Māori students are just as likely to get an NCEA qualification as European students, but much less likely to achieve University Entrance. File photo. Photo: 123RF
Māori teenagers are less likely to get University Entrance than European students - even after allowing for socio-economic differences, an Education Ministry analysis has found.
The finding comes as the government is eliminating ethnicity for targetting government services and downgrading the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi in its guidelines for school boards of trustees.
The ministry's report found Māori students were just as likely to get an NCEA qualification as European students from similar socio-economic backgrounds, but they were much less likely to achieve University Entrance.
The report to Education Minister Erica Stanford used anonymised data for more than 44,000 young people born in New Zealand in 2003 to identify factors linked to not achieving NCEA level 1 and University Entrance.
"Māori had higher rates of leaving school without NCEA than European students (18 percent vs 7 percent). However, after including the socio-economic factors into the model there was no difference in the odds ratios between these two groups. Asian and Pacific students had statistically significant lower rates of non-achievement within the model.
"This means that students with broadly the same socio-economic characteristics are less likely to leave school without NCEA level 1 if they are Asian or Pacific than if they are Māori or European," the briefing said.
"The difference between Māori and European becomes significant with Māori being less likely to achieve UE," it said.
The ministry told RNZ it was not clear from its study why Māori ethnicity affected UE attainment, but not level 1 attainment.
"The work did not set out to identify what is instrumental in causing or mediating the effect. However, other evidence on differences between ethnic groups and between Māori and non-Māori often point to such things as differences in financial access, bias and discrimination, institutional support, the influence of social networks, different expectations and academic pathways, parental influence and resources," it said.
It said a Māori student was 1.36 times more likely to leave school without UE than a European student.
The study said NCEA non-attainment rates for the study group were three percent for Asian students, seven percent for European students, 10 percent for Pacific students, and 18 percent for Māori.
UE non-attainment rates were 25 percent for Asian students, 51 percent for European students, 70 percent for Pacific students, and 78 percent for Māori.
University of Waikato education professor Mere Berryman said school factors were also important and it was likely they prompted many Māori to leave before they could get UE.
"How many of our Māori learners have been pushed out of the system before NCEA?" she said.
"What this paper doesn't address is what are the factors internal to schooling that also have an impact on student progress, student achievement student outcome."
Professor Berryman said it would be useful to know more about how different factors affected achievement rates within the Māori population.
"Who are the Māori whose parental income and parental education levels mean that they are not at the same level as all Māori and what size is that group," she said.
Aorere College principal Leanne Webb said the better performance of Asian and Pacific students after allowing for socio-economic factors should be considered in light of the fact that many were immigrants or children of recent immigrants.
"People who choose to come here from Asia or from the Pacific are coming to New Zealand and they're generally coming for aspirational reasons and does that have an effect on how those people perceive education," she said.
"What we have noticed is that as students get into Year 12 and Year 13 they can sort of go off the boil, they can lose interest with school. They might have started off in Year 10 and they have said 'I want to go to university and I want to study this' but then by the time they're in Year 12 or Year 13 they're making other choices," she said.
Webb said her school did not see a lot of difference in UE achievement rates between its Māori and Pacific students.