Will replacing NCEA make New Zealand smarter?

Tuesday, 5 August 2025

The Government has unveiled a proposal to discontinue NCEA in favour of a simpler A–D grading system, drawing strong responses from educators, students and political opponents.

The Government is going to get rid of NCEA, as alarm grows about New Zealand’s falling literacy and numeracy standards. But is NCEA the issue? Glenn McConnell reports.

Since NCEA was introduced, the average high school graduate in New Zealand has become worse at understanding numbers and words.

Officials and educators say it’s increasingly common for high school graduates to arrive at universities without the foundational knowledge required to understand academic readings or interpret basic data.

Not only is New Zealand losing a competitive edge it once held, standing out as one of the most intelligent populations on Earth, but the latest OECD reports show New Zealand adults are effectively becoming dumber.

In 2023, New Zealand was below the OECD average for numeracy skills. Just a decade ago, it had stood out as one of the countries with results significantly above the average.

Goodbye NCEA

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford announce a new national qualification to replace NCEA.

On Monday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford outlined part of their plan to turn around the country’s declining numeracy and literacy results. They would get rid of NCEA.

“It’s time to ensure that when students reach secondary school, our national qualification reflects the same high standards and ambition we expect throughout their education,” Stanford said.

NCEA is the national assessment framework for secondary school students. It has three levels, which tend to be delivered in years 11, 12 and 13. But schools and students are given significant flexibility in how they approach NCEA.

“That immense flexibility has really masked the decline,” Stanford said.

Education Minister Erica Stanford tells Samantha Hayes the new A–D grading system will help set students up for success and bring needed clarity to NCEA.

Nationally, she said, the quality of education and the quality of an NCEA qualification was inconsistent.

The qualification did not necessarily indicate students were graduating with the foundational knowledge you’d expect them to have after leaving high school, she said.

She said the PISA results, which compare 15-year-olds across the world, showed New Zealand students’ results had “tanked” - but in contrast, NCEA results had improved.

“You can see many governments have tried to fix the system, but it’s just not something we were able to do,” she said.

She said the new system would ensure more comprehensive knowledge in subjects, rather than allowing students to pass with NCEA by doing a range of different assessments.

Wider changes under way

The assessments overhaul, removing NCEA in favour of a new “Certificate of Education”, would follow earlier changes to the curriculum.

Next year’s Year 9 students would learn from a refreshed national curriculum, which they would be assessed on in 2028 when the new assessments framework arrives.

Senior students say they’ve benefited from NCEA’s structure and flexibility—but feel blindsided by the Government’s decision to remove the system they’re finishing under.

NCEA Level 1 would instead become a simplified “Foundational Award” in 2028, Level 2 would become the “New Zealand Certificate of Education”, and the final year would give students the “New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education”. That would be in place for 2030.

Under the proposal, students would need to take five approved subjects. They would need to pass at least four of them to attain the certificate, by showing comprehensive knowledge of each subject.

The case for NCEA

Dr Aaron Wilson, associate professor in literacies education in the school of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of Auckland, said an overly rigid approach to assessment could see more New Zealanders leaving school without any qualification.

“People can talk about the negative aspects of NCEA, with it being too flexible and too easy and not being worth anything, but people also have to think about what the implications are for a country that has a lot of students leaving school without a qualification,” he said.

He said the current proposal looked to be setting New Zealand up for growing inequity and potentially a “two-tier” qualification system, where people left high schools with “vocational” or “academic” qualifications. Those futures were “unavoidable” unless the proposal was reconsidered, he said.

“With what we know about inequity in New Zealand, it's going to be concentrated on what were formally known as low-decile schools. It's going to disproportionately affect Māori and Pasifika. And that is going to be unavoidable,” he said.

He said NCEA did well to recognise the strengths that students did possess, and a complete return to a “simple qualification system” similar to School Certificate would “fail” many students.

“It’s going to make inequities painfully obvious,” he said.

Falling numeracy and literacy results

A number of international studies show New Zealand’s declining numeracy and literacy results.

The OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, also called PIAAC, shows the average knowledge of a high school graduate has decreased since the introduction of NCEA.

In the 2014/2015 study of adults aged 25 to 65, New Zealand’s high school graduates ranked significantly above average for both numeracy and literacy. The average result was 277 for literacy and 268 for numeracy. By this point, only people aged under 28 had completed NCEA.

In 2023, that same test showed high school graduates’ knowledge had declined. They scored 255 for literacy and 250 for numeracy. That numeracy result was below the OECD average for high school graduates. By this point, New Zealanders aged under 37 had gone through NCEA.

Are those falling results the fault of NCEA?

Dr Nina Hood, the founder of Education Hub, said there was no doubt New Zealand students were now more likely to be struggling with basic skills.

She said the minister was right to note that students were leaving with qualifications despite testing showing they were less likely to have the numeracy and literacy skills you’d expect them to leave school with.

“NCEA did open up the system to essentially be able to be gamed by schools. And you had the result of students who were passing level two and level three, who… actually didn't have a basic level of literacy and numeracy,” she said.

She said a refocus of that assessment schedule could change how secondary students were taught - which could help students.

“It hopefully, and should, lead to a more rigorous and robust learning journey. in terms of literacy and numeracy… it really will depend on how each individual subject ends up being examined. But it could, in theory, make strong literacy schools an even more important part,” she said.

But she also noted that NCEA covered only the last few years of a child’s education. To improve literacy and numeracy, she said the Government would need to look right back to preschool education.

“We know from the research that you want to be building foundational literacy skills when children are preschoolers, and by that we mean exposing them to lots of story books, talking to them a huge amount, singing lots of nursery rhymes and so on,” she said.

NCEA was just one part of education. And for most students, after preschool, primary school, intermediate and high school, it made up just a fifth of their schooling experience.