Steve Baron: The Participation Trophy Generation

When my kids were at school, they often came home from sports day with medals. Lovely, I thought—until I realised they hadn’t won anything. They hadn’t come first, second, or third. They’d simply shown up. Everyone got a medal. Everyone was “special.” Nobody lost, which meant nobody really won either.

At the time, I wondered what message we were sending. If you get rewarded regardless of effort or result, why bother trying? What happens when these kids hit the real world, where performance actually matters? It turns out that the participation trophy mentality didn’t stay on the sports field. Over the following decades, it infected our entire education system.

In August 2025, the bill came due. The government proposed replacing all three levels of NCEA with entirely new qualifications. Not just tweaking it. Not reforming around the edges. Replacing the whole system. The reason? Internal assessments have become so inflated that students are achieving high grades while New Zealand’s PISA scores in maths, science, and reading have been steadily declining since 2000. We’ve created a system where grades keep rising, but actual learning keeps falling. Excellence grades are handed out while our actual performance slides backwards.

Welcome to the logical conclusion of the participation trophy generation.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Here’s what we know about grade inflation: NCEA pass rates have been climbing for years, particularly in internal assessments marked by schools themselves. Yet New Zealand’s performance in international testing has been on a downward trajectory since 2000—even before NCEA was fully introduced. Our PISA scores in maths, science, and reading have dropped consistently over two decades. During much of that same period, NCEA grades climbed. When test scores fall while qualification rates rise, something’s not adding up.

This is grade inflation in action. When an Excellence grade in 2024 represents less actual knowledge than an Excellence grade did in 2010, the qualification becomes worthless. It’s like monetary inflation—what used to buy you something valuable now buys you less. Students end up with credentials that don’t reflect their actual capabilities, and everyone loses out.

The evidence is everywhere. Universities have been steadily increasing their guaranteed entry scores for NCEA Level 3 students. The University of Auckland lifted its Bachelor of Arts entry requirement from 120 credits in 2010 to 150 in 2017. Why? Because students arriving with the same qualification weren’t actually at the same standard anymore.

Post-COVID, learning was significantly disrupted through lockdowns and school closures, with some arguing students lost up to six months of learning. But grades? They stayed remarkably buoyant. How does that add up? It doesn’t—unless you’re more worried about protecting feelings than measuring reality.

The Workplace Reality

Now here’s where it gets personal for young New Zealanders. A 2025 Deloitte survey found that 64% of Gen Z in New Zealand are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s not just above the global average—it’s significantly worse. And 33% of our Gen Z cite their job as a major source of anxiety.

Think about that. Nearly two-thirds are financially stretched, and a third are stressed about work. These aren’t lazy kids. These are young people who’ve been told their whole lives that they’re excellent, that they’re achieving, that they’re on track. Then they hit the workforce and discover that showing up isn’t enough. Their credentials, earned through a system more focused on self-esteem than standards, don’t translate to the security they expected.

The disconnect is brutal, and it’s unfair—not because employers are cruel, but because we’ve lied to these kids about what they’d achieved.

The Self-Esteem Fallacy

Here’s where I’ll cop criticism: “But Steve, we need to protect children’s self-esteem!” Do we? Because the evidence suggests we’re doing the exact opposite.

False confidence is more damaging than honest feedback. When you tell a student they’re excellent at something they’re struggling with, you’re not building them up—you’re setting them up for a fall. Real confidence comes from genuine achievement, from tackling actual challenges, from learning that failure is feedback, not fatal.

Internal assessments where pass rates keep climbing despite falling international performance don’t prepare students for reality. They prepare them for disappointment. Every participation trophy handed out for mediocre work teaches kids that achievement is meaningless. It doesn’t build self-esteem—it builds entitlement wrapped in anxiety.

We’ve created a generation that expects praise for attendance. And when the real world applies different standards, they’re shocked, stressed, and struggling financially.

A Way Forward

So what do we do? First, we stop pretending that grade inflation is kindness. It’s not. It’s cowardice dressed up as compassion. We’re failing our kids because we’re too afraid to be honest with them.

The government’s proposal to replace NCEA with clearer, more rigorous qualifications is a necessary step. A system that gives students actual marks out of 100, that requires them to pass multiple subjects, that makes English and Maths compulsory in Year 11—these aren’t punitive measures. They’re honest ones.

But qualifications alone won’t fix this. We need a fundamental shift in how we approach education and child-rearing. We need to teach our children that struggle is part of learning, that failure is temporary, and that genuine achievement—earned through effort and meeting real standards—feels different and better than hollow praise.

I’ve never been particularly good at anything, but I improved at what I needed to because I refused to quit. That resilience, that determination to keep going despite setbacks—that’s what we should be instilling in our kids. Not false confidence based on inflated grades, but real grit built through honest feedback and perseverance.

Parents need to stop demanding that their child be treated as special. Your child matters enormously to you, as they should. But they’re not exceptional simply for existing. If we want to raise exceptional humans, we need to let them face challenges, experience failure, learn from mistakes, and genuinely achieve.

Merit-based systems should reward both effort and results. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging hard work, but we can’t confuse effort with achievement. Both matter. Both deserve recognition. But they’re not interchangeable.

The Bottom Line

We’re not helping kids by lying to them about their abilities. We’re setting them up to fail in a world that demands real competence. The choice is ours: continue down this path and watch another generation struggle, or have the courage to tell the truth and teach real resilience.

This isn’t about being cruel. It’s about being honest. It’s about preparing young people for the world as it is, not as we wish it were. It’s about giving them resilience, realistic self-assessment, genuine standards to meet, and the tools they need to actually succeed—not just accumulate credits.

The NCEA crisis should be our wake-up call. We’ve spent decades prioritising feelings over competence, flexibility over rigour, self-esteem over standards. The results are in, and they’re not good. Our kids are stressed, stretched, and struggling—not because we’ve been too hard on them, but because we haven’t been honest with them.

We owe them better. We owe them the truth, appropriate challenges, high standards, and the genuine support they need to become capable, resilient adults who can thrive in the real world. The question is: do we have the courage to change course?

Because right now, we’re handing out participation trophies while our kids lose the race.

Steve Baron is a New Zealand-based political commentator and author. He holds a BA with a double major in Economics and Political Science from the University of Waikato and an Honours Degree in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington. A former businessman in the advertising industry, he founded the political lobby group Better Democracy NZ. https://stevebaron.co.nz