Media Release
NEWSLETTER: NCEA, Independent Curriculum Council & ECE
Newsletter 30 September 2026
The Parents' Alliance has officially launched!
Last week we launched the Parents’ Alliance. We welcomed support and attendance from Education Minister Hon Erica Stanford and Labour’s finance spokesperson Hon Barbara Edmonds. We thank both for their time in what was a very busy final sitting week of parliament.
Our Launch was covered by The Herald, The Post, Newstalk ZB, The Country, RNZ, and TVNZ’s Breakfast.
Why we are here
The Parents’ Alliance is a group of parents building a collective national voice for parents, grandparents and whānau in education, and putting the parent perspective into the media and into the corridors of power.
Teachers are represented by their unions and principals by their associations, but parents and grandparents have no one. That leaves a significant gap whenever funding, curriculum and legislation are debated, because the education system exists to serve our children.
Six for our Kids
At the launch, we introduced Six for our Kids our first six policy priorities:
- Learning comes first: student achievement needs to be the paramount priority
- Well trained teachers: evidence based teacher training
- Standards parents can trust: parents deserve to know exactly how their child is progressing
- A fair start for every child: more and earlier equity funding
- Real school choice: greater choice in what school your child attends
- Every parent's voice heard: every school, every year, survey parent views and publish results,
We have polled each policy. Every one of these policies received net positive support from voters across every major political party. This means parents support these policies no matter how they vote.
We have noticed some commentators have confused net support with total support.
Net positive support is the margin between support and opposition for the policy, not the total level of support. For example, our Learning comes first policy had 4 per cent net positive support among Green voters. This means four percentage points more Green party voters support the policy than oppose it. It doesn't mean only 4 per cent of Green voters support learning coming first.
Membership is growing
Less than a week after launching we already have over 3,200 members, and this is just the beginning.
Our website is finished!
The research and resources page of our website plus FAQs is now live.
Things you can do today
Tell ten people to check out parentsalliance.nz
Share parentsalliance.nz on social media and WhatsApp groups.
Join the Parents’ Alliance facebook and instagram pages.
Membership is free, and numbers matter. The more parents standing behind us, the harder it will be to exclude us.
Help fund the work.
Joining is free. Running an effective national organisation is not. If each of our 3,200 members donates $20 we would have $64,000 to spend on media and policy work through the election campaign.
If you think our advocacy is worth $20, donate today.
Donate to the Parents' Alliance
Labour proposes an Independent Council for Curriculum and Assessment
Labour announced that, if elected, it will keep the current NCEA system unchanged until 2029. An Independent Council for Curriculum and Assessment would be established to review the changes and recommend a way forward. Labour says curriculum and assessment decisions should be guided by the sector evidence and expertise, not the preferences of individual Ministers.
Our initial thoughts.
What is the curriculum for?
Before setting up another government agency, there is a more basic question: what does each party think the curriculum is for?
The 2007 curriculum aimed to produce young people who would be “confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners”. In practice, that meant growing flexibility and a major shift towards internal assessment. NZQA's own reporting shows nearly 80 per cent of NCEA credits are now achieved through internal assessment, and 154 schools were flagged in moderation because their internal assessment results were inconsistent with their external exam results.
The new curriculum is knowledge-rich, nationally consistent and grounded in the science of learning. We believe mastering a subject, and the confidence that comes with it, is how young people become confident, connected lifelong learners.
We agree on stability. The way to get it is to keep going.
The current reforms are not one party’s project. Labour began the curriculum refresh in 2019, and it took two years to go from announcing its intent to announcing a work programme. Today’s reforms build on that work. Sticking with them, as the product of both Labour and National, is what gives the system stability. Pausing now would mean more than a decade before changes that lift standards reach classrooms, and another cohort of students short-changed.
There are early signs the reforms are working: achievement in the literacy and numeracy co-requisites is rising. The system is still recovering from Covid disruption, and losing momentum now could set education back another ten years. The priority should be resourcing teacher development, particularly in subject knowledge and technical expertise, along with additional learning support. That will do more to raise standards than a new agency.
NCEA is not trusted
Parents don’t understand or trust NCEA. We want our children to be offered a qualification that properly tests skills and has international currency. Every year of delay puts more students through a qualification that employers don’t trust.
The problems with NCEA Level 1 are well documented. A growing number of schools, mainly in high socio-economic areas, have stopped offering it. Employers value other skills and attributes over it. It is not yet a reliable measure of knowledge and skills, it does not always prepare students for Level 2, and it is not motivating all students to do their best.
If NCEA isn’t replaced with a qualification families can trust and that is internationally comparable, more schools in affluent communities may turn to Cambridge, the IB or other alternatives, as happened with Level 1. Their students will have more options, while those without the same choices remain with NCEA. That could widen the achievement gap and, over time, deepen inequality, weaken productivity and lower living standards.
There is a valid concern that many students could miss out under a new qualification because their learning hasn’t prepared them for the higher standard. We cannot let that happen. The transition must be properly resourced, with early assessment, targeted teaching and enough support for students who have fallen behind to catch up. This includes Māori and Pacifica students.
Transition planning must also be explicit about supporting students in Māori-medium education, and disabled and neurodivergent learners.
Keeping NCEA simply to avoid confronting poor achievement would leave those students with the same gaps in their learning and short-changes others.
How independent is independent?
