Ten years ago, New Zealand completely revamped its senior school assessment system, bringing in three levels of the standards-based National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) at years 11, 12 and 13. The ‘benchmark’ qualification for school leavers became NCEA Level 2. The change to the new system was accompanied by a meteoric rise in the pass rates for senior school examinations. This was an expected element of the new system, as it assessed a “wider range of competencies” and was free from scaling whereby “only a certain number of students could pass each year”. The link between class, ethnicity and educational achievement is clearly established internationally through programmes such as PISA. New Zealand’s achievement gap is most easily viewed as a gap between Māori and Pasifika achievement and that of Pakeha (European New Zealanders). The New Zealand government has recently adopted a range of strategies to close that gap. In particular, it has put in place an ambitious ‘public service target’ that, by 2017, 85 percent of 18 year olds will have achieved NCEA level 2. The government’s rationale for this target is that those with NCEA Level 2 do much better in further education and employment than those without, and their risk factors for negative social outcomes are significantly reduced. Thus, arming more people with the qualification will improve outcomes for all. While the social mathematics involved in the policy may be problematic (education alone cannot solve social inequality, as the OECD points out), the goal is clear. As in the UK, the focus on ‘getting your NCEA’ has intensified significantly. New Zealand schools still have a significant proportion of young people who leave school before reaching the benchmark. Many of these are NEET (not in education, employment or training), who currently make up around 8% of 15-19 year olds. There have been youth training schemes for such young people for nearly 30 years, which have failed to improve opportunities overall. In 2012, the government realigned youth training into a ‘youth guarantee’ scheme, which offers free places in further education for young people to gain their NCEA level 2 or vocational equivalent. This paper will focus on the impact of this scheme on disadvantaged young people, using findings from a major research study conducted in 2014.

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