How does your school rate? NCEA, UE results at every college

Is the education tide turning?

After years of declining education achievement in secondary schools, the latest data has bucked the trend.

The levels of achievement among school leavers at NCEA Levels 2, 3 and for University Entrance (UE) for 2024 were the first increases at any level since 2020 – but Māori fell further behind non-Māori, and the gap between rich and poor was as pronounced as ever.

Achievement at NCEA Level 1 fell to its lowest level in a decade, but these results were potentially skewed by the increasing number of high-achieving schools no longer offering it.

The Education Ministry publishes data annually for school leavers. This is considered a more accurate picture of educational achievement than NCEA results because it includes all students, including those who dropped out before getting a chance to sit some levels of NCEA. It also captures other assessments, including Cambridge International Assessment.

With school-by-school information obtained under the Official Information Act, the Herald has dived deep into the data.

The interactive graphic below allows students and parents to see how they compare, and which type of schools seem to do best.

We have plotted the attainment rate, the percentage of school leavers who had NCEA Level 3 (or equivalent) and UE, for each school.

We have then cross-referenced this with the school’s Equity Index (EQI) score.

EQI scores have replaced the older decile system for school funding and are intended to be more targeted measures of the socio-economic barriers to education faced by kiwi kids.

EQI uses a combination of factors to judge student equity, such as parents’ incomes, qualifications and ages at the birth of their first child, along with any criminal records, time spent on benefits, social welfare interventions for their children, and the number of times the family has moved house. The higher the EQI, the more socio-economic barriers the school’s students face.

Every student in New Zealand is assigned an EQI score and these are combined to calculate a school’s EQI score. The range in 2024 was 344 (fewest socio-economic barriers) to 569 (most barriers), with the average range being 448 to 469.

A cautionary note about the data: trends can be observed, but nothing definitive can be inferred. It doesn’t mean, for example, that sending a student to a large school with a low EQI score will necessarily lead to high achievement in NCEA.

But the graph clearly indicates that the school system is far from egalitarian, with social barriers closely related to educational achievement. This mirrors the trend of previous years.

Three schools, all with low numbers of school leavers, had 100% pass rates for NCEA Level 3:

The former is particularly impressive, with an EQI score (498) indicating above-average social disadvantage. Private schools do not have EQI scores, which are used to calculate additional funding to schools with higher socio-economic barriers.

Of the bigger schools with students from wealthier backgrounds, Wellington Girls’ College (EQI 373) was the stand-out in 2024, as it was in 2023: 93.1% of the 276 school leavers had NCEA Level 3 in 2024, while 87% had UE.

Auckland Girls’ Grammar School had another high-achieving year despite its students facing above-average socio-economic barriers (EQI 487); 81.4% of its 210 school leavers attained NCEA Level 3, while 73.8% had UE.

Integrated school Te Aute College was one of those that bucked the trend, with high achievement (92.9% of school leavers with NCEA Level 3) despite having some of the highest socio-economic barriers (EQI 536).

Several other Kura Kaupapa Māori also had high achievement rates despite such barriers, including TKKM o Hurungaterangi, TKKM o Te Kura Kokiri, TKKM o Hokianga.

Students at such schools can often benefit from a tikanga approach that grounds them in a sense of belonging and identity, which is often correlated with student success; only 68% of secondary school students feel a sense of belonging (below the OECD average of 75%), while 22% felt like outsiders or said they were left out of things at school.

Smaller, isolated rural schools tended to struggle more, as they are more likely to be in more deprived areas, and have restricted access to resources including teachers and learning support specialists.

Auckland University research in 2023 found NCEA results and UE attainment rates were about 15% lower for rural students, compared to urban students.

After new NCEA standards came out in 2013, only 45% of students leaving state schools had NCEA Level 3. This rose to 50% in 2016, 51% in 2019, and 57% in the first year of the pandemic, when Covid disruption enabled students to receive bonus credits.

It was all downhill from then and across the board, leading to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon calling it an education crisis.

An Education Review Office report in 2023 said New Zealand was not alone in experiencing a post-Covid collapse, while a 2024 academic paper called A Generation At Risk estimated the impact of Covid was up to six months of “learning loss”, and up to eight months for students with higher socio-economic barriers.

