It has come to our attention that the parameters around and the process for obtaining derived grades is outdated and counterintuitive — NZQA requires the reason for the application to have occurred after October 1st. We find this to be an unethical boundary to set and demand change to be established. In addition to this, guidelines for the application are vague and regularly contradict themselves; for example, ‘personal ongoing trauma’ both qualifies and disqualifies a student from accessing derived grades. Further information is inconsistent between the information provided by the NZQA website and school administration. We are seeking to ensure that the parameters on what results in a successful derived grade application are re-evaluated.

While it is noted on the NCEA website that under ‘exceptional circumstances’ applications for significant events that occurred after September 1st (as opposed to the general October 1st rule) will be considered, this is still an arbitrary date that puts a deadline of recovering from a range of trauma and conditions: something that is unreasonable to ask of a student. To top this off, the vague and often contradictory guidelines between the NZQA website and individual school handouts mean that students are often recommended to not bother with trying to apply, if the event affecting them is not ‘serious enough’. This is a subjective quality that is imprecise and allows for a higher rate of application rejections. This is unacceptable.

This petition is calling on Hon. Erica Stanford, our Minister for Education, to remove the significant event deadline of October/September 1st from the ‘Significant conditions or events’ section of NZQA’s derived grade policy. By removing the ‘event’ deadline, and reevaluating/creating new and coherent national guidelines for schools to distribute to students, important steps are taken to give all students applying for derived grades a fair assessment — through this, school learning and achievement can be made more accessible to all students within Aotearoa.

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