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NZEST Scholarship Programme Concludes

Sir John Graham, Chairman of NZEST, announces that the NZEST scholarship programme, which has run from 2004-2010, has now concluded.

NZEST has awarded 65 scholarships over the 7 years of its scholarship programme and details of the scholarship winners are available under "Winners" on the toolbar.

Therefore, the NZEST scholarships awarded in April 2011 will be the last scholarships to be awarded by the Trust – there will be no scholarships available for entry to university in 2012.

The Trust will now concentrate on funding research which will address key issues which could raise achievement levels in secondary education.

Below is the letter sent to secondary schools during the week of July 11, 2011 which details reasons for winding up the scholarship programme and focusing more on research. The original 1992 NZEST newsletter, referred to in the letter, which sets out the NZEST objectives is also shown below.

Letter to Schools, July 11, 2011

We are writing to inform you that 2011 will be the last year of the NZEST scholarship programme. The trust will not be awarding scholarships for 2012 entry to university study.

As you will know, when the national Scholarship examination was abolished in 1990, the New Zealand Education and Scholarship Trust was established to run an independent national scholarship examination from 1991-2003. This provided awards averaging a total of $75,000 annually to successful students. In addition, NZEST ran award ceremonies throughout the country generating widespread and significant publicity for top academic success. With the advent of the NZQA Scholarship examination in 2004, NZEST switched to awarding scholarships to top scholars selected on their external exam results from NZQA, CIE and/or IB, the winners to be attending a New Zealand university.

However, with the very generous awards from NZQA and the exponential increase in valuable scholarships from Universities now available to top scholars, the NZEST Trustees have decided that providing additional scholarships of $5,000 cannot be justified. For the list of scholarship winners announced in April, please refer to the NZEST website – www.nzest.ac.nz.

To give you some background history, I have enclosed the original NZEST newsletter dated February 1992. If you refer to the "Objectives of Trust", you will see that Objectives 1, 2 and 4 have been successfully accomplished as documented in previous paragraphs.

The Trustees now propose to advance the 3rd Objective of the Trust:

"To promote, sponsor or conduct research into examination syllabi and related curricular issues and all other matters relating to examination, academic achievement and scholarship generally in the education system of New Zealand."

To achieve this objective, NZEST will be inviting a representative group of secondary principals to meet and discuss topics relating to secondary education which would benefit from further research or investigation.

Thank you for your support of NZEST since 1991. We look forward to keeping you posted regarding the next stage as the Trust works to maintain the highest standards of academic performance throughout New Zealand.