Year 7 NCEA tests too far – principals

Primary and intermediate school principals are telling the Ministry of Education that they don’t want children as young as 10 tested to new NCEA standards.

The Government is introducing the external assessments as part of reforms of NCEA announced earlier this year.

Now the Ministry of Education is asking if children as young as year 7 (about 11 years old) should be allowed to attempt the yet-to-bedeveloped standards.

It said the requirements were being introduced due to worries that too many students were leaving school without the skills to get jobs or do further study.

A study for the Tertiary Education Commission showed 40 per cent of students with NCEA level 2 did not meet the level of reading and numeracy regarded in adult testing as the minimum for life in a knowledge economy, even though they had met minimum NCEA literacy and numeracy standards.

The president of the Association of Intermediate and Middle Schools, Sharon Keen, said allowing children in year 7 or 8 to attempt the literacy and numeracy standards was a bad idea.

‘‘It has the risk of some schools going, ‘Wow we’ve got 90 per cent of our students by the end of their middle school passing, so we can go back to those league tables’ – all of the things that we’ve just got rid of,’’ she said.

Keen said such a move could prompt schools to focus on reading, writing and maths at the expense of other subjects.

‘‘It was our understanding that the original notes said this testing would occur in year 9, so at the moment we’re seeking meetings with people to find out where it’s come from, why it’s happening and what can we do about it.’’

The president of the Principals’ Federation, Whetu Cormick, said its members were taken aback by the suggestion children as young as 11 could sit the tests.

NZEI Te Riu Roa president Lynda Stuart said that once the tests were available it was likely parents would expect all schools to offer them. ‘‘We’ve just come out of a very negative experience with national standards and we don’t want to see that repeated.’’

Stuart said research showed children and teenagers were already under too much pressure because of tests and assessment.

The ministry’s acting deputy secretary for early learning and student achievement, Pauline Cleaver, said the timeline for changes to the NCEA would be decided at the end of this year.

‘‘Changes to the NCEA literacy and numeracy requirements will be brought in only after sufficient time and support has been made available to schools and foundation tertiary education providers, to ensure they are ready to implement the changes,’’ she said.

‘‘We expect the changes to NCEA as a whole will be phased in over at least three to five years.’’