Confusing Confidence with Competence: Erica Stanford and the Bulldozing of Education Reform
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11:48 am, August 7th, 2025 - 28 comments
Categories: education, erica stanford, Politics, uncategorized -
Tags: NCEA
I went through school in a system where the only goal was to prepare us for a job. That was it. No big ideas about growing confident learners, critical thinkers, or creative contributors to society. No talk about identity, belonging, or the joy of learning. We were taught to recall and reproduce. You passed or you failed.
The result? I never really saw myself as a good learner. I went to university for the social life, expecting to fail. Even though I earned a degree, I still carried the belief that I wasn’t good at learning, and that I’d somehow tricked the system. It took me years to unlearn that story and start valuing myself as a learner.
That kind of education system leaves a mark. And it’s the same approach I see creeping back into our classrooms under the current reforms.
As a parent, I saw something better. My daughter went through NCEA. Sure, she gamed the system sometimes – skipping exams if she didn’t need the credits – but she also learned how to plan, problem-solve, write persuasively, and think for herself. She achieved a degree and is now working on a second while holding down a full-time job. More importantly, she’s a fierce advocate for equity and social justice. Isn’t that the kind of outcome we want?
NCEA wasn’t perfect, but it offered students a chance to grow and succeed in different ways. It recognised that learning isn’t linear or one-size-fits-all. It allowed for depth, creativity, and flexibility. It gave students a chance to find their place – not just in the job market, but in the world.
Which brings me to the current Minister of Education, Erica Stanford.
The more I see Stanford in action – and the more the media praises her confidence – the more I wonder if we’re confusing confidence with competence.
Across several sweeping reforms, Stanford has acted with speed and certainty. But certainty isn’t the same as wisdom. Rather than drawing on a wide range of voices and experiences, she has relied on a small group of neo-liberal experts. The evidence she uses is highly selective. And the language she uses paints past practice as broken and ineffective, clearing the way for shiny new reforms – regardless of their actual merit.
Take the rollout of structured literacy. Stanford has portrayed it as a silver bullet, while dismissing decades of teaching approaches that actually helped most New Zealanders learn to read. She ignores the fact that countries like the UK – who pushed structured literacy under Tory governments – are now grappling with mixed results.
Even more concerning are the proposed changes to NCEA. These aren’t small tweaks. They represent a major ideological shift.
Let’s be clear: it’s reasonable to expect more conservative education policy under a National-led government. But what’s happening now goes far beyond that. These reforms are rooted in a market-driven view of education – one that sees students as future workers, schools as training pipelines, and learning as a means to an end.
Is Erica Stanford really the driver behind these reforms – or simply the messenger? Is she a true neo-liberal in a blue jacket, or has she been captured by the neo-liberal think tanks and now tasked with implementing a pre-written neo-liberal agenda?
Here are a few features of the proposal that reflect the neo-liberal agenda in action:
1. Focus on Employability and Industry Alignment
The reforms place a heavy emphasis on aligning education with industry needs – especially through Vocational Education and Training (VET) subjects. The goal seems to be creating work-ready graduates, rather than well-rounded individuals.
2. Emphasis on Measurable Outcomes
The proposal favours standardised, easily assessed skills. It prioritises what can be measured over what truly matters – things like creativity, curiosity, or citizenship.
3. Reduced Flexibility
The current system allows students to choose from a wide range of standards. The new approach narrows those choices, imposing more uniformity and less room to personalise learning.
4. Superficial Equity Fixes
Yes, there are challenges with coherence and rigour under NCEA. But rather than investing in supports that meet diverse learners where they’re at, the response is to tighten achievement thresholds – raising the bar without building the bridge.
5. A Narrow Definition of Success
Perhaps most telling is the way these reforms frame success: as the achievement of a qualification. That’s the result, not the purpose, of education.
Compare that to Estonia, a global leader in education. Their upper secondary schools aim to “help students become creative, multi-talented, socially mature, and reliable citizens.” That’s a vision of education centred on people – not just productivity. Ironically, even Prime Minister Luxon has praised Estonia’s education system. But this proposal doesn’t bring us closer to that vision – it pulls us further away.
