NCEA statistics a milestone for learning - Mallard

Education Minister Trevor Mallard says today’s release of NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) statistics from 2002 national secondary qualifications is a milestone for learning in New Zealand.

National statistics from the 2002 internal and external level 1 NCEA are on the NZQA (New Zealand Qualifications Authority) website (http:// http://www.nzqa.govt.nz) from tonight. Each school will be able to access statistics from its own level 1 students from tonight also and these school-by-school statistics will be publicly available on the NZQA website from 23 May.

“The statistics release marks a number of firsts and will reinforce the immense benefits from the introduction last year of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement,” Trevor Mallard said.

“When the interim NCEA results came out in January principals, teachers, parents, students and employers talked enthusiastically about how much the detailed results told us about each student. They immediately started looking at how the patterns of results, nationally and locally, can be used to improve teaching and learning.

“These final statistics are even more valuable. They give us a rich source of information at a number of levels. Nationally, by school, by learning area and by individual standard, we will be able to look at patterns of achievement and break them down by gender, ethnic background, school decile, school type and year group.

“One of this government’s top education priorities is to reduce underachievement in learning for every single student, regardless of their background.

“The most important aspect to the NCEA is that it gives us an in-depth and detailed source of information so we can help students achieve to their fullest potential.

“We can now identify weak spots in students’ learning and make targeted changes in teaching and learning to fix those weak spots. We will be able to track over the years whether those changes are working. Before NCEA, none of that was possible.

“We know, for example, that our boys are not doing as well overall as girls. Now, the way NZQA is presenting the results we will be able to drill down and find out, for example, the particular areas where boys are weak or strong, and whether boys and girls do better in single-sex or co-educational schools, city or rural.

“The same array of information will be there for Mâori students. We know that at tertiary level Mâori learners are doing better under the National Qualifications Framework. Now we’ll be able to see if that trend also applies to the framework in schools and we’ll be able to track the progress of Mâori learners over the years.

“The same trends are slowly becoming apparent for Pacific students as well and NCEA statistics will be revealing for those students.

“NZQA’s dynamic website presentation of the NCEA statistics is another important stage in NZQA’s steady development of web-based applications. This is the sort of development that the recently announced additional information technology funding to schools and to NZQA was designed to support,” Trevor Mallard said.

Trevor Mallard recently announced a pre-budget package of initiatives totalling nearly $78 million in new spending over four years to support the NCEA and the administration of other qualifications.

That package included an extra $15 million over four years to fund an increase in the capability of software for school administration systems, including the ability of secondary and area schools to better manage NCEA data.

It also included new funding of $6.5 million next year to replace and update NZQA’s Information Systems. This funding will enable NZQA to improve business processes and IT systems. It will also significantly enhance students’ record of learning, and support entries, results and examinations.

“Not only are we making school-by-school statistics readily accessible for the first time, but NZQA is providing quite sophisticated online functionality. The NCEA statistics are not static tables. Everyone, including parents, will be able to select parameters and drill down to look at a variety of groupings,” Trevor Mallard said.

An advance breakdown of ethnic and gender results is attached.

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