Success for Whom? And at What Cost?

It was Father’s Day here in New Zealand yesterday, and I had the privilege of enjoying a family lunch together with my children and grandchildren. It’s an exciting time in our family, with my eldest grandsons in their final year of high school and preparing to go to university, several of the grandkids celebrating successes in their respective sports teams as the seasons near an end, my youngest daughter contemplating a move to Australia to pursue career ambitions… the list could go on.

As a grandparent it gives me immense pleasure watching these young people growing up to become fine young citizens. They’ve all chosen to pursue very different pathways in life – none have really conformed to the ‘traditional’ pathway of success starting at high school (only one of my five children actually graduated with sufficient NCEA credits to go to university) followed by success at University (curiously, three of the five now have tertiary degrees – all with distinction), followed by success in a recognised career pathway (all, including my sons-in-law, are gainfully employed in occupations that wouldn’t have appeared in their careers counsellor handouts while at secondary school!)

I look then to my grandchildren and wonder what lies ahead for them, and what they are learning now that will prepare them for whatever that is? As a life-long educator this sort of question has fuelled my personal commitment to the work I do – and still does.

Narrowing the meaning of success

In a recent opinion piece, the Minister of Education began with a statement  few would disagree with: “Every parent wants the same thing: for their child to leave school with the knowledge and skills they need to build the life they want.”

This resonates with me as both parent and grandparent. But as I read further, I found myself asking: what kind of life are we assuming they want?

In the Minister’s framing, success seems to be defined almost exclusively in economic terms  – measured by employability, exam performance, and alignment with industry needs. Of course, the Minister is not alone in this view. It is an ideology that is expressed in a number of other countries – including by Nigel Farage in the UK who is arguing for teaching trades and services in schools as a part of his broader education reform agenda.  

The second feature of this framing is that it is also framed as an individual pursuit: my child, my future, my opportunities. What’s missing is any recognition that education is also about preparing young people to contribute to society, to live well with others, and to flourish as whole people – culturally, socially, and personally – not just economically.

It’s this narrowing of perspective that troubles me most.

The limits of ‘fixing’ assessment

The Minister is emphatic that NCEA has failed and must be replaced. I don’t deny that some of the symptoms she identifies are real – the credit-chasing, the patchy coherence, the uneven outcomes. These issues are not unique to New Zealand; many education systems worldwide wrestle with them. But the assumption that simply replacing one assessment system with another will fix the problem is simplistic.

As Yong Zhao reminds us in What Works May Hurt, there is no such thing as a solution without side effects. Every policy comes with trade-offs. And averages can conceal serious harm to individuals. If we see “declining achievement” as a problem of assessment alone, we risk ignoring deeper causes, including curriculum design, teaching practice, equity of resources, and the complexity of learners’ lives for example.

Even the claim that students are “gaming” NCEA, while certainly true in some instances, doesn’t automatically indict the system itself. It points instead to choices about how it has been implemented and where weaknesses have been allowed to persist. To respond by discarding the whole framework is to miss the opportunity to learn from its strengths – particularly its emphasis on competencies, evidence of progress, and alternatives to blunt exam-driven models.

What does the data really reveal?

The Minister also leans heavily on ERO survey data showing that many teachers and principals are unhappy with NCEA. It is entirely possible for a qualification to be sound in design, yet poorly supported in practice. Without the professional capability to use it well, even the best systems will disappoint

On the surface, the figures look damning: 60% of teachers said the new Level 1 was not a reliable measure of students’ skills and knowledge; 75% of principals questioned the reliability of credit values; 70% of employers said it wasn’t a meaningful signal.

But here’s the question: what do these numbers really reveal?

Dissatisfaction doesn’t always mean the system itself is fatally flawed. It may just as easily reflect the mindset and capability of those working within it – and the level of support they’ve been given to use it well. NCEA was deliberately designed to be more future-focused than the traditional exam-based model, emphasising competencies alongside academic knowledge, valuing evidence of progress, and broadening definitions of success. If teachers and leaders are struggling to make that vision work, is that the fault of the system? Or does it highlight failures of implementation, resourcing, and professional learning over nearly three decades?

Data never speaks for itself. It always requires interpretation. The risk here is that the ERO findings are being used to prop up a predetermined conclusion – that NCEA is broken beyond repair. A more constructive reading would ask what the data tells us about culture, capability, and the conditions under which the qualification operates. Without that deeper interrogation, we risk fixing the wrong problem.

Personalisation, not standardisation

The Minister’s call for more exams and standardisation is one way to respond to NCEA’s challenges. But it isn’t the only way. On the day after her opinion piece appeared, Steve Maharey –  himself a former Minister of Education –  offered a very different view.

Maharey acknowledges the problems with NCEA, but argues that the answer is not to lurch backwards to uniformity and league tables. Instead, he insists the only credible path forward is personalisation.

He frames the central question well: “What kind of education is suited to the knowledge age we now live in?” If we take seriously the reality of AI, climate change, and rapid social transformation, then preparing students for lifelong learning, creativity, and problem-solving must be at least as important as certifying them for jobs. Finland’s system is his case in point. They achieve high standards, but through building trust, personalisation, formative assessment, and well-supported teachers — not through a one-size-fits-all model.

This directly challenges the Minister’s dismissal of “political agenda” claims. The real debate here is not whether we want high standards –  everyone does  – but whether high standards are best achieved through centralised standardisation or through personalised approaches that reflect the diversity of learners and contexts.

Where the Minister’s solution leans toward standardisation and uniformity, Maharey argues for personalisation and trust. Both want high standards  – but the means could not be more different. The real debate here is not whether we want high standards – everyone does – but whether high standards are best achieved through centralised standardisation or through personalised approaches that reflect the diversity of learners and contexts.

I was doing some contract work for the Ministry of Education around the time that Steve Maharey was Minister of Education, and remember him championing the cause of personalised learning. I recall wondering at the time why it was necessary to introduce this an approach at all – surely education has always been about a focus on the learner? But as the responses to this initiative emerged, I came to realise that there wasn’t a commonly shared understanding of what personalised learning is or was. A common concern was that the shift to personalisation would simply mean having to plan 25 different lesson plans (i.e. one for each student) instead of one for the whole class – a view firmly established in the paradigm of ‘delivery’ of knowledge and not considering any sort of shift in the ownership of learning.

Beyond “Academic” vs “Vocational”

Before diving deeper into policy, it’s worth pausing to remember that education isn’t just about systems and structures –  it’s about people, and the messy, surprising, multidimensional ways human potential shows up. Which brings me to the example of Brian May I used in a recent blog post. May was a man who can fill stadiums as Queen’s guitarist one night and analyse cosmic dust the next day. Which side of him is more “valuable”? Which represents his “real” intelligence?

The danger of the current reforms is that they reinscribe an old binary – “academic” subjects count, while disciplines like outdoor education, sport or the arts are sidelined. We risk returning to the kind of “drafting gates” that limited opportunities for my parents’ generation, where a single test determined whether you went to high school or left formal education altogether.

Human capability doesn’t divide neatly along those lines. Narrowing our curriculum to what is easily measured or economically valuable impoverishes not only students but society.

Asking the bigger questions

So as I spent time with my kids and grandkids yesterday, I pondered whether, at the heart of this debate is a bigger set of questions we urgently need to confront:

• What do we want education to achieve – economic productivity alone, or also wellbeing, citizenship, creativity, cultural identity, and social cohesion?
• How do we define success – as an exam pass rate, or as the flourishing of diverse human potential?
• Who gets to decide what counts as success — a central authority, or communities and cultures who bring their own knowledge and values to the table?

Yes, qualifications matter. Parents deserve confidence that they mean something. But reducing the conversation to a swap of one system for another risks narrowing, not expanding, our vision of education.

If we take Zhao’s warnings seriously, the question is not only what works? but who does it work for, and who does it hurt? That’s the debate New Zealand needs – and the one our young people deserve.

That’s the debate New Zealand needs.