We’ve seen this ideology before. Charter schools. Performance pay. Standardised testing. Reforms that treat education like a business. They promise efficiency, accountability, and results – but often deliver disengagement, inequality, and burnout.
So we have to ask: who is this really for? Who benefits from these changes? And who is being left behind?
Because education isn’t just about qualifications. It’s about shaping minds, nurturing confidence, and creating communities where everyone can thrive.
We owe it to our young people to offer more than a narrow path to a job. We owe them an education that sees their potential – not just their productivity.
Lappies
Doing to NCEA what Seymour did to school lunches – have a marmite sandwich.
Finland is known to have the best education system in the world. So I looked it up
All schooling is public, no fees whatsoever, and students and teachers liase with architects in the design of schools. Schools have plenty of resources and nourishing food.
Teachers all have a Masters degree and undergo rigorous training- it is a tough training course and teachers are highly respected in Finland.
The first 6 years, the child has the same teacher.
There are NO tests or exams. No standards or benchmarks. Just one exam at the end for university entrance.
Learning is what is done- hands on discovery and enquiry. The teachers are TRUSTED to just get on with the job.
Homework is minimal.
It seems to me Erica and her Structured learning/ Crimson buddies are doing everything wrong. This government are turning our kids into robots and stifling creativity.
I've never been able to work out why any government of any flavor doesn't look round the world for who's doing best in the given problem/situation and use that, fucking idjits the lot of mm
Because they want policy-based evidence to support vibes and reckons, not evidence-based policy. Finland's education system is one example. Scandinavian prison models are another.
They have their mega rich donor to satisfy
Because private providers don't get rich when we have excellent State education.
Neither Stanford nor that so called "expert"* in education Jamie Beaton have any experience in education other than university education. They have no knowledge of educational theory or practice other than having sat in a classroom, nor what a successful pedagogue looks like. Yet here they are, preparing to rip up years of tried and tested teaching practice because they think they know best.
Just typical behaviour from this arrogant and unthinking government. A government which cannot see further than bending to the wishes of their mates.
* Definition of "expert" – "x" is the unknown quantity, and "spurt" is a drip under pressure
Jamie sounds like Musk. Never been a teacher, like all of Stanford's advisors. Act muppets. I would. hate my kids to go through his education system They'd turn out to be little bots like him.; full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
There are real issues with kids getting directed into dead-end standards so that the school can show better pass rates. But narrowing the curriculum and making it harder to pass will hit those kids even harder because they'll end up with no qualifications rather than being able to show competence in some things.
And there were issues with some subject getting harder and harder because more and more of the weaker students weren't taking them and the increasingly enriched group were achieving at higher and higher levels e.g. maths exam standards.
But overall, I think NCEA turned out more well rounded students – more critical in their thinking and more accepting of different viewpoints.
Excellent post and you put the torch light on the ideological bias of the reform proposals.
The corresponding Government press release is littered with neoliberal dogma. Here are just three quotes:
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/replacing-ncea-transform-secondary-education
As always, ideological dogma is narrow-minded, selective, and misleading.
There’s not a single reference to social and inter-personal skills and the place & role young people are playing in contemporary society and the world.
This is not the only critical omission. In the whole NCEA Discussion Document there’s not a single reference to gen-AI, which shows how out of touch and unrealistic it is.
https://web-assets.education.govt.nz/s3fs-public/2025-08/NCEA%20Discussion%20Document%202025_web%206Aug.pdf
The way this Government is thinking about AI and technology is amateur and doesn’t bode well for the future of NZ.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/569232/government-should-match-enthusiasm-for-ai-with-investment-in-teachers-principal
On the one hand, they ban technology from classrooms, they believe that AI is the silver bullet for growth, but they have no idea how to reform NCEA except to repeal & replace it with old-school stuff.
A well balanced contribution thanks DMK.
