Loyal readers of the Initiative’s work will know there are more than a few problems with New Zealand’s secondary school qualification.

As Briar Lipson’s report released earlier this month showed, the system makes it rather too easy for students to be directed through ‘safe’ pathways to qualifications of little quality.

Part of the problem is that the system has been geared toward producing NCEA Level 2 qualifications with too little thought about just what they involve. And the thousands of possible pathways to an NCEA diploma make comparing student performance difficult.

That is not just a problem for parents trying to figure out how well their own children are doing in secondary school – something that looms for me far sooner than seems reasonable. It is also a problem for the system if we care about figuring out what makes for an effective school.

The measure of a school’s performance is the education it provides its students – NCEA pass rates are not enough. A fair assessment should account for each student’s starting point, because what students bring with them to the classroom matters too.

This necessarily starts with a decent measure of each student’s performance.

In Score! Transforming NCEA Data, released last week, Martine Udahemuka and I show how to build a better measure of student performance out of the crooked timber of NCEA results. Most of the credit must go to our erstwhile colleague, Dr Rachel Hodder, who slogged through the data mines at Statistics New Zealand and built the measure.

We use our measure of student performance to check whether the teaching profession has been attracting stronger or weaker recruits. We find that while the average performance of students choosing to train as primary school teachers has been lower than the average performance of students choosing other tertiary fields on our NCEA measure, that gap has declined over time. That is encouraging because more modern methods of teaching maths require stronger teachers.

New Zealand can and should make far better use of the education data held in the Integrated Data Infrastructure. Better measures of student performance can lead to better measures of school performance. Better measures of school performance can lead to communities better empowered to make sure all schools deliver for their students.

Our report is a start, but there is a long road yet ahead.