An independent panel of experts sounds good, but it will only be as independent as the Minister who appoints it, and no Minister is independent. Ministerially appointed councils can quickly end up pursuing their appointees’ own agendas. When a new Minister arrives, the council is restocked or abolished, and the curriculum is turned upside down again. Australia shows the limits of the model. Its curriculum authority, ACARA, is an independent statutory body, yet its board is appointed by education ministers, and the national curriculum has been through two major, politically charged reviews since 2014.
We saw this recently when the Government bypassed the normal process to hand-pick Nursing Council members.
Labour’s proposal also leaves people out. It gives no role to parents, employers or the wider community. And Labour has already committed to removing the SMART assessment tool, so it has made up its mind on some issues before the council it says should decide them even exists.
Stability? No.
More churn for teachers? Yes.
More wasted money from Vote Education? Yes.
Less accountability to parents? We think so. It puts curriculum decisions further from parents’ scrutiny.
Our view
Whoever is Minister of Education after the election should continue the current reforms, properly resource teacher development and learning support, and wait for the data before making any further dramatic changes. They should evaluate how students are progressing using ERO’s independent evaluations of how the reforms are landing in classrooms, and international benchmarks such as PISA and TIMSS. Give the reforms time, fix what isn’t working, and make further changes based on evidence, not political persuasion. That’s stability.
National proposes a School Start Check and screen limits
National has promised that, if re-elected, it will introduce a Set Up for Success policy that would end screen and individual device use in early childhood education centres, tightly limit it in Years 1 to 3, and introduce age-appropriate limits for older primary students.
Screens and the School Start Check
Parents haven't raised screen time in early childhood centres as a concern with us, and early childhood teachers and the unions have been defensive on the point. Our recent personal experience at early childhood centres backs the unions on this one. It would be an interesting question to poll parents on.
National appears set to put more emphasis on education and development in early learning. The School Start Check will:
- set clear expectations, drawn from Te Whāriki (the early childhood curriculum), for the foundations children should have before school
- bring together information on how each child has progressed through ECE
- give parents and schools a clear picture of each child's readiness
- identify children who need extra support, so it can be provided early.
We think the check will be useful for parents and new entrant teachers. Critics say it will take teachers off the floor and needs resourcing. We won't know until we see the detail. If it does impact resourcing, the sector should be funded to backfill that resource. However, early childhood teachers should already know our children well and should be assessing and documenting children’s development against the curriculum.
Currently, this is typically recorded in a narrative format, learning stories, but it’s lengthy to read and inconsistent in the way information is communicated to parents across the country and is rarely read by new entrant teachers. A check should take developmental milestones from the curriculum and make it easy for teachers to document their professional judgements about a child’s development over time so it’s easily understood by new entrant teachers
But the real test is what happens next. There is little value in adding checks if the follow-up support is not there. Children who need help must receive it, and that requires sustained learning-support funding for early childhood and the junior primary years. Research shows early intervention is a sound investment. Nobel laureate James Heckman’s work on high-quality early programmes found they can deliver greater returns than later remediation, and the Dunedin Study found that childhood self-control predicts adult health, wealth and offending.
The Government has made a start. Budget 2025 put $266 million into the Early Intervention Service, and from this year the service extends to the end of Year 1. But when that funding was announced, more than 3,000 children were on the waitlist, and in 2024 the average wait was more than four months.
So we have questions for National. What will the check consist of? Who will carry out the check? How will it be funded? Will the expanded Early Intervention Service have the capacity to see the children it identifies quickly enough to make a difference?
A check without funded follow-up is just another report, and families will keep waiting.
The latest PISA results show signs of stabilisation
The 2025 PISA results indicate that New Zealand’s long decline may be stabilising. New Zealand ranked ninth in reading, tenth in science and 16th in mathematics. Although the results were broadly similar to 2022 they are well below our historical performance. In 2000, New Zealand scored 529 in PISA reading; by 2022 that had fallen to 501. That’s over a year’s lost learning.
There is encouraging evidence that the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students narrowed. Students in the lowest socioeconomic quartile recorded particularly strong gains. However, New Zealand did not meet the OECD’s participation requirements. The OECD estimates that non-response may have pushed New Zealand’s mean scores up by about 10 to 15 points, although it says comparisons with 2022 are unlikely to be materially affected. (OECD).
We should welcome improvement without becoming complacent. One encouraging set of results does not undo three decades of decline, and that decline is now showing up in our productivity and living standards. It reinforces the need to stay focused on attendance, excellent teaching, a strong curriculum, reliable assessment and early support for children who are falling behind.
ERO’s work points the same way. Its 2022 report Missing Out found many parents had become more relaxed about their children missing school, and its 2024 report Ready, Set, Teach found many new teachers felt underprepared for the classroom. That is why evidence-based teacher training is one of our Six for our Kids and why parents are part of the fix on attendance.
Education in the media
We welcome the attention education is now getting and commend the various sector peak bodies such as the NZ Principals’ Federation and Aotearoa Educators Collective and the PPTA to mobilise ahead of the election. We may not agree on every policy but there will be synergies – and we all agree on the importance of education.
Thank you
Thank you for joining us at the beginning. Now, please help us grow: tell ten people, and if you can, support our work with a donation. Ask your friends to sign up at www.parentsalliance.nz
For those of you with school-aged children, we hope the weather cooperates wherever you are so you’re not all locked inside together.
Ngā mihi nui,
Cameron Bagrie (Chair) and Anya Zohrab (Executive Director)
The Parents' Alliance
Te Kotahitanga o ngā Mātua, Le Lotogatasi o Mātua, 家长联盟, पारिवारिक मंच
Media contact:
Cam Bagrie, Chair and Spokesperson, The Parents’ Alliance - 027 290 9844