National Consistency feels good Erica — if you’re already winning

by Rebecca Thomas

Again and again — eight times by my count — Erica Stanford and Christopher Luxon stood in front of cameras promising a nationally consistent picture of education.

Clearer reporting for parents using five-point progress descriptors the Minister says were co-constructed with the sector.

Attendance information will be included. Behaviour information will be included. Achievement will be measured using nationally consistent tools, supported by AI-enabled analysis and centrally stored data, delivered through Janison — an Australian ed-tech company that will now hold and process a significant volume of New Zealand children’s learning data.

SMART, the assessment tool — not formally mandated (yet), but clearly positioned as the default— is designed to travel with children as they move schools.

Consistency, everywhere.

Christopher Luxon described it as “one way, the same way, every day” reform across the country. Which is a slogan that might work on a billboard.

And if your child is already succeeding — proficient, exceeding — this likely sounded reassuring.

But consistency only feels good if you’re already winning.

Because at the very same time, RNZ reported something that fundamentally reframes this entire announcement:

By the end of 2025, 9 percent of Year 13 students and 15 percent of Year 12 students had not achieved the literacy and numeracy co-requisite. That equates to 15,000 young people — 5,000 Year 13s and 10,000 Year 12s — leaving school with no NCEA qualification at all.

This horrible reality not being treated as a warning signal to stop testing and slow down.

It is being positioned as proof that the system is broken — evidence that will almost certainly be carried straight to Cabinet to justify a rushed NCEA reform agenda. The failure of students, many of whom are already literate and numerate but unable to clear this particular exam-style gate, becomes the rationale for tightening the system further.

The danger is obvious: a policy-created problem is now being used to argue for more policy rigidity. The co-requisite locks students out, then their exclusion is cited as the reason to overhaul NCEA itself — even though this gate was never part of NCEA’s original design.

The failure of our young people — engineered by policy-obsessed adults who will never carry the consequences — should have been the headline.

Instead, we were treated to an Australian show-pony demonstration and told to admire the reins.

SMART

The new reporting framework relies on five descriptors: emerging, developing, consolidating, proficient, exceeding.

We’re told these were settled on by Ministry officials — and, of course, “the sector”. Not by the Minister herself. National Standards, repackaged with softer language.

But the interview reveals more than the press release intends.

At one point, Erica Stanford refers to her original thinking around the grading scale, describing it instead as “novice” and “mastery” — a very different framing, and one that gives away the underlying logic of progression and sorting sitting beneath the final descriptors.

There is another moment that matters just as much.

At 13 minutes 45 seconds into the interview, Stanford refers to SMART as an “examination tool”, before correcting herself to say assessment tool. Earlier, when she was more composed, the tool had been framed as “light touch, low stakes”.

Those slips are not trivial.

They expose the tension at the heart of this reform: a system being sold as formative and supportive, while being designed, spoken about, and increasingly positioned as something much closer to an examination regime.

I’m not convinced these terms are any better than well below, below, at, above. They are still code words. They still sort our kids.

On paper, the descriptors describe progress but in our classrooms, they name children.

The most honest moment in the interview came when the media asked the obvious question:

What if a child is always “emerging”?

That question wasn’t answered.

Because it can’t be — not without acknowledging that for many learners, this is already their reality. Māori learners. Boys. Neurodivergent children. Young people carrying trauma, instability, or poverty into classrooms that were never designed with them at the centre.

A nationally consistent picture doesn’t soften that.

It just standardises it.

The label follows the child from school to school, year to year, while the conditions shaping learning remain deeply uneven.

“Teachers asked for this”

When challenged about whether schools are taking on too much, the public was told that teachers asked for this. That teachers want it.

That line from Erica is doing a lot of work. Because once responsibility is shifted onto teachers, any harm that follows can be framed as consent.

But teachers have not been asking for tighter prescription layered onto already unmanageable workloads. They have not been asking for nationally fixed labels that harden learner identity. They have not been asking for reporting systems that expand compliance without expanding support.

Teachers have been asking for time. Trust. Professional judgement and assessment that informs teaching, not systems.

What is being described as “teacher voice” looks much more like teacher compliance — the familiar pattern of educators absorbing change to protect children, then being told they wanted it.

The most revealing exchange between the politicians and the press came when the literacy and numeracy co-requisites were raised live.

Asked whether they were locking students out of the curriculum, the response was:

The longer they stay at school, the more likely they are to get it.

Followed by a stab at Labour — because when we’re talking about children leaving school with nothing, apparently the most serious concern is assigning political blame.

But that claim collapses under the evidence.

These students did stay.

They stayed through Year 11.

They stayed through Year 12.

They stayed through Year 13.

And still, 15,000 of them left with nothing.

“Stay longer” is not a strategy when repeated failure is what’s on offer. It is an abdication. And it is humiliating.

Despite their effort, their persistence, and their need to get work and participate in society, policy locked them out of success.

For many young people, staying longer does not feel like opportunity. It feels like being asked the same question, in the same way, after already being told — repeatedly — that they failed.

SMART the new hoop they’ve introduced hasn’t changed.

It’s being tightened.

More exams.

Fewer subjects deemed valuable.

In the same announcement, the SMART tool was described as flexible — online with AI or paper-based. Yet evidence from Australia already shows that results differ between paper-based and computer-based testing. A pity nobody has told Erica that!

NCEA itself was designed to allow multiple pathways. Different ways of demonstrating learning. That flexibility was intentional.

But when papers go to Cabinet, the fact that thousands of young people are now leaving school labelled failures will almost certainly be used as justification to reform yet another system that once allowed students to avoid the sorting hat.

The damage is not NCEA.

The damage is the non-negotiable gate — the co-requisite — that overrides everything else a student has achieved. This was never part of NCEA’s original design.

Progress that doesn’t count who is lost

You cannot stand in front of cameras celebrating clarity, national consistency, and progress while 15,000 students are already pushed out of education and call that success.

Consistency feels good — if you’re already winning.