Good news, Minister: the sector has spoken. Again.

There are moments in public policy when the stars align. A problem is identified, evidence is gathered, the people closest to the work are asked what they think and, remarkably, they give a reasonably clear answer.

We appear to have arrived at one of those moments.

The newly published NZCER Secondary teachers’ perspectives from the 2025 national survey has landed, and buried among its 80 pages is a finding that is awkwardly difficult to massage into something else: 71% of secondary teachers agree that NCEA should be improved rather than removed, with 45% strongly agreeing. The survey included 830 teachers from 126 schools, with responses broadly representative by school Equity Index, area and region.

Not 71% saying NCEA is perfect. Not 71% demanding that we lovingly preserve every credit-counting quirk, every labyrinthine standard and every feature of a qualification that has accumulated twenty years of educational barnacles.

Seventy-one percent saying, quite simply, improve it rather than remove it.

This may sound strangely familiar.

Almost a year ago, the Aotearoa Educators Collective launched a petition called Save NCEA: Strengthen, Don’t Replace It. Its argument was hardly revolutionary. NCEA has problems. Fix them. Align it properly with the new senior curriculum. Review the standards. Improve coherence. Address credit accumulation. Retain the flexibility that allows schools to respond to different learners and different pathways. Do the difficult work of improving something rather than the considerably more expensive work of demolishing it and starting again.

At the time of writing, that petition has 7,472 signatures. Its central request remains that the Government stop the replacement process and instead work with educators, students, whānau and industry to strengthen and future-proof NCEA.

It turns out this was not merely the fever dream of a few nostalgic NCEA enthusiasts.

NZCER asked teachers. The teachers answered. And they did not stop at 71%.

Sixty-eight percent said they were concerned the proposed replacement would limit learning opportunities and pathways for students in their schools. Only 24% agreed that the proposed Year 12 and Year 13 qualifications were heading in the right direction, while 44% disagreed. Perhaps most concerningly, only 16% thought the proposed changes would reduce existing inequities in student outcomes, compared with 54% who disagreed.

The qualitative comments are equally difficult to misunderstand. One teacher described the reform as being “‘done to’ rather than ‘done with’”. Another, after acknowledging some of NCEA’s shortcomings, asked the remarkably sensible question: “why not just modify the NCEA?”

There is, of course, a legitimate case for reform. The Government has argued that NCEA can lack coherence, that its flexibility can allow students to accumulate unrelated credits and that qualifications should communicate more clearly what students know and can do. Teachers themselves identified some of those problems in the NZCER survey. This is not an argument for freezing NCEA in amber circa 2025.

It is an argument about what we do next.

Because there is an important distinction between identifying problems with a qualification and demonstrating that those problems require an entirely new qualification system. The NZCER findings suggest that classroom teachers, who will eventually have to teach the curriculum, interpret the standards, design programmes, assess students and explain the resulting qualifications to whānau, are far from convinced that replacement is the answer.

Which brings us to one of the Minister of Education’s favourite and, in principle, entirely admirable themes: listening to the sector.

In October last year, when curriculum implementation timelines were changed, Erica Stanford said: “We’ve heard from the sector and we’ve listened.” She went further, saying the Government was “listening to principals’ and teachers’ needs”. (The Beehive)

Excellent. Here is another opportunity.

Possibly an even better one, because this time nobody needs to organise a roundtable, commission another advisory group or undertake an extensive nationwide listening tour. NZCER has done the listening. The results have been tabulated. There are graphs. There are percentages. There is even a particularly helpful bar in Figure 15 showing 71% of respondents sitting on the “please improve the thing we already have” side of the ledger.

And kudos where kudos is due, in recent weeks we have heard both the Green’s Lawrence Xu-Nan state that they are committed to strengthening NCEA not replacing it, and similarly we have heard Labour’s Ginny Anderson state that if elected they would be open to doing similar. That is what listening looks like.

And the wider findings reinforce the message. Seventy-two percent of teachers disagreed that the curriculum changes were proceeding at an appropriate pace. Seventy-six percent disagreed that there had been sufficient engagement with the teaching profession. When teachers were asked what they would most like changed about their work, the number-one answer, selected by 71%, was reducing the pace of change or the number of initiatives happening at once.

One would have to work quite hard to interpret all of this as a cry for an additional national qualifications system to be designed, developed, trialled and implemented simultaneously. More importantly, changing course is still possible.

Yes, the Government has announced its intention to replace NCEA. But the Ministry itself describes the qualification work as being in its early design stages. In March it said the detailed design would now get underway, with the new system phased in from 2028: the Foundational Award first, followed by the Year 12 qualification in 2029 and Year 13 in 2030. (Ministry of Education)

Meanwhile, the Phase 5 Years 11–13 curriculum is still being finalised. Three major rounds of subject consultation have only just concluded, with the third closing on 3 August. The Ministry says all feedback will be considered before the final senior curriculum is published later this year. (New Zealand Curriculum)

This is therefore not a case of discovering halfway through implementation that the profession disagrees with the destination. We are still building the road.

There is an extraordinary opportunity here for the Minister to demonstrate what genuine consultation actually means. Consultation is not simply the process of asking people what they think before proceeding with the original plan. Nor is listening demonstrated by producing a summary of feedback and explaining why everyone who disagreed has unfortunately misunderstood the proposal.

Sometimes listening means changing your mind.

The Minister could take the NZCER findings seriously, act on the Phase 5 feedback now arriving from subject communities and pause the qualification replacement work. She could retain the strongest aspects of NCEA while addressing the concerns that prompted reform in the first place: coherence, consistency, curriculum alignment, credit accumulation, assessment load and the clarity of what a qualification represents.

She could even call it a strengthening programme. We promise not to complain about the branding.

There would be something politically refreshing about a Minister saying: “we proposed a substantial change, we consulted, we have now received strong independent evidence from the teachers who will have to make it work and we have adjusted our approach’.

Wouldn’t this be a great example of evidence-informed policymaking functioning more or less as advertised.

AEC said many months ago that the choice was not between the status quo and wholesale replacement. More than 7,000 people have since put their names behind that proposition. Now the NZCER national survey has reached much the same conclusion from a substantial sample of secondary teachers.

So perhaps the most radical education reform available to the Government in 2026 is also the simplest. Listen to them.

Strengthen NCEA. Don’t replace it.