Why I Signed the NCEA Petition

By Becca Thomas

People sign petitions for all sorts of reasons.

Some sign because they’re angry.
Some because they’re afraid.
Some because they’re tired of shouting into the void.

But mostly, people sign petitions because they still believe in something better.

Because even when the system feels too big to fight, adding your name feels like saying —
I see what’s happening, and I don’t agree.

I am still here. Still watching. Still resisting.

It’s not just a signature. It’s a refusal.

A refusal to stay silent.
A refusal to be complicit.
A refusal to let someone else rewrite the future without us.

I signed because I’ve seen what happens when education is used as a filter

I grew up in a country that turned schooling into a sorting system — rigid, relentless, unforgiving.

By the time you were 11, the trajectory of your life had already been mapped out.

Pass or fail.
University or trades.
Leadership or labour.

And the label stayed with you.

Long after the exams. Long after the school gates. Even at 50, people still carry the shame of failing at school.

That is not a flaw in the system — that is the system.
It was designed to do exactly that.
To decide who rises, and who serves.

I signed because for a moment, Aotearoa was doing something different

NCEA, in all its imperfection, was never meant to be just another qualification.
It was meant to be a system that could wrap around diverse learners. That could acknowledge different kinds of brilliance. That could say:
You don’t have to fit the box — we can redesign the box.

And it did.

Sometimes clumsily.

Sometimes beautifully.

My sons are living proof of that.

One neurodivergent, likely autistic. The other with introverted ADHD and likely dyslexia.

They built their own paths through school — paths that were flexible, creative, and human.

One earned excellence while barely attending school, working part-time, and surviving sensory overload.
The other climbed mountains, learned mechanics, surfed rips, cracked systems — and discovered who he was along the way.

They didn’t “game” the system.

They used the system. In the way it was intended.

And — they didn’t feel like failures.

They left school feeling like they succeeded.
That’s not a loophole. That’s liberation.

I signed because what’s happening now is not about literacy or standards

It’s about control.

It’s about reversing the progress we’ve made toward equity.
It’s about removing Mātauranga Māori from the centre and putting whiteness back in charge.
It’s about rebuilding a system that sorts and labels, because those labels are useful to those in power.

Because if every child leaves school feeling strong, worthy, and full of possibility — who does the low-paid labour?
Who accepts “less than”?
Who stays quiet?

That’s the part no one wants to say out loud.

A truly equitable education system threatens the very foundations of colonial power.

I signed because I live in one of the largest Māori communities in the world

And I am proud of that.

This is not something to be managed, or mitigated.
It’s something to be treasured. Protected. Celebrated.

To hold within one nation the greatest population of Māori students in the world is not just extraordinary — it’s deeply precious.

Most normal countries would see the need to honour this — not commodify it for offshore buyers, not turn it into a tourism asset or marketing pitch.

It is a gift. A taonga.

It means that Aotearoa is not only the whenua where te reo Māori, tikanga, and mātauranga were first spoken into being — it’s the place where they continue to breathe, evolve, and lead.

Why wouldn’t you want to protect that?

Why wouldn’t you want an education system that ensures Māori success is not the exception, but the expectation?

Because here in Te Tai Tokerau, if you’re Māori, education has never been a success story.
Not systemically.

Not structurally.

And yet our tamariki show up.
They learn. They lead.
They carry the weight of a system — and they do it with mana.

To do nothing in this moment would be complicit.

We had the beginnings of something beautiful:

A curriculum co-designed with care.
A qualification that was starting to hold complexity.
A system with the potential for our most marginalised students to leave school with mana.
A system that let my sons walk away feeling they had succeeded.

We were finally heading in the right direction.

So yes, I signed

I signed as a mother.

I signed as an educator.

I signed because I’ve seen what it looks like when education liberates, rather than limits.

I signed because I want to live in a country where every child has a chance to thrive — not just survive.

But above all else,

I signed because I live in Aotearoa.

And this is our chance to choose something better.

From AEC - It has been a pleasure creating space for Becca to share this. We recommend checking out more of her work here: https://www.engaginglearningvoices.com/