The Government is starting to think about that after this new report from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority which says NCEA is too focused on kids wanting to go to university.
The report was prepared for Education Minister Erica Stanford who is promising some big changes.
The report says NCEA doesn’t do enough to get school students ready to work in the trades and hospitality. It says many students end up doing subjects that aren’t relevant to what they want to do when it comes to a career.
So could that be fixed, do you think, if students had the option of studying for an NCEA “trades entrance” qualification, similar to the university entrance qualification?
Dr Michael Johnston from the NZ Initiative think tank thinks so. And I think so too.
The irony is that, when NCEA was first developed, it was all about not being so focused on the academic kids and providing something which gave all students a useful qualification to take with them when they leave school.
But, as the qualifications authority is saying to the education minister, that hasn’t turned out to be the case for anyone wanting to be builders, or plumbers, or sparkies etc.
Which the tertiary education union agrees with and which is backed up by the numbers Dr Michael Johnston from the NZ Initiative has been throwing around.
He says 44 percent of school leavers aren’t enrolled in tertiary education. And only six percent of them end up in work-based training doing things like trades.
From what we’re hearing from the NZ Qualifications Authority and the tertiary education union, a big reason for that is that NCEA doesn’t do enough for students who either know they want to do a trade or the kids who might end up doing a trade if they learned more about it while at school.
And the brilliance of NCEA being expanded to include a trades entrance qualification - as well as the university entrance qualification - would be that, even if someone did leave school with a “trades entrance” certificate, they would still have the option of going to university if they wanted to down the track.
Because, once someone turns 20, they can go to uni whether they’ve got UE or not.
Michael Johnston says school students need to be given a much clearer idea of their options.
He says: "We just esteem university education much more highly than apprenticeship training for no really good reason. Trades people can earn great money and there's no reason why an arts degree, for example, should be seen as better than an electrical qualification or a plumbing qualification.”
Amen to that. Which is why I think his idea of giving high school kids the option of doing NCEA trades or NCEA university entrance is a brilliant idea
John MacDonald is the Canterbury Mornings host on Newstalk ZB Christchurch. This article was first published HERE
The report says NCEA doesn’t do enough to get school students ready to work in the trades and hospitality. It says many students end up doing subjects that aren’t relevant to what they want to do when it comes to a career.
So could that be fixed, do you think, if students had the option of studying for an NCEA “trades entrance” qualification, similar to the university entrance qualification?
Dr Michael Johnston from the NZ Initiative think tank thinks so. And I think so too.
The irony is that, when NCEA was first developed, it was all about not being so focused on the academic kids and providing something which gave all students a useful qualification to take with them when they leave school.
But, as the qualifications authority is saying to the education minister, that hasn’t turned out to be the case for anyone wanting to be builders, or plumbers, or sparkies etc.
Which the tertiary education union agrees with and which is backed up by the numbers Dr Michael Johnston from the NZ Initiative has been throwing around.
He says 44 percent of school leavers aren’t enrolled in tertiary education. And only six percent of them end up in work-based training doing things like trades.
From what we’re hearing from the NZ Qualifications Authority and the tertiary education union, a big reason for that is that NCEA doesn’t do enough for students who either know they want to do a trade or the kids who might end up doing a trade if they learned more about it while at school.
And the brilliance of NCEA being expanded to include a trades entrance qualification - as well as the university entrance qualification - would be that, even if someone did leave school with a “trades entrance” certificate, they would still have the option of going to university if they wanted to down the track.
Because, once someone turns 20, they can go to uni whether they’ve got UE or not.
Michael Johnston says school students need to be given a much clearer idea of their options.
He says: "We just esteem university education much more highly than apprenticeship training for no really good reason. Trades people can earn great money and there's no reason why an arts degree, for example, should be seen as better than an electrical qualification or a plumbing qualification.”
Amen to that. Which is why I think his idea of giving high school kids the option of doing NCEA trades or NCEA university entrance is a brilliant idea
John MacDonald is the Canterbury Mornings host on Newstalk ZB Christchurch. This article was first published HERE
4 comments:
>"Dr Michael Johnston from the NZ Initiative think tank thinks so. And I think so too."
And so do I! See my 2005 published paper "Smoothing the secondary-tertiary education interface: Developments in New Zealand following the National Qualifications Framework reforms", Journal of Vocational Education and Training, Vol. 57, pp. 411-418, in which I focus on a school that is also registered with the govt as an industrial training provider.
The NCEA is associated with the advent of Unit Standards in many people's minds; the concept behind these actually originated in vocational education. Early concerns focused on their inappropriateness for academic subjects, bringing about the Achievement Standard; and further concerns about inter-rater comparability and the need to be able to rank students led to the reintroduction of external examinations.
The NCEA is wonderfully flexible. Schools can run all-US programmes, all-AS programmes, or programmes with combinations of the two. They can hook their programmes to vocational training outcomes, university, or a host of other post-school destinations in between.
What is new here is the suggestion that there be a 'trades entrance certificate' that would parallel UE. It sounds worthy of investigation and I would be most interested in the polytechs' opinion of the value of such a qualification.
No matter what you intend to do Ilin your life,the ability to read, write and do basic math gives you an immense advantage over those that can't.
So why doesn't our education system try and get this simple part correct first. Once they have mastered this part of the job, them they could move into getting kids ready for uni or the trades.
That's the job of the primary schools, CXH. I have suggested elsewhere that we resuscitate the primary school leaving exam (proficiency exam) last conducted in 1936. Its function then was to act as a filter between primary and secondary school. All kids now advance automatically to high school but an exam like that would enable us to identify kids who need to be put into remedial basic skills classes as soon as they hit high school and, just as importantly if not more so, identify primary schools that are not doing their job and take action accordingly.
I believe first and foremost we need to investigate and purge the destructive ideologies we have in schools at all levels .
Child centered constructivism( teach yourself) , socialism , Marxism , the self esteem ideas, discovery learning , multiple intelligences, progressivism , schools as primary places of socialization and social change and activism, and entertainment. Not to mention the genderism , climate cult , DEI and Maorification , which are unproven ideas and it is unethical to force them on innocent children.
Replace all this nonsense with hard work, discipline , rote learning of the basics, , spelling, drills and a strong knowledge content in grammar , punctuation and sentence structure, structured maths as we used to have with Traditional Education when everyone succeeded in the basics and arrived at secondary school well prepared for higher level learning like algebra , essay writing , critical thinking ( as distinct from Critical Theory) , accurate history and advanced western science like physics and chemistry. As a tutor, I saw that, most of my remedial adult students required some basic algebra and solid arithmetic for their trades.
When are the educational elites of this country going to acknowledge all their rarefied learning in all the -isms mentioned above have failed generations of our children and need cancelling out ? Parents, and many teachers don't want them and some students are avoiding schools because they don't believe they are being taught useful material for their futures.
Have they not learned from the expose by rigorous research of the constructivist Whole Language reading method as a total failure and so much else of their theory of learning and teaching also based in constructivism is also bunkum ?
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