A proliferation of private schools offering an alternative qualification, such as the Cambridge exams, to our young people could threaten to splinter the education system and undermine the achievements of many students. That's why it is so important that the NCEA is a qualification we can all believe in and that's why we support steps to strengthen the NCEA," Mrs Turei says.
ENDS
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