Should kids learn how to serve a flat white at school?

Former head calls credits in subjects such as making filter coffee and managing shift work ‘garbage’

Despite an increased focus on “meaningful” skillsbased study some teenagers are still taking spurious NCEA standards — learning about toilet cleaning, household shopping and shift work.

The detailed student entry data was uncovered as part of a Herald investigation into soaring high school pass rates.

The number of students with the benchmark NCEA Level 2 rose more than 10 per cent in the past five years, with data showing large chunks of the credits earned came from more skillsbased subjects.

Figures showed the most popular of those during 2015 were hospitality, tourism and outdoor recreation, closely followed by construction trades — largely areas with demand for workers. It follows a push from the Government around its “vocational pathways” policy, to ensure credits earned during NCEA led somewhere useful post-school.

However, data showed a miscellaneous category named “Core Generic” also had very high entry numbers — alongside a bunch of standards described as “garbage”.

Among those were a handful of entries for cleaning credits, including in courses where students learned about emptying bins, cleaning toilets and washing floors.

More than 700 students also took a course on “purchasing household consumables”, while 16 took a course on “managing shift work”.

A standard requiring students to “demonstrate knowledge of law enforcement” had 1700 entries, while a course on “anger issues” had 3500, and another on solving issues at rental properties had 8000.

Other more popular courses included “making filter coffee”, a major part of hospitality, with 18,000 entries in five years.

Most of the standards pertain to industry qualifications, and were offered under the Government’s Youth Guarantee scheme, where secondary students can attend tertiary training while still enrolled at schools.

Some attend tertiary fulltime, while others go to school for part of the week.

Former Auckland Grammar principal John Morris, a long time NCEA critic, said some of the standards were “garbage”, although the number of those kind of standards had been reduced.

“Why you’d develop a standard for that kind of thing is beyond me. Some things, like woodwork, that’s a skill. The others are just manual labour.”

Morris thought NCEA needed more rigorous assessment within the vocational subjects, and mandatory core subjects, to raise quality. He also said there needed to be consideration as to which pathways were pushed by schools.

“I think hospitality is the flavour of the month. The students will probably get a job, but is it going to be great for the country that we’ve got a lot more baristas?”

However, PPTA president Angela Roberts said the standards did not mean the vocational side of NCEA should be dismissed wholesale.

“The thing that makes my heart sink is that there will be a lot of people who will instantly draw the conclusion that NCEA is broken because there are a few kids doing these standards,” she said. “I’m not saying that learning how to make coffee isn’t important for people that will employ those students it’s about making it’s at the right level in comparison with the achievement standards.”

She believed there needed to be an “alignment” so skills-based standards were more aligned with academic ones.

Currently, NCEA is made up of both skills-based (unit) and academic (achievement) standards.

Students need 80 credits to pass and they can come from any standard and any subject.

While achievement standards were recently assessed to ensure each carried roughly the same level of work and difficulty, the same had not been done with unit standards — which were “owned” by industry rather than government.

Roberts said any work done should allow NCEA to retain its diverse range of options, including the more vocational subjects. Skills-based standards have undergone a major push in recent years, as the Ministry of Education released its “vocational pathways” programme which aims to get students studying more a coherent mix of subjects, and towards the government target of 85 per cent passing NCEA by the end of this year.

In line with that, more students are able to attend trades academies or other secondary-tertiary programmes.

Manukau Institute of Technology’s Director of External Relations Stuart Middleton said the movement was a “quiet revolution”.

Middleton said while some criticised the use of unit standards, he said that was “snobbery”. The standards, and the vocational path, was vital to keeping students engaged, he said.

He said the key was to offer standards that would lead to employment — not just offering credits to pad out courses or that were “easy”.

MIT worked hard on pathways with schools to ensure they were choosing the right pathways, he said.

Head of the Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation Warwick Quinn said it was hopeful it would gain more apprentices from the pathways this year.

The industry was working hard to attract students to fill 32,000 predicted jobs, but it required something of a mindshift from parents and students.

“Trades still aren’t considered as a real option. We are still fighting some of that prejudice, that university is held up as the ideal.”

Previous analysis by the Herald showed that low-decile students were more likely to be enrolled in the skills-based standards — along with more Maori and Pasifika students — raising concerns about equity.

For example, the data showed decile-1 Maori students were four times more likely than decile-10 Pakeha to take subjects in the “services sector” field — an area including hospitality, tourism and retail.

Labour associate education spokeswoman Jenny Salesa said she worried about the direction some students were taking — while some vocational courses were wellrounded, others were not.

“I also worry about where we are headed as a country. We are going to rely on a knowledge-based, highwage economy with a skilled workforce. And we are not delivering that now, especially in low-decile schools.”

The Herald was unable to discover which organisations were offering “toilet cleaning”.

The only organisation accredited to teach the standard was WelTec, in Petone, but it said it was not using the course. The standard is due to expire next year.