I believe that Clarence Beeby would be saddened by the back to basics narrowed Stanford way of commanding retrograde plans.
Yes 100% ianmac. Imo National generally throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That old system was designed when there was full employment. Leave school at 15 and avoid the 50% pass fail rate of SC in year 11.
Ranking 50% SC, some off to a job or tech. 50% UE, some off to a job or tech. How many prepared for university in year 13?
Most employers provided training on the job, including the public service (no need for a degree back then) who provided options for tertiary study after employment.
Now its study and acquire debt, or the employer takes on a skilled migrant (or one who trains here while workingo gain residence).
I support the end of NCEA 1.
There is no purpose to an achievement standard at that level. There it should be an attainment standard, to inform employers and tech training providers what the person can do/skills etc. And in all areas … rather than just "a Maths and English" block" on access to year 12 courses. That is a return to the SC fail and exclusion era.
Sure most students can have their Maths and English access to Year 12 courses (and skip attainment standards as irrelevant to their own course plan). That ends most of the year 11 marking/assessment.
But other students (doing it via attainment standards) should be able to access year 12 subjects they are competent in while continuing with "Maths and English (attainment required standard)".
Maybe the Minister needs to talk to employers and the vocation education Ministers some more about their pathways.
As for the year 12 and year 13, the return to the middle class proof of meritocracy/entitlement via the 4/5 subject straitjacket (not so student centred), I'll leave it to another elaborate on the problems with that.
Young people leaving school when they reached their level of ability or interest wasn't restricted to times of deliberate policies of full employment, and failing them is certainly easy but it's not going to solve that issue.
ToI didn't like NCEA when it first came out and I don't like all of it now, but I've concluded ncea1 is better than school certificate.
If anything, ironically, it's 2 and 3 that should be tightened. Those graduates are becoming more academic than the 1s, IMHO. Ncea needs to be flexible enough to be a standard for all kids, including those that will move on to the workforce and build their careers despite being less academic or even phobic about a 3hour exam situation.
I'm less physical, not really cranial, but I got through with hard work. But I would have failed from the outset if my school cert exam was taking apart an engine, finding the fault and reassembling it, or cutting the parts and making a lounge suite. That said, all students need to be able to write to a middle level and understand maths enough to make a household budget or cut materials.
Having a child of my own made me realize kids who failed school certificate (and the rule was only the top half would pass) didn't mean you dont know stuff, it means you can't compete in a reading/writing/memory/stress test, but that's no reason to be written off completely at 15.
I do like the idea of external assessment or at least an independent audit of the assessment, but if you are going to make the system academically tighter, do it at the academic levels, not where you're going to disenfranchise half the population before they even leave school.
Geez. I didnt realise exactly how close was the relationship of Crimson-head Beaton to the sir Key family? With all the present push push go Crimson….It kinda made my spidey sense go..off.
And of course there is this…
The focus on the removal of NCEA L1 is being used to conflate external validation of NZ learners outcomes relative to other comparable countries with the broader outcomes of learning and development of learners and what system we use to achieve positive outcomes that prepare youth for their future success.
STEM subjects are useful in that they provide an objective way to compare NZ performance (with NCEA being the delivery/assessment methodology) with other countries. In NZ's case there are international benchmarks for Y10 (15 year olds) across OECD countries.
The news isn't great, but not all bad. According to PISA (2022) and TIMMS (2023) which are international standardised tests, focussing on Maths and Science, NZ is somewhere in the middle of OECD countries. However, we continue to trend downwards.
The major issue is that NZ's at risk groups, with the highest Deprivation Index weighting, are achieving least and decreasing their outcomes quickly. This is a 12+ year trend.
So our Education system is OK for most but failing the most vulnerable. This is not great when we have accelerating automation forecast to significantly reduce untrained jobs and AI efficiencies poised to reduce jobs even further and faster than we expect.
Perhaps the takeaway from this situation is that if NZ wants to compete globally we need to be achieving higher than current outcomes and have them comparatively assessed against standardised tests. Our economic wellbeing is based on NZ competing in a global market, and do that we need to have people with higher core STEM skills.
