Highest secondary school qualification

School achievement is of high interest to central government, which has set a public service target to boost skills and employment through increasing educational achievement for New Zealanders.

Although these targets can be monitored using administrative data, census data has the advantage of indicating which population groups to target. This is because of the unique ability to cross- tabulate qualifications data from the census with other variables that are also collected in the census.

As well as being an output variable in its own right, highest secondary school qualification is used along with post-school qualification to derive highest qualification.

Our current recommendations relating to highest secondary school qualification

• We recommend that information on highest secondary school qualification be collected in the 2018 Census with no changes.

See our preliminary view of 2018 Census content (page 32) for a more detailed discussion on highest secondary school qualification information.

See 2013 Census information by variable for information on the highest secondary school qualification variable