Can anyone tell me why literally everything that is ever done in the education space is rejected, hated and railed against by the unions?

Have the education unions ever not asked for more money, more resources or more non-contact time, while at the same time telling you everything in the classroom is crap?

The NCEA changes confirmed over the weekend, to most parent's eyes, will make perfect sense.

Anyone who has had kids through these past few calamitous years knows full well the old NCEA has been an abject failure.

The indisputable outworkings are;

1) We have a swath of kids leaving school too early without any real qualifications to their name. We then wonder why their unemployment rate is so high.

2) Of those who do leave, too many have a potpourri of random eclectic passes that may or may not mean anything in the real world.

On paper having hundreds of choices and vague terms like 'merit' or 'achieved' probably looked like it could make sense.

But it relied on parents and kids having the wherewithal and interest to navigate their way through a system that in reality allowed you to take the piss for an easy pass.

With 'A' to 'E' you know where you're at.

Being able to actually read and write remains as important today as it ever has and a few basics like science and maths are critical for life, as well as job prospects.

But no, this won't suit students according to the unions. Is it the students they are worried about, or themselves?

The more accountable you make the system the more questions that get asked about the quality of the teaching and what's unfolding in the classrooms.

Unions hate that. All that accountability is deeply unsettling and of course only ever cured by wanting more money.

Between the old NCEA and Covid there is a generation of our kids that have been robbed and, quite possibly, detrimentally affected for life. They have been let down shockingly.

If the unions wanted to make up for any of that, some enthusiasm and a vastly more productive approach to change and improvement would go a long way to restoring their increasingly tattered reputations.

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