We also need to radically reassess how we strategically address the coming changes to the nature and types of employment for our future generations. I am in favour of change but believe we need to also expose our learners to external assessments to ensure our education system outcomes are valid, of a high standard and equip our learners for successful futures be those in Industry, Services or Professions.
That is really the point. Rather than rigidly sticking to a 19th century prescription designed for mass production or local services we should be targeting flexibility and adaptability. Focusing heavily on current employment prospects is a mugs game. If it is a skillset in demand now, then the history of the last 66 years is that it will be obsolete or markedly reduced long before you hit retirement.
Where are the permanent accounting clerks, bookkeepers, factory process worker, unskilled farm labourer, fencers, typist, barman and many other jobs that were so much part of our economy when I was in my 20s. And those were just the ones I’d been involved in by the time I was 22. The surviving ones are tiny or have morphed into pretty specialist operations.
FFS: I’m a semi-retired software engineer. This was a skillset that barely existed in 1959 when I was born, wasn’t a large when I let secondary school in 1976, and went off for a year in factory jobs, farming and the army before going (reluctantly) to uni.
My entire primary, intermediate, and secondary school was filled with reports of “could do better”. School was (frankly) just boring. I read, played sport, worked night shift after age 15, and had appalling attendance records. I also took courses out of interest – mostly languages, arts or social with minimal maths or science. Somehow then I did a BSc in earth sciences followed by an MBA in operations and wound up writing code for 35 years after dropping out of doing management.
I picked up programming by just reading and a few partial courses. These days I wouldn’t even do teh latetr. That was what we built the web for.
Like almost everyone I know from my era, what I did after school was mostly influenced by their general interests and my disposition towards adaptability.
Offhand I can only think of a handful who are in professions that even close to what they trained for. Most of those were in professions that I’d consider have a high probability of being automated out of existence or diminished over the next few decades. Including GPs, solicitors, ‘subject’ secondary school teachers, road workers turning signs, petrol station attendants …
Trying to predict the future employment needs is a mugs game. Only dimwits with limited understanding of the history of employment markets like Stanford would try.
NCEA from what I have seen of it, mostly assisting young family members, is a system designed to facilitate making decisions and selecting subjects and topics of interest. Those are the
That doesn’t sound like something targeted at the needs of student futures. It sounds like something a moron manager would want so that they could concentrate measuring on key performance indicators, rather than getting actual bottom-line and/or strategic outcomes.
You would not believe the number of companies that I have seen fail because of that bean counter focus. Only incompetent managers (and politicians) concentrate so much on bean counting or external validation like that.
I’ve been in the tech industry for 12 years, and the technology I work with today hadn’t even started development when I began: let alone when I was at university or school.
That’s how fast things move.
I’m reasonably sure my 2-year-old daughter will end up working in a job that doesn’t even exist yet by the time she enters the workforce.
It really puts into perspective how important it is to focus on adaptability, learning how to learn, and staying curious. Because the tools and roles will keep changing, but those foundations will always be relevant.
Although your comment is also slanted towards only the economic benefits and (global) competitiveness of education in NZ, it does make a few points that merit a response.
There’s a strong argument that one must have a strong foundational knowledge to be able to use gen-AI based on LLMs well (i.e., productively, efficiently, effectively, ethically, wisely, et cetera).
The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI [one of the co-authors is Michael Johnston of New Zealand Initiative who has lobbied hard to scrap NCEA, among other things]
Perhaps or perhaps not. The singular focus on economic outcomes wrongly ignores the huge impact gen-AI already has on social, political, and personal interactions and engagement. I think that education has an important formative role & responsibility in giving all people appropriate knowledge & skills rather than letting them figure it out by and among themselves.
STEM(M) skills only? Sounds like you’re in favour of defunding Humanities and Social Sciences by the Marsden Fund and in tertiary institutions. Many so-called STEM skills can and will be replaced, partially or completely, by AI.