The 2024 results saw improvements for the first time since the Covid pandemic, with the exception being NCEA Level 1.

The NCEA Level 1 achievement rate in 2024 was impacted by the number of high-performing schools no longer offering it.

According to a report from the Education Review Office, only three in five schools with fewer socio-economic barriers offered NCEA Level 1 in 2024, with the rest teaching an alternative.

These are the types of schools – with low EQI scores – that tend to have high-achieving students, as the overall data shows and has shown year after year.

Experts have said it’s too early to say whether the tide has turned.

“One year is not enough to make a call on whether there is a turn happening in student achievement, and the change is not substantial enough to warrant significant claims,” said Dr Nina Hood, academic director at The Teachers Institute.

Stuart Deerness, senior lecturer in teacher education at the Auckland University of Technology, said there was a suggestion of “a potential turning point”.

But it was an uneven one, he said, noting the nearly one in six school leavers with no formal qualification.

“Our most vulnerable learners are disengaging from the system entirely. While the mainstream improves, a marginalised group requires urgent, targeted support to prevent them from leaving school empty-handed,” he told the Herald earlier in August.

Education Minister Erica Stanford hopes that implementing structured literacy and maths in primary schools should lift those at the bottom, improving their chances of gaining high school qualifications.

She described the improvements at other levels in 2024 as “that climb out of Covid”.

There is also support for accelerated learning to plug knowledge gaps for those in Years 0-8, though teachers say the reasons kids might fall behind are many and varied, and often involve out-of-school factors – such as poverty.

A far greater proportion of students with few socio-economic barriers (as measured by the Equity Index) left school in 2024 with NCEA Level 1 (96.3%) compared with those facing the most barriers (72.3%).

This was also the proportion (72.3%) of Māori school leavers in 2024 with NCEA Level 1 or above, lower than for Pacific school leavers (81.4%).

“The gap in NCEA Level 1 attainment rates between Māori school leavers and all school leavers increased in 2024 to 11.9 percentage points, up 0.5 percentage points from 2023,” the Ministry of Education report on the results said.

“This was the largest gap since 2014, and 3.8 percentage points more than in 2017 when the gap was smallest.”

The difference between rich and poor was far more pronounced at NCEA Level 3 or above: 84% of school leavers with few socioeconomic barriers gained this level, more than double the proportion of those who faced the highest barriers (36.2%).

Only 37.1% of Māori school leavers had NCEA Level 3 or above, while for Pacific school leavers it was just shy of half of them (49.5%).

Since 2020, the proportion of Māori school leavers with NCEA Level 3 or above has decreased across all school equity index bands.

Female students are still doing better than their male counterparts, but the achievement gender gap is shrinking. In 2024, 59.5% of female leavers attained NCEA Level 3 or above, compared with 51.6% of male leavers.

Stanford has announced plans to replace the NCEA system, saying it was enabling students too much flexibility at the expense of credibility.

Under the new scheme, Year 11 students will face what is being called a Foundational Skills Award with a focus on literacy and numeracy. English and mathematics will be required subjects for students at this year level.

Year 12 and 13 students will seek to attain the New Zealand Certificate of Education (NZCE) and the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education (NZACE) respectively.

This will replace the current system with a structured approach that requires students to take five subjects and pass at least four to receive the Year 12 and 13 certificates.

The proposed timeline is to phase out NCEA over five years, with the current system and the new system – including the old curricula and refreshed curricula – running parallel for some of those years.

The announcement prompted about 90 principals from largely lower socio-economic areas to ask for an “immediate halt” to reforms until they were better planned.

Sixty four principals from some of New Zealand’s wealthiest high schools - including St Kentigern College, Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls’ Grammar - pushed back, penning a letter backing the Government’s plans to scrap NCEA.

It follows a tide of other changes in the education system, with the Government introducing refreshed curricula for Years 0-10, new curricula for maths and English (Years 0-8), a focus on knowledge-rich curricula that has rubbed some teachers the wrong way, and structured literacy and numeracy in classrooms along with a cellphone ban.

Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.

Chris Knox is a scientist turned data-journalist who investigates the stories behind the numbers, and creates interactives for Herald readers to explore them.