Some principals fear new literacy and numeracy tests needed to pass NCEA will mean a backlog of students having to repeat years at school and some dropping out altogether.
The NCEA co-requisites are new tests that students have to pass from this year onwards, aimed at improving reading, writing and maths levels in schools.
Students need to achieve the tests along with their other credits to achieve any level of NCEA.
But in the pilot programme, pass rates for low decile schools were abysmal - decile one schools achieved less than 30 percent on average in reading, writing and numeracy.
Principals at these schools are worried that the new tests fail to give their students a fair go.
Aorere College principal Leanne Webb said when her students sat the first round of tests in May, many of them struggled.
"They find them very difficult. They're high stakes, the testing is in a form they're not particularly used to."
As the standards sat outside of NCEA, Webb said they tested different skills to what students were learning in the rest of their curriculum.
"The assessment needs to be prepared for. And that is on top of trying to do new NCEA level one standards. So the time is a big issue."
At many low decile schools, 80 - 90 percent of the students spoke English as a second language, which added another barrier to passing the tests, Webb said.
Year 12 student at Aorere College Riya Raj was one of the. She moved to New Zealand from Fiji in October last year and failed her first attempt at the numeracy standard this May.
"I was not kind of doing those topics. So now I'm doing it, I need to study more. It's challenging for me. Because back in my country I was not doing the maths, so over here I was kind of lost."
Raj had another shot at the test in September and was doing extra classwork to prepare for it.
Webb was worried that the tests would create a backlog.
"We could end up with a logjam of students needing to repeat level 1, or keep attempting these [standards] over and over again."
The numeracy tests were language rich, Webb said, testing problem-solving rather than just mathematics.
It would be fairer if students could achieve the standards through their NCEA credits rather than an exam, she said.
"That would be equitable. It would be the same for everyone, and you wouldn't end up with schools trying to prepare students for two different types of assessment."
Alternate pathway
While schools transition to the new system, they can opt for their students to achieve the standards through internal assessment.
But that brings its own problems, Papakura High School principal Simon Craggs says.
"It is making it hard for them to achieve their qualification because they cannot use those credits for both literacy and numeracy, and for adding up to their NCEA qualifications. So that means they have to get 20 more credits than everybody else. And they can't sit a two-hour exam. It's literally 100 hours of work."
Craggs believed once his school had to switch to the tests, his students would struggle even more.
"It'll mean much higher failure rates for students, and not being able to achieve any NCEA qualifications which will lead to disengagement, and probably higher levels of dropping out."
Both principals agreed there was a need to make sure students left school with literacy and numeracy skills that helped them function in the real world.
But Webb said the system needed to be set up to work with kids - not penalise them.
"We see many kids in our community who have lots of skills. They might be multilingual. They have great potential. We need to be developing an education system that allows them to keep learning, not penalises them because they can't pass this particular test at this particular time"
Ministry of Education responds
In a statement, a Ministry of Education spokesperson said the NCEA co-requisite was a one-off requirement which students could complete at any time throughout their NCEA journey.
Students could continue to progress through all levels of NCEA without the co-requisite, they said, meaning there was no need for them to repeat any level of NCEA - but they wouldn't receive any qualification until they passed the test.
There was no limit to the number of times a student could attempt the tests, they said.