Spoken like a hammer who only sees nails.
On that note, AI carries a huge risk of entrenching existing biases and inequities but perhaps that’s the intention of some or a price they’re more than willing to pay for growth, profit, production, and economic prosperity for middle-class and, of course, the oligarchic elite who increasingly run the show and tilt the playing field in their favour.
I'm concerned about the mixed messages we are giving young people.
The signal to students is that you may not use AI in your learning (particularly with renewed emphasis on externals), but we will use AI to assess you in order to cut costs.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/08/05/ai-will-aid-with-ncea-replacement-education-minister-says/
Education is one area that all of us can have an opinion on because we have experienced the system first hand. In the 2000 PISA survey NZ was third in maths and reading out of 41 countries. While PISA scores have trended unstoppably downward, pass marks for NCEA have rapidly increased. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FlrwTqqaUAQbyOF?format=png&name=small
Something needs to change. We were doing something right and now we're not. I'm no educational expert but the differences between when I went to school in the 60's and 70's that I can remember are:
– There was a big emphasis on reading, spelling and maths.
– There was virtually no truancy
-The classes were streamed
– We were tested frequently to ensure understanding
-Students were generally respectful and classes quiet
-There were often incentives for achievement.
I would add;
Children often started school with a few of the basics sorted, counting, alphabet, colours etc. Because back in our day, we often had a parent at home engaging with the child.
Class sizes.
The massive increase of youth with various learning difficulties that range from mild to serious, coupled with the underfunding of support for said children.
– massive middle class, less extremes of inequality
– no homelessness
– no food banks
– no rogernomics
Postwar governments held to Keynesian economics and spending for the public good.
The elites in smoky clubs hated that and have worked relentlessly to rip that social contract apart.
There's no shortage of racism in this policy, and the rest of the NACT platform. The NCEA was developed to give different pathways to children with different interests and abilities.
NACT are taking us back to the abusive British factory system that manufactures good little soldiers ready to die for king and country.
In the 1960s and 1970s we had full employment and we were building a nation with workers of all skill levels. We can still do that. It's a government choice to abandon education and steal from the future.
Is anyone mentioning the teachers? The worst thing we have done to teaching in NZ is to license all manner of teacher training providers without rigorously checking up on their quality. This happened way back in the 1990s and the resulting poor results from assessment started coming through very quickly.
I’ve seen teachers working who have limited knowledge to pass on and limited teaching skills. Result is limited learning by children. How those teachers passed their own assessments in their training is beyond me. So we could start there by only certificating really well qualified and knowledgeable people, and tuning up the providers. And let me say this is not the teachers' fault. They were encouraged into the field by all those people out there who for years have said that anyone can teach, you don’t have to be an expert….
"And the language she uses paints past practice as broken and ineffective, clearing the way for shiny new reforms – regardless of their actual merit." In my experience this scorched-earth approach is the classic introduction to an academic thesis – 'Up until now it was believed that … but now we have found that …" What happened to academics standing on the shoulders of giants?
As a designer I am all for critiquing the status-quo in the cause of continuous improvement. Ka mua ka muri – walking backwards to the future – is a means of building on the best foundations of the past. The polarised pendulum is obviously flawed – structured learning suits some children, self-directed discovery suits others. Many will benefit from elements of both approaches. We don't need to make one bad to justify the other.
Learning is a life-long enrichment of our lives. Being work-ready is a useful way of achieving the mana in mahi that enables the capacity to keep growing.
This is another case of individuals giving advice to teachers, individuals who have no idea what the realities are of our learners. Individuals who are giving privilege to a few who are already doing well and come from success families and have the resources to do extremely well in life.
NCEA is not perfect but is is far better than school certificate and bursary. A scale system based on a bell curve average. Where schools who had a higher average would succeed.
NCEA is a more level playing field where you compete with yourself. Unfortunately there is so much misinformation out there.
Thank you for your blog very insightful and hopefully more people hear both sides of the story.