Josh Williams

But as I say, they're added on.

They have different eligibility, different funding, different administrative requirements.

And at the moment, only about 15% of our year 11 to 13 population access them.

No, and I mean, that's ultimately the parity of esteem problem that you hear about.

Although even the phrase parity of esteem pretends like there's two things, there's academic and there's vocational.

kind of reject that.

And honestly, where the situation's going now, I think, when we're talking about a shared curriculum that has curriculum subjects and industry subjects sitting within a shared curriculum, I think is very positive.

Look, every young person is on a trip to the workforce.

I was listening to a morning report this morning, listening to university students, many of whom needing to work in order to survive the experience of study.

And then, of course, are looking for jobs after their degree.

The same goes for every other student, including the seven out of 10 who are not going to degrees when they leave school.

So ultimately, I don't see it as a system of there's the curriculum over here and there's the world of work over here.

In fact, the world of work is where curriculum gets deployed.

I work out of an electrical workshop, skills, trades, trainings workshop here in Napier.

The trigonometry and algebra that our level threes are doing is way, way above my head.

A lot of those young people look like they might not have enjoyed calculus, and yet there they are, completely grasping calculus because they're doing it through the concepts of electrical work and electrotechnology.

So what we need is every young person to have exposure to those possibilities.

What we need is an effective ecosystem where more than just the 15% who can get a gateway place or a place in a trades academy can get experience, exposure, get some of those employability skills that serves them all in the end.

Certainly it was the case, as I say, that the flexibility of NCEA could be misused, that ultimately kids could come out with an NCEA qualification that was made up of an incoherent grab bag of things that didn't really add up to a purposeful direction or a set of foundation skills for employability.

I mean, coming to the other part of your question, though,