The teachers who will have to make the Government’s new school qualifications work are not convinced they are needed. New research from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research has found that 71 percent of secondary teachers agree NCEA should be improved rather than removed, with 45 percent of them agreeing strongly.
The finding comes from NZCER’s 2025 National Survey of Secondary Schools, which gathered responses from 830 teachers at 126 schools between October 2025 and March 2026. The teacher report, Secondary teachers’ perspectives from the 2025 national survey, was written by senior researchers Jo MacDonald and Rachel Bolstad with a team of co-authors, and was released this month.
Support for keeping NCEA was not the only sign of unease. Sixty-eight percent of teachers said they were concerned the proposed changes would limit the learning opportunities and pathways available to students at their school. Asked whether the new Year 12 and Year 13 certificates were heading in the right direction, 44 percent disagreed and only 24 percent agreed, with close to a third sitting on the fence. RNZ reported that just over half of the teachers surveyed disagreed the replacement qualification would reduce inequities in student outcomes.
Written comments from teachers, published in the survey findings, put the worry in blunter terms. One said the change would “severely disadvantage any students with special learning needs, and students of other cultures/languages”. Another wrote, “I am perturbed by the pace of change and lack of transparency and consultation.”
School leaders said much the same thing a month earlier. The principals’ half of the same survey, covering 106 secondary principals and released by NZCER on 9 July, found 70 percent agreed or strongly agreed that NCEA should be improved rather than removed. Just 23 percent thought the changes would support better outcomes for students, and only 11 percent believed the reforms would reduce inequities.
“Many would prefer to see it improved rather than removed,” MacDonald said of the principals’ responses. “They were particularly concerned about what the proposed changes could mean for student pathways, subject choice, and equity.” She added that “any change to senior secondary qualifications needs to work for all students, including those whose pathways do not follow a narrow academic route”.
The Government is well past the point of asking whether NCEA goes. Education Minister Erica Stanford confirmed the structure of the replacement in March, describing the existing system as one that “has become increasingly fragmented, difficult to understand, and too easy to game”. NCEA Level 1 goes in 2028, replaced by a Foundational Award in literacy and numeracy, and English, Mathematics and Science all become compulsory in Year 11 that year.
The detail followed on 16 May. The new qualifications will be the New Zealand Certificate of Education at Year 12, starting in 2029, and the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education at Year 13, starting in 2030. Students will study at least five subjects a year and need to pass three of them to gain each certificate, graded on a six-point scale running from A+ to E. Passing all five earns an endorsement. “We want young people leaving school with qualifications that are clear, rigorous and widely understood by parents, employers, tertiary providers and students themselves,” Stanford said. Students who were in Year 9 in May are the first cohort to go all the way through the new system.
One caveat is worth noting when reading the teacher numbers. Responses were collected from October 2025 through to March 2026, which means a large share of teachers answered before the full detail of the new certificates was published in May. Their scepticism was aimed at the proposal as it stood at the time, not at the finished design. Whether the May detail has shifted any of those views is not something this survey can answer, and NZCER will not be back in the field until its next cycle.
The qualifications question was only part of the picture. NZCER’s first release from the teacher report, on 5 August, led on learning support. Only 40 percent of secondary teachers agreed they had sufficient support to teach students with additional learning needs, a group that takes in disabled students, students with learning difficulties, mental health needs, behavioural needs and neurodivergent students. Sixty-two percent named more support staff or teacher aides as their top priority, a figure that has climbed at every survey cycle since 2015.
“Teachers are telling us they are working hard to meet the needs of diverse learners, but they do not always have the support they need,” MacDonald said. “More support staff and teacher aides would make a real difference in many classrooms.”
Classroom behaviour has also got harder. Sixty-seven percent of teachers said they sometimes or often struck student behaviour that seriously disrupted their teaching, up from 48 percent in 2015. Seventy-one percent said they wanted the pace and scale of change reduced, which is a pointed number given how much is landing on secondary schools at once. Two-thirds said they were already using generative artificial intelligence in their teaching practice.
Not everything in the report is grim. Teacher morale has recovered to where it sat in 2018, job satisfaction has held steady, and 86 percent now agree student wellbeing is a strong focus at their school, up from 72 percent in 2021. The share of teachers who say their school does not prioritise staff wellbeing has fallen from 24 percent to 14 percent over the same period.
What the survey does not settle is the question underneath all of it. The Government’s timetable now runs through 2027 as a preparation year for assessment and professional learning, before the first pieces of the new system arrive in 2028. The people who will teach it, and the people who will run the schools delivering it, have both said in the same research that they would rather have fixed what already existed.
Do you think NCEA should have been improved rather than replaced, or is a clean break the right call? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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