Public Education for Sale: The Government’s Real Plan for NCEA

by Rebecca Thomas

Epsom Girls Grammar is adding Cambridge exams in 2026. Mount Albert Grammar is under pressure to do the same. More than a quarter of New Zealand high schools now offer Cambridge or other international alternatives.

It’s being sold as “choice.”

But what we’re really seeing is the quiet exit of the elite from our national curriculum—and the slow dismantling of NCEA as a meaningful, public, equitable qualification for all.

While thousands of young people in Tai Tokerau and South Auckland fail or are locked out of NCEA altogether, the system is being repurposed around the demands of those who were never left behind to begin with.

This is not reform.

This is a strategic abandonment.

Let’s Stop Pretending This Is About "Raising Standards"

Education Minister Erica Stanford says students are "gaming the system"—picking easier credits, avoiding exams, and undermining the credibility of NCEA.

But maybe our kids aren’t gaming anything.

What if we stopped calling it “failure” and started calling it what it is—survival?

Because when you’ve sat in classrooms where you don’t see yourself reflected…

When you’ve been labelled, streamed, overlooked…

When your home life is chaos and your learning is fractured by lockdowns and poverty and loss…

You do what you need to do to get through.

You find the credits that keep you afloat.

You protect your dignity.

And if the exam doesn’t serve you—you vote with your feet and don’t show up.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Lost in the Numbers Are the Ones Who Never Showed Up

In May, over 7,000 students in South Auckland and Tai Tokerau sat the new NCEA literacy and numeracy tests.

More than half failed.

But that’s not the whole story.

Because lost in that number are the ones who didn’t even turn up.

And that absence says more about the system than any test result ever could.

Why didn’t they show?

• Because they knew they wouldn’t pass and couldn't bear another mark against them.

• Because they were confused, anxious, or flat-out unaware of the test’s impact.

• Because they were caring for siblings, working part-time, grieving, anxious, disengaged, or simply tired of trying to succeed in a system that never saw them.

And still, we treat their silence as indifference—

What did we ever do to show them it was worth turning up for?

If This Is Reform, Who’s It Really For?

A Year 9 girl at Epsom Girls Grammar told her principal she loved the school but feared being moved for Cambridge. So the school introduced it.

She had friends. She felt safe. She was heard.

A beautiful story.

But what about the Year 9 girl in Kaikohe? The one in a decile 1 school, where teacher shortages mean the relievers change weekly.

She loves her school too. She loves her kapa haka group, her science teacher who sees her, her best mate who always shares kai at lunch. But when the new literacy test came, she panicked.

Not because she can’t read. But because the screen froze. Because she didn’t understand the format. Because she couldn’t click her way to confidence under pressure. Because no one had explained that this one moment might decide her entire educational future.

She didn’t even know what the test was really for.

There is no pilot programme for her.

No video to reassure her dad that her school will catch up. 

No principal on a livestream promising to make space for her fear.

Just silence.

And a growing wall of barriers she didn’t build but will have to climb anyway.

This is not just inequity.

This is engineered invisibility.

While our rangatahi are being locked out of qualifications for failing tests designed without them, Cambridge is booming.

Why?

Because it reflects the values of the elite:

Rigour. Competition. Test performance. Prestige.

A system where high-stakes exams determine your worth.

And it’s exactly that model—standardised, externalised, and easily monetised—that’s now creeping into NCEA through the back door.

This is not about “standards". It’s about profit.

The global education testing market is worth over $10 billion USD annually. Every new requirement, every high-stakes test, every shift away from teacher-led, relational learning is another contract. Another revenue stream. Another opportunity to privatise what once belonged to us all.

We must ask: Who is making money from these shifts? Who is selling the problem, and who is selling the solution?

And Don’t Think the Ministry Is Neutral in This

Some ask: Why would the Ministry of Education allow this drift toward privatisation?

Simple. The Ministry does not operate independently—it works for the government of the day.

And right now, that government is laying the tracks for a two-tier system: One for the polished and well-positioned. And one for the rest—patched together, underfunded, and quietly shamed.

Cambridge is growing.

NCEA Level 1 is being undermined.

And all the while, thousands of students in our lowest-income communities are falling out of the system completely.

This is not a glitch.

This is a design.

So What Do We Do Now?

We speak up. We call this what it is: The quiet dismantling of NCEA as a truly national, inclusive qualification.

If this drift continues, we’ll wake to find our public education system sold off—

Wrapped in the language of "rigour",

But stained with exclusion.

And our kids?

They’ll be sitting the wrong exam—for a future that no longer includes them.