‘Gaming the system’? Teen with chronic illness says flexible study helped her succeed

Saturday, 27 June 2026

The years after Caitlin Gribble fell ill with Covid in Year 9 were a struggle - two days off school here, one day back there - as she patched together the subjects she could tackle. Now in her final year of school, the determined 17-year-old credits the flexibility of NCEA with helping her be on the cusp of achieving her academic goals. Amy Ridout reports.

On track to achieving excellence this year, 17-year-old Caitlin Gribble hopes to study medicine, going on to help people when they’re at their worst.

Gribble knows what that feels like: she’s spent most of her high school years seriously unwell, some days barely able to walk to the letterbox.

But despite that, the year 13 student is on track for excellence this year, which she credits to the flexibility of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

The qualification is now on the chopping block, with the education minister saying its structure has allowed students to “game the system”. But its replacement, a return to a more rigid pass-or-fail qualification, has been criticised by some educators, who say will wind back the clock, creating barriers for many students.

‘I was a shell of a person’

In May 2022, Gribble fell ill with Covid. Within a few weeks, it was clear she wasn’t improving and the teenager, who lives in Lower Hutt and attends St Oran’s College, began to worry.

“We realised I wasn't getting better like we'd hoped,” said Gribble.

Daily, she experienced dizziness, headaches, nausea and a fatigue that laid her flat. Over time, she would be diagnosed with a raft of post-Covid complications, but the journey to diagnosis and help was not straightforward.

At first, Gribble struggled through school: two days off, and then back for a day. But towards the end of that year, it became clear that school as she knew it was out of reach for now.

The teen’s social life and packed extracurricular schedule of football, dance, flute, piano, sailing and Scouts fell away.

Reflecting, Gribble said she had blanked out a lot of those worst months.

“I remember I was very sick, but it's a bit of a blur. I was a shell of a person. I was just surviving.

“Even just walking to the end of the driveway; there are days that would take it out of me.”

In that blur was endless appointments, tests and investigations. Gribble’s parents, Martin and Rochelle, pushed for help and recognition for an illness that seemed to baffle their doctors.

In January 2024, the family caught a common cold. While everyone else recovered quickly, Gribble became seriously ill and was admitted to hospital with a high fever and a racing heart.

Doctors found she was approaching an adrenal crisis, a potentially fatal condition caused by severely low cortisol levels. The family already knew Gribble had adrenal insufficiency, but there was not a treatment plan in place.

The hospital admission marked a turning point, and soon, Gribble began taking a steroid: an artificial version of cortisol. While her doctors hoped this treatment would flick a switch, turning on good health, the reality has been a slow, steady improvement.

All in, Gribble’s “post-Covid package” of conditions added up to chronic fatigue syndrome, adrenal insufficiency, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which affects the body's automatic functions.

Gribble has a supportive family, who pushed, advocated and pulled every lever in their bid to get her the medical help she needed and help her navigate through school.

Martin didn’t mince words when asked to describe what it was like watching his daughter suffer.

“It absolutely sucked,” he said. “She missed out on two years of her life.”

At one point, ahead of an MRI scan, Gribble told her parents she hoped she had a brain tumour.

Martin, who found this “freaky” to hear, asked her why.

“'She said, cause it's really easy to operate and then it'll be cured.'

Martin is glad it wasn’t a brain tumour, and in hindsight, so is Gribble.

But she knows she could be facing a lifetime of compromised health: there’s no crystal ball for her condition.

Gaming the system

Gribble fell sick in year 9. That year, and the following, were a “write off”, she said.

In year 11, when students are expected to work towards NCEA level 1 qualifications, she managed to get enough credits, including a merit endorsement (the second-highest award for an achievement standard).

This, Gribble explained, was due to the flexibility of the qualification.

NCEA is a standards-based qualification, rather than the traditional pass-or-fail system that was in place until 2002. It means students can customise their study, mixing subjects and levels, and learning at their own pace.

This was a criticism by Education Minister Erica Stanford, who has talked about “gaming the system”, and been critical of students gaining credits through avenues such as barista courses.

Gribble agrees she’s gamed the system: but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t worked hard: she’s academically able and driven. She’s just been able to do it in a way that works around her chronic illness.

For example, she picked up a level 2 credit for piano performance without it being too much of a strain on her energy. Piano was one of the few things she’d been able to stick to during her illness.

“Because I was playing the piano anyway, I thought I might as well get some credits out of it.”

And she eschewed a statistics standard that came up when her health was at a low point, choosing instead to opt for calculus when she was feeling well.

She’s made these decisions with the help of teachers, who have had “pragmatic conversations” with Gribble about which standards were worth her time and limited energy.

In this way, she was able to focus her energy on achieving the standards that would work for her and her future study.

If that’s gaming the system, they’ll take it, Martin said.

“I’ll tell you what, in the working world you game the system as well, you use the rules you’ve got.”

Now in her final year, Gribble is at school for much of the time, and is on track to achieve excellence in five subjects this year: chemistry, physics, biology, calculus, and music.

“I haven’t failed, because of the flexibility that NCEA offered me.”

NCEA replacement

Current year 9s will be the first to embark on the new qualification, which is the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) at Year 12 and the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education (NZACE) at Year 13.

Announcing the change, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the new qualification would be easier for parents and employers to understand.

'Gone is the ability to make up your overall qualification by choosing between thousands of different standards,“ Luxon said. ”Gone are fully internally assessed subjects. Gone is the ability to avoid exams.'

This set off warning bells for Gribble, who thinks she would have buckled under such a system.

“I would have just been spread too thin.”

She saw this in action last year as she studied for an English exam.

She’d worked hard and after doing well in a mock exam, believed she was on track for an “excellence” achievement in the subject.

But on the morning of the exam, she felt awful. Cortisol levels are affected by stress, and she hadn’t properly factored in the pressures of exam study.

“Throughout the exam period, I was consistently below my baseline,” she said.

“None of us understood, even the doctors, that exam stress is still stress,” Martin said. “She got to the exam and she just bottomed out.”

Gribble, determined to stick it out, headed to her exam anyway.

“I thought, I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but it’s an exam: I can’t just push it back. I think I can get an excellence in this and I don't want to give up that chance.”

“So I went to school. I sat in the exam room and I just felt so sick. I was dizzy, I was tired. I couldn't think straight. I had a headache.”

A teacher noticed Gribble was unwell, and together they made the call to not take the exam. It meant a lower mark for Gribble, but there was no other option, she said.

Hope for the future

Now, Gribble is picking her extracurriculars up again, socialising and even working part-time for couple of hours a week.

She hopes to head to Otago University to study health science, aiming for a career in medicine, or biomedical science. But she knows that first year won’t be an easy one, and she’s still deciding whether to take a gap year.

Her experience has changed her: she’s had to learn to advocate for herself and be proactive in following up with schoolwork.

“I’m a very different person than I would have been if I'd spent the last four years healthy.”

But it’s also informed her future, she said.

“When I was at my sickest I did a lot of research, looking into different things and I've just found it all very interesting… [in my career], I want to be that person for someone else so that they don't have to fight quite as hard to be able to get the answers.”

The Post sent questions to Erica Stanford. However, the Education Minister referred them to her ministry.

Antony Harvey, the general manager of business operations for Te Poutāhū, the ministry’s curriculum centre, said special assessment conditions (SAC) would continue to give extra help for students who are affected by barriers.

These were available for a range of “physical, sensory, medical, and learning needs,” including the use of a writer or reader, computer access, rest breaks or enlarged papers, Harvey said.

SAC are designed to remove or reduce barriers to achievement, providing students with a fair and equitable opportunity to achieve credits.

However, educator, academic and former Ministry of Education staffer Claire Amos said the ministry’s response didn’t cut it.

While SACs were a good tool for a learner with dyslexia, or someone suffering from exam anxiety, the wider point was that students would no longer have access to a “whole suite of different ways” they could gain qualifications.

Amos had heard “rumblings” about the desire for end-of-year exams for all subjects but this had not been confirmed.

“But what we do know is there is an absolute commitment to having whole subjects that the students have to do.”

This would mean passing three subjects to gain a certificate, a structure that presented barriers to students.

She worried that a large cohort of young people would be “completely shut out” of the system.

As well as learners like Gribble, this group included Māori and Pasifika and neurodiverse students: learners a Cabinet paper has acknowledged would be disadvantaged by the new framework.

“We're going to get young people leaving school without any qualifications whatsoever,” Amos said.

Talk of “gaming the system, like it’s a bad thing” infuriated Amos.

“I'm a huge advocate for the way that the flexibility of NCEA has allowed us to meet the needs of neurodivergent students, and students who, for whatever reason may have been unwell and had to be in and out of school.”

It was the role of educators to prepare young people for a wide range of courses, pathways and careers, Amos said.

“We actually need to be preparing them for this complex world.“