To identify educational winners requires creating educational losers. Can we afford them?

By Chris Trotter*

Erica Stanford's educational reforms, particularly her restoration of compulsory external and internal exams, will be welcomed by most New Zealanders. Not by the Post-Primary Teachers Association admittedly, but that is hardly surprising. One could be forgiven for thinking that somewhere in the PPTA’s constitution there is a clause mandating opposition to any attempt by right-wing parties to improve educational outcomes. That said, Stanford’s reforms are accompanied by far too few indications as to what sort of life can be reasonably anticipated by the kids who fail.

Because, as Stanford must know, for any examination system to be academically effective a pass mark cannot be given to everybody. A test that everybody passes isn’t a test, it’s a fraud. It was the widespread perception that the NCEA assessment regime could be, and was being, “gamed” that became one of the strongest driving forces behind National’s decision to scrap it.

The problem of failure remains. Indeed, looking back at the system NCEA replaced, of which the School Certificate examination was the centrepiece, the mandatory procedural failure of half the candidates loomed large in the pedagogical indictment.

The most damning accusation levelled against the old system was that it was turning half of New Zealand’s 15-year-olds into failures. Effectively, they were being told that, henceforth, theirs would be a sub-optimal existence; that their lives were over before they had even begun.

But this was a thoroughly bourgeois judgement. To find oneself barred from ascending the qualifications ladder and denied access to the status and income of the professional bourgeoisie was every middle-class parent’s nightmare scenario. If avoiding it entailed clambering over the bent backs of tens-of-thousands of working-class teenagers then so be it.

Not that many working-class teenagers growing up the 1960s and 70s would have described their situation in such apocalyptic terms. “School” was not for everyone. The viciously enforced rules and regulations of the nation’s high-schools, and the stifling social assumptions of the people who ran them, were experienced by many working-class students as prisons from which they were only-too-happy to escape. For these workers-in-waiting, their 15th birthday could not come soon enough.

And the work was there, just waiting for the school-leavers to do it.

That’s the huge difference between the New Zealand of the 1960s and 70s and the New Zealand of 2026. Half-a-century ago metropolitan New Zealand was awash with manufacturing enterprises and most provincial cities boasted at least one huge freezing-works.

This solid industrial base supported a working-class culture that reckoned little with academic qualifications. A trade certificate was valued much more highly than School Certificate. Only the poor buggers they’d left behind: the ones who wouldn’t be earning a real pay-packet for at least the next five years; cared about such things. The adventure of adulthood beckoned these working-class kids and they were eager to follow.

Hard to believe? Yes it is. Any New Zealander born after about 1980 will have no memory of the country in which major industrial enterprises abounded. Even Baby Boomers will struggle to recall just how industrialised New Zealand’s import-substituting economy had become by the 1970s.

In December 2024, as part of the Wellington Heritage Festival, the Upper Hutt Public Library curated an exhibition entitled “Upper Hutt: City of Industry.” On display were photographs, architectural drawings, and the recollections of workers employed by the likes of General Motors, Dunlop Tyres, Repco, Trojan Engineering, and a host of other industrial concerns. As one of the contributors noted:

“At one time the Hutt Valley could have been considered the Detroit of New Zealand. But by 1990 the car assembly industry here was all gone.”

And with it went the culture and lifestyle of the young workers who had grown to adulthood in the factories of the Hutt Valley. One of those workers, employed by General Motors, Trentham, recalled the social amenities that catered to the region’s vast workforce:

“We had a social club, we had darts and snooker. It had a football pitch which was just part of the plant … and golf.”

The other thing they had was a union. Employers were required to ask whether prospective employees objected to joining the relevant “industrial union of workers”. Overwhelmingly, the answer was “Of course not!” Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt were union towns.

Very few residents of the Hutt Valley reached the age of 15 unaware of the importance of trade unions. Perhaps, if there had been a union for secondary-school students over the age of 15, then more of them would have stayed on. As it was, an injury to one, inflicted by the cane-wielding teachers of the 60s and 70s, was never allowed to be treated as an injury to all.

“School Strike for Climate” was still 50 years in the future.

The Minister of Education can protest until she is hoarse that the Coalition Government will do everything in its power to ensure that those who fail its new examinations are not forgotten, but the claim is self-contradictory.

An examination system capable of earning the respect of students, parents and employers must have a credible failure-rate. Without its 50 percent pass, 50 percent fail, mark-scaling protocols, School Cert would very soon have succumbed to the same scepticism that undermined the NCEA. Without the losers to make the claim real, declaring oneself to be a winner in Erica Stanford’s brave new world can only ever be an empty boast.

At the heart of this tragedy lies the fact that the parallel universes of those with qualifications and those without still exist. For every Yin there has to be a Yang.

What’s differentiates the social-democratic management of “failure” from that of the neoliberals is that it was confined to academic performance. In a valley overflowing with factories and state houses it was possible to lead a successful life without the pieces of paper so prized by the middle-class.

In a valley shorn of its industry and state houses, the challenge of constructing a successful existence is made so much harder. Marrying, finding somewhere warm and affordable to live, having babies: all the life-stages facilitated by the social-democratic state of the 1960s and 70s are now only to be reached by a narrow and much steeper road, with sheer drops on either side.

According to Statistics NZ there are currently 82,000 young New Zealanders classified as NEETs (not in education, employment, or training). That’s nearly 15 percent of Kiwis aged 15-24 years. A huge number of them will, in one way or another, depend upon the public purse for their survival. Some will be lost to drugs, others will be locked up in prison. Most will just be rotting away at home – unmissed and unwanted.

Such is the alternative universe inhabited by those who “fail” in the 2020s. Fifty years ago similarly aged New Zealanders would have been at work, paying taxes, raising families, and living a successful life.

But back then we were a nation of industry. What are we now, Minister Stanford? The other half of your educational equation remains unanswered.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.