National has this habit of attacking teachers.
It must resonate with its base because it is a common occurrance.
There appears to be two incentives, they want to attack the teacher’s union and they want to skewer the curriculum away from woke nonsense which is otherwise known as reality.
This term their behaviour has been particularly bad.
The politicisation of the school curriculum has been appalling. Overseas “experts” have been brought in and changes with a right wing bias have been rammed through against all reasoned advice.
And how else can you explain the removal of any explicit mention of “climate change” from material for use by students from the age of one to ten. They don’t want our kids to learn about the most pressing issue faced by humanity.
And how about this? Those Taxpayers Union dollars are clearly working.
They are referred to in the latest Social Studies School Curriculum.
From Aotearoa Educative Collective’s Substack:
The Ministry of Education has released the updated draft of The New Zealand Curriculum: Social Sciences Years 0–10 (August 2026), set for mandatory implementation starting in 2027. On page 30, under the Year 8 Civics and Society strand, sits an explicit reference to a specific political lobby group:
“The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union aims to influence government spending, through public campaigns, media engagement and direct lobbying.”
To understand why this is so alarming, we have to look at how social movements and civil society actors have historically been treated in New Zealand’s curriculum.
Normally, when political and economic actors are introduced in social studies, they are discussed broadly through their institutional, socio-political, and historical roles in a functioning democracy. For example, curricula have long covered the role of trade unions in advocating for worker protections, fair wages, and collective bargaining.
Previous curriculum documents have never explicitly named individual, active unions like E tū, FIRST Union, or the PSA. The focus was kept firmly on the conceptual framework of how organised labour operates within civil society, allowing teachers and students to analyse various real-world examples critically. Teachers may have in their classroom used a specific name when talking about a specific example, however, naming the Taxpayers’ Union in the curriculum itself breaks this long-standing convention entirely.
The Taxpayers’ Union is not a neutral public service organisation or a broad civic institution. It is an explicitly right-leaning political advocacy group, funded by private donors, designed to promote a specific fiscal and political ideology. It exists to selectively pick stories, follow specific interest avenues, and run public relations campaigns that directly align with its ideological agenda.
There are numerous other changes. The Waitangi Tribunal recently ruled that the government’s rewrite of the school curriculum was ideological, aided by people hostile to Māori knowledge, and breached multiple Treaty principles. It stated that the predetermined course to return to a one-size-fits-all style of education or “‘restoring balance’ to the teaching of Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories has effectively meant lessening the emphasis on local and Māori experiences (including the focus on the treaty itself) and recentring international events and ‘the histories and traditions of all New Zealand’s people’.”
And one could ask how did this all happen, and who is responsible, and reach for the Official Information Act in the hope that answers will be forthcoming.
One could do that but judging by what has happened this week one would be disappointed.
There was the revelation on Monday of this week that there had been an active campaign to NOT record any communication between Stanford’s office and the Ministry.
From Jamie Ensor at the Herald:
A senior official working on a secondary school curriculum update has been filmed telling staff not to put information in writing showing material had “gone backwards and