Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Students haven't been taught well enough in primary schools to pass new NCEA standards, an education researcher says.
From 2026 students will have to pass new assessments in literacy and numeracy in order to obtain any level of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).
But The New Zealand Initiative said a full scale pilot of the assessments this year had shown that if adopted, many students would fail.
"The trouble is that we've been using poor methods of teaching literacy and numeracy in primary school for a pretty long time, and so by the time kids get to secondary school, many of them are well behind the expected curriculum progress," senior fellow Dr Michael Johnston said.
The way those skills were taught at primary school level urgently needed to be addressed, he said.
Johnston said that was something the incoming government had plans to do, having announced that teachers would get professional development and that the structured literacy curriculum would get an overhaul.
In the short term however, Johnston said there needed to be a more transitional approach to tying together the literacy and numeracy certification and NCEA.
"What I think we need to do is still run these assessments, but separate it from NCEA, so that young people can be certified as being literate and numerate, but not have to rely on that in order to get any level of NCEA."
Johnston said making literacy and numeracy certification a requirement for passing NCEA when students weren't being taught well enough in primary schools would "throw too many young people off a cliff, through no fault of their own".
Johnston said until the teaching was improved, the new literacy and numeracy standards needed to be separated from NCEA so students weren't disadvantaged.
"In the longer term, when we've addressed the problem with teaching of literacy and numeracy at primary school level and people start to flow through into the senior secondary school with enough knowledge and skill, then we could attach it as a co-requisite to NCEA."
The Minister of Education has been approached for comment.