The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) was brought in about 20 years ago to replace School Certificate, University Entrance, Sixth Form Certificate and University Bursary. Scholarship exams remained.
The change was designed to allow recognition of more than just academic subjects.
There was also a concern the school qualifications were too dependent on external exams.
In the case of School Certificate, sat in year 11, a pupil who might have been working well and passing tests throughout the year but who failed the end-of-year exam would have no qualification to show for that year.
The School Cert exams had been around since the 1940s. Until the early 1990s they were set up so raw marks were scaled to ensure only a certain percentage of pupils passed each subject.
The NCEA, with its three-year levels, plethora of unit and achievement standards and mix of internal and external assessments, also involved a new way of recognising passes. It replaced percentages and A, B, C, D and E grades with achieved, merit, and excellence (and not achieved) grades and a number of credits for each standard.
Credits can be gained through internal assessments during the year and at end-of-year exams.
It has long been criticised.
Parents and prospective employers have found it hard to get their heads around it, the workload for teachers has been immense, and there are concerns the flexibility offered means a pupil can gather disparate credits which do not add up to a coherent core qualification.
There have been concerns too many pupils are turning up at universities without the required entry qualifications and having to undertake foundation studies before they start their tertiary study proper.
Officials are concerned at what they describe as the "increasingly problematic imbalance" between internal and external assessments. Last year only 22% of the results came from external exams.
The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the authenticity of internal assessments is also an issue.
Some changes have been made, including the recent introduction of online literacy and numeracy tests which must be passed in order to achieve NCEA.
But these have proved controversial because too many pupils are failing them, and the alternative of completing extra literacy and numeracy credits is only going to be available for a couple of years.
Some schools have opted out of offering the level 1 certificate in favour of other international qualifications.
Just how any revamp might be handled and when it might happen, is unclear.
But both Education Minister Erica Stanford and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon have been keen to emphasise it will not be tinkering, and all options will be on the table.
Reaching consensus on how the qualification system best accommodates those subjects which are not suited to exam assessment and ensures a diverse range of learners are catered for may not be easy.
Changes are coming thick and fast in the education sector and, as much as many might see the flaws in the existing set-up, enthusiasm for more major change now might be muted.
Women schoolteachers, who make up the majority of the post-primary workforce, will still be smarting after the scuppering of their previously lodged pay equity claim as a result of the controversial law change earlier this year.
Ms Stanford says whatever changes are made will need to be "very well communicated, very well staged and very well resourced".
Mr Luxon has stated: "We’re going to open it up and we’re going to fix it and do it once and do it right".
A bold claim, and one he will be hoping does not come back to haunt him.
