The Purpose of These Pages
This book explains NCEA to you.
All of us grew up in a different secondary school system. It was dominated by School Certificate, University Entrance, Sixth Form Certificate and Bursary. Because we had been through it ourselves, we knew how it worked. We understood it. When our children went through it we knew what was happening and how the examinations worked. We could check up on them, help and support them.
But the secondary world has changed. Now the school qualification is NCEA; the National Certificate in Educational Achievement.
There is a whole new set of jargon to learn. Its hard to know what is important work at school and what is practice; what counts for NCEA and what does not.
How do we know what is happening and what its significance is? Do we just have to rely on our kids telling us? Do they understand it fully? Have they got it right? When your child says; “Don’t worry Mum, this doesn’t really count”, is this correct? When he says, “Dad, stop getting on my back, I can have another go if I stuff it up”. Is that true?
There has been a lot of publicity about NCEA. Often it is negative; people who don’t like it finding fault with it, politicians using in party political arguments, problems cropping up with the examinations.
It produces a sense of uncertainty about the NCEA which combined with a lack of familiarity with how it all works makes parents a little uncomfortable about the new system.
We have held meetings at school about NCEA and the parents who have attended have reached a better understanding of the new world of the NCEA and feel more positive about it.
These days we are all very busy and people can’t always come to evening meetings. So we have produced this booklet to help make the new world of NCEA clearer and to give parents advice about how to manage their children’s progress through the NCEA.
These pages are organised in three sections. You can reach all the pages from links on the Contenst page. The first describes how NCEA works everywhere in New Zealand. The second describes how the NCEA works at Kaipara and the third has information and advice to help you stay on top of child’s progress.
I hope it helps. Please let us know if you found these pages useful and if there are things you would like us to include in it.
John Grant
Principal
|
