NCEA lost over unpaid fees

WELLINGTON: More than 21,000 people who have passed NCEA exams in the past 10 years have never been awarded the credits because their parents did not pay the exam fees.

The lost credits have fallen into what Industry Training Federation chief executive Josh Williams calls ‘‘NCEA purgatory’’ — still accessible to training bodies, but not normally to employers.

‘‘Most of our industries would say that NCEA Level 2 is increasingly a bit of a minimum. If people don’t hold that, that would be a barrier,’’ he said.

‘‘To me that seems a bit cruel. If you think of NCEA as the culmination of all that compulsory education, and for the sake of $76, or $20, you don’t give people the piece of paper that shows the labour market what they have got, that’s a crazy policy.’’

Carterton construction worker Trent Grimmer (25) passed his Level 2 at Wellington’s Rongotai College but his mother, a beneficiary at the time, couldn’t afford the $76 fee so he never received the credits.

‘‘They would have been pretty helpful to me just to be able to show people that I had some qualifications,’’ he said.

The NZ Qualifications Authority charges a flat fee of $76.70 a year to enter the NCEA. Students can enter any number of NCEA standards at no extra charge.

The fee can be reduced to $20 a student, or $30 a family, for families who qualify for community services cards. The income limits range from $49,993 for a sole parent with one child up to $85,852 for a twoparent family with four children, with higher limits for bigger families.

However parents must apply via the students’ schools by Sept ember 1, and a $50 late fee is added to all fees paid after December 1.

Education Minister Nikki Kaye has told Green MP Catherine Delahunty in a written parliamentary answer that NZQA wrote to 22,127 students who had not paid their 2016 NCEA fees by the due date.

That was one seventh of the 154,835 students who entered NCEA last year.

NZQA deputy chief executive Kristine Kilkelly said 8395 of the late payers eventually paid up by the end of last week — leaving 13,732 who have still not paid last year’s fees.

Many of them did not pass any credits anyway. But Ms Kaye told Ms Delahunty 21,180 domestic students who entered NCEA from 2007 to 2016 ‘‘have one or more NCEA qualifications that have not been formally awarded due to unpaid fees’’.