I wonder how many teachers are as nervous about the return to work for the start of the school year, as the students today are awaiting their NCEA results. 

The anticipation will be palpable for students and families, as the National Certificate of Educational Achievement results hit the internet for the country’s year 11, 12, and 13 students. 

More than 160,000 students are now able to access their results through the New Zealand Qualifications Authority website. There will be huge demand on the website, so hopefully it copes. How's that going for you and your nervous children?  

Do you recall those days of awaiting exam results? I do. I was almost apoplectic with anticipation of the postie arriving at the front gate with the official envelope and the impending doom of having to return to be second year 5th, as it was called back in the 80’s. 

These days, the results appear to be designed so that everyone’s a winner. The exam results of late seem to replicate the outcome of a sports match at primary school level, where the coach tells everyone that both teams are winners, and then you’re encouraged to walk along a line of peers, slapping hands in that ubiquitous high five style, repeating ‘good game, good game…’ in order to appease the losers who didn’t do so well. 

The Minister of Education has set education standards in a new direction, and Minister Erica Stanford is excited about the uptake, enthusiasm, and direction that our students and teachers will hurtle towards this year. 

Whatever we do from here on in has to be better, right? 

We have to do better for our children. But how do you feel about the constant change in direction since the advent of tomorrow’s schools and NCEA? Until now, several generations of our children have been the lab rats for successive governments didactic and woeful attempts to do the right thing. 

ERO is the Education Review Office, and they have questions around NCEA Level 1. I wonder how many teachers about to return to work with more change to adapt to have great confidence with the new direction set by Erica Stanford? 

The ongoing manipulation of the education system and ergo, the children within it and the teachers charged with delivering it has to stop. 2025 has to be the year where we begin to get it all right so that more of our young can succeed academically. 

Do you have great faith in the new direction we’re heading in with education in 2025?