NCEA BOMBED, LET’S NOT FAIL AI TOO.
New Zealand’s worst-kept educational secret is out – NCEA is a joke and it needs to go. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon finally admitted what everyone except a handful of Education policy wonks have known since ten minutes after NCEA was originally announced: ‘The evidence shows NCEA is not consistent and can be hard to navigate… It doesn’t always deliver what students and employers need.’
Gosh, who knew that employers look for something beyond warm fuzzies or ‘everyone wins equally’ certificates to find the best new hires? Or that they didn’t select an entire class of equal winners to fill an individual role?
The smart schools figured that out early and wasted little time offering Cambridge International Exams (CIE) either instead of or at least alongside NCEA. These qualifications have proved so popular with employers – and parents – that after 23 years of NCEA a large percentage of higher decile secondary schools now have the CIE option available for students. Why high decile? Because students graduating from these schools are more likely to travel overseas for job opportunities and NCEA qualifications are not as valued as much as the CIE equivalent in most countries outside of New Zealand.
A Chance to Seize the Initiative on AI In Education
So NCEA is headed for the scrapheap leaving an entire generation of school leavers with tainted qualifications? Hardly ideal. Still, at least there’s a silver lining here; the government can use this opportunity to get with the program and address the issue of how to integrate AI into the school curriculum instead of the current mishmash of passing on that responsibility to individual schools and even teachers.
Currently, secondary students are being told not to touch AI at school, but are then expected to suddenly start using it at university, or in the workplace, without any transition. Are we really suggesting kids should spend their Year 13 holidays learning how to collaborate with the most powerful tool of the modern age on their own? Can someone please explain to me the definition of ‘school’ again?
A Little Less Conversation Please
And yet, somehow, none of this chaos seems to have triggered any real urgency around AI! The government’s first-ever AI strategy was released in July – a glossy, feel-good document called Investing with Confidence that mostly reiterates the values of fairness, transparency and ‘trust’. NCEA kind of talk. It doesn’t contain a single new regulation, investment commitment, or legislative timeline. It’s more a statement of values: transparency, fairness, human oversight, and encouraging business innovation. It doesn’t do much more than say ‘Hey, AI is here. Use it responsibly. Follow existing laws. Everybody play nice. We’ll keep an eye on things.’
No real action plan either, just a vague promise to ‘think more deeply about this’ in 2026 and maybe act by 2027. We are, apparently, going to stare at the smoke for two years before admitting there might be a fire. So, while schools and universities are already trying to figure out how to deal with AI in the classroom, the New Zealand government is still stuck in O Week.
Uh, News Flash, We’re All Already Using AI, Guys!
And not just in education either. Ask around and you’ll find AI is central to businesses all over the place; in finance, manufacturing, creative industries, technology, science, retail and, increasingly, healthcare. In fact the only jobs not majorly affected by AI are car battery smashers and dredge operators – not that dredge operating couldn’t be improved with AI-driven underwater mapping too. AI’s in our homes, on our phones, in our lounges, bedrooms and cars. Hell, it’s even in our grandparents’ house!
This old-fashioned governmental attitude of ‘let’s set up a committee to look at’ an emerging technology and report back in half a decade or so’ ain’t cutting it no more. AI isn’t an art style that evolves over a generation – it’s a new life paradigm that can evolve drastically over a single day. For example; on January 20 this year OpenAI brought out a price plan that charged $200 a month for Chat GPT Pro’s unlimited services, then in the afternoon Liang Wenfeng released Deepseek which offered the exact same unlimited service – but for free. Within a handful of hours the world of Artificial Intelligence went from being a nightmare of cartel capitalism to competitive pluralism.
That’s a Magna Carta level effect on future societies across the globe – in a single day! Perhaps someone should remind our government, there are 700 odd of such days between now and whenever this working party deems it relevant to report back with their findings. It is extremely difficult to imagine how relevant anything such a languid approach would find. Why don’t we just call this strategy for what it really is; ‘we’ll just stall until someone else decides the future for us.’
A Wartime Consigliere
The only way for any government to look at this issue is to treat it like a war – as that is the closest scenario to what we have now where our lives are being affected by an external force 24/7.
During wartime did previous governments set up a working party of academics to stroll about popping the odd question about how a lack of weapons was affecting the soldiers’ ability to shoot back at an invading army? No, they created a War Cabinet that met almost daily to find solutions to ensure the soldiers had whatever they needed to defend those core tenets that make any nation unique.
It’s the exact same situation now, AI isn’t going to go away, whether we like it or not. So the question isn’t whether we want to engage with it; it’s how, when and on whose terms. We need first to decide what kind of society we want to have in five, ten, fifty years time. Then we need to tailor a plan where we allow AI to fit within that framework to help us achieve our goal(s). Waiting for global tech giants or foreign governments to decide on our behalf isn’t any sort of strategy – it’s surrender.
NCEA was a massive fail, but so what? We can bounce back, come back with a stronger product that will help prepare our kids for the future better. But if we’re too afraid to include AI in this conversation we are setting ourselves up to fail all over again. And with consequences that go a lot further than just in education.
