The NCEA and How We Got There: The Role of PPTA in School Qualifications Reform 1980-2002

Abstract

The NCEA, like many other government policies, tends to be seen by teachers as something imposed on the profession, and introduced without due recognition of the realities of teachers’ work. This article argues that the NCEA could instead be seen as the fulfilment of decades of advocacy by NZPPTA, the secondary teachers’ union in New Zealand. It uses evidence from the author’s PhD research, including documents from union files supplemented by interviews with union policy-makers, to trace the development of the union’s advocacy for a standards-based assessment system to replace the traditional norm-referenced assessment. It concludes by proposing an explanation as to why a policy with such a long union history would continue to be received with ambivalence or outright rejection by a significant proportion of secondary teachers.