Macleans College latest to withdraw from NCEA Level 1
New Zealand’s fourth-biggest school, Macleans College, has joined a small stampede away from the first year of the national qualification system as school principals take fright at proposed reforms.
Macleans principal Steven Hargreaves yesterday told parents of his 2523 students that Macleans would not offer Level 1 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) from 2020.
The Bucklands Beach college will stop entering students in the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) in Year 11, but will continue to offer both NCEA and Cambridge exams in Years 12 and 13.
Ormiston Senior College also said last week that it would abandon NCEA Level 1 from next year and its Year 11 students would work towards achieving Level 2 over two years.
Auckland’s Hobsonville Pt Secondary School and Hamilton’s Fairfield College and Rototuna Senior High School have previously withdrawn from NCEA Level 1, and Hargreaves said more schools would follow suit.
“I heard that there were up to five [in Auckland] that were considering dumping Level 1, and more throughout the country,” he said.
Their decisions come two months after a Government-appointed review group proposed reducing NCEA Level 1 from 80 credits to 40, scrapping external exams and leaving only internally assessed literacy and numeracy tests and a project chosen by each student. It also proposed requiring 20 out of 80 credits in each of NCEA Levels 2 and 3 to come from a “pathway” course such as a trades course, a research project or a “community action project”.
More than 70 of the country’s 349 secondary principals have now signed a petition asking Education Minister Chris Hipkins to delay the review.
Hipkins has agreed to extend the consultation deadline from September 16 to October 19, and a spokesman said a Cabinet decision was expected “very soon” on creating a professional advisory group of principals and teachers to feed into the review.
Auckland Grammar School principal Tim O’Connor slammed the proposal to scrap external exams at Level 1 and said Grammar would replace NCEA Level 1 with its own “Pre-Q” assessments for Years 10 and 11, in which end-of-year exams would be “the predominant part of the assessment system”.
Hargreaves said Macleans’ decision to scrap Level 1 was only partly driven by the reform proposals.
He criticised the proposals to scrap external exams at Level 1 and encourage project work. “If you are interested in the wellbeing of students you don’t remove exams, you remove internal assessment, because that is what dogs them through the bulk of the year and weighs kids down, it’s not the three or so weeks of external assessment,” he said.