Education Minister Hon Steve Maharey hosted a launch of the NCEA 2006 exam season at Parliament on 16 November. Secondary school principals and teachers, NZQA Board members and staff, tertiary providers and media representatives attended.

Here the Minister, NZQA Deputy Chief Executive Qualifications Bali Haque and Secretary for Education Karen Sewell are in discussion after the speeches.

The sweat is close to drying on the brows of more than 136,000 exam candidates but the work of marking a total of 1.9 million standards continues.

Around 2000 markers will complete their work by Christmas and the results will reach candidates between 17 and 24 January.

As ever, the process is a huge logistical challenge but one NZQA completes each year, with the major assistance of teachers around the country and a team of 4,600 exam supervisors and 1,920 markers.

This year, exams started a week later than last year but results should be with students about a week earlier – between 17 and 25 January.

Deputy Chief Executive Qualifications Bali Haque paid credit to the efforts of those involved.

"I know that teachers put in a huge amount of effort preparing their students for this important part of the year and, of course, I hope the students put in an equally big effort preparing.

For the exam season more than 500,000 personalised exam packs were sent to 405 designated exam centres. Plans were in place if candidates could not reach a particular centre with 400,000 additional papers printed for contingencies.

Mr Haque said NZQA's focus was to ensure exam candidates had the opportunity to perform to the best of their abilities during exams.

"Then we will focus on ensuring that the marking process runs smoothly."

The total number of candidates who entered the NCEA exams were:

• 70,489 candidates at level 1
• 52,943 at level 2
• 30,635 at level 3
• In Scholarship, 7,705 candidates entered a total of 27 subjects.

The subjects with the most entries were:

• level 1 English had 50,206 candidates,
• level 1 Mathematics had 46,511
• level 1 Science had 39,529. At the other end of the scale, just 43 candidates entered level 3 Latin.