Deputy chief executive of assessment Jann Marshall said NZQA has worked to reduce administrative barriers, making it easier for eligible students to access support.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are also seeing increasing numbers of students with multiple or intersecting needs<\/a>, which suggests that case complexity is growing as well as overall application volumes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cFor example, the number of learners with both medical and learning needs increased from 1164 in 2023 to 2077 in 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n Secondary Principals\u2019 Council chairman Steve McCracken said schools were experiencing the rise firsthand.<\/p>\n \u201cSchools are seeing a mixture of things, all the way through from mental health and special reasons for seeking special assessment conditions, all the way through to being behind in terms of curriculum achievement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He said some students were still feeling the effects of disrupted learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing, hopefully, is the tail-end of this Covid-19<\/a> pattern where students who are going through these assessments at the moment were affected by home learning.\u201d<\/p>\n McCracken said the support needed could vary significantly between students, but schools were becoming better at identifying individual needs.<\/p>\n He said the increase was also putting pressure on schools, particularly during exam periods<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMany still have their Year 9s and 10s come the end-of-year assessments and examinations whilst their seniors are off on exams.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe juniors are still there doing classwork. So, if we\u2019re looking at individualised spacing and compartments for students to do their assessments, it takes up physical space as well as teacher resource and support resource.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not completely funded to look after them all individually. So, that has a financial implication as well as a human resource implication for us.\u201d<\/p>\n NZQA said the sustained growth in demand had created pressure on processing, operational capacity, budgets and systems.<\/p>\n Marshall said spending on Special Assessment Conditions for external assessments increased from about $1.15 million in 2019 to $2.37 million in 2024.<\/p>\n \u201cThe growth is being driven by higher application volumes, increasingly complex cases, greater use of higher-cost supports such as reader-writers and separate accommodation, and increases in staffing and contractor costs,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n NZQA said the support system would remain as NCEA changes<\/a>, although demand was expected to shift as the new qualification structure<\/a> was introduced.<\/p>\n Marshall said the removal of NCEA Level 1 in 2028 was expected to reduce demand in the short term, before increasing again as more students moved into Years 12 and 13 under the new system.<\/p>\n Jaime Cunningham is a Christchurch-based reporter with a focus on education and general news. She joined Newstalk ZB in 2023 after working as a sports reporter at the Christchurch Star.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deputy chief executive of assessment Jann Marshall said NZQA has worked to reduce administrative barriers, making it easier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[806,138,4190,4189,21661,56388,27308,134,5838,11285,1885,130,36089,5971,32295,9812,111,139,69,9478,801,3767,1886,27561,102],"class_list":["post-538725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-as","tag-business","tag-demand","tag-driving","tag-exam","tag-exams","tag-extra","tag-health","tag-help","tag-learning","tag-mental","tag-more","tag-ncea","tag-need","tag-needing","tag-needs","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-requests","tag-rising","tag-students","tag-support","tag-triple","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}