The Cost of Being Told You Failed at School

by Rebecca Thomas

That label wraps around a child’s identity and seeps into their sense of self.

It tells them:

You’re not smart.

You’re not enough.

You’re not like the others.

Even if we don’t say it out loud —Even if we “don’t make a big deal” of it —They know.

And they remember.

That memory follows them. It’s there when they apply for a job, when they sit in a uni lecture room and feel out of place, when they raise their own tamariki and wonder if school will hurt them too.

This is the cost of being told you failed at school.

In staffrooms and data meetings across the motu, we open spreadsheets. We click tabs. We colour code. We sort and filter.

We say words like “achievement,” “progressions,” and “accelerated learning".

We point to red and yellow dots.

We track attendance.

We chase numeracy.

We whisper about literacy.

We quietly pass on children we’ve worked so hard for… and who still didn’t “make it.”

We think it’s just this year. Just this cohort. Just this moment.

But it’s not.

It’s a systemic tide, and it’s pulling our tamariki out to sea.

The CAA conveyor belt is running, humming along quietly — and it’s swallowing children whole.

When you’re in the thick of the classroom, it’s easy to zoom in.

You see the face in front of you.

You see the child you’ve read with, cried for, fought hard for.

You know they tried.

You hand them over to the next teacher, hoping that next year, they’ll break through.

But stand back. Zoom out.

Look at the national picture.

NCEA Qualification: In 2024, 16% of school leavers—over 10,600 teenagers—left school with no NCEA qualification at all, marking the highest non-achievement rate in a decade.

Every red dot in a Year 3 reading dataset today is a potential face at the CAA checkpoint tomorrow.

My own son is in Year 13.

He will leave school feeling he achieved.

He missed the CAA choke point.

There was no gaming the system — this was not about shortcuts or loopholes.

This was about his future wellbeing and mindset, not a “choice” in the strategic sense.

He was given choice and flexibility — credits for surf safety, for surviving overnight in the wilderness, for holding down a job at McDonald’s. He was able to walk a pathway that fit him, not one forced on him.

That flexibility will serve him for the rest of his life — not just in qualifications, but in confidence. He will carry the quiet strength of a young person who did not leave school with the weight of failure on his back.

That, more than any grade, will shape his future.

I am grateful for that.

But I know it is not the reality awaiting so many of our young people.

With the looming NCEA changes, the CAA choke point is about to get tighter. And when that happens, too many will leave school having been squeezed into failure — reduced to a number, a grade, a label.

By the time a child reaches the CAA checkpoint, their journey is already years in the making.

Primary schools are part of that journey.

Intermediates are part of that journey.

Secondary schools are part of that journey.

We are all responsible for what happens when they hit that checkpoint.

If the conveyor belt keeps churning at a pace that doesn’t consult, doesn’t pause, doesn’t adapt, then we must start thinking about our data differently.

Not as isolated sets of numbers.

Not as “my class” or “my school” or “my year level.”

But as our collective story.

We must start talking across schools.

We must stop treating data as a siloed responsibility and start seeing it as a shared map of where our tamariki are headed.

Because if we don’t, we’ll keep sending children down the conveyor belt blind, only to be shocked when they reach the choke point and are spat out marked as “failed.”

The looming NCEA changes make this urgent.

The current CAA choke point makes this real.

This is not their failure.

It is ours.

The journey starts long before secondary school. When primary and intermediate share data, we get a clear picture of the whole learning journey — and the power to change where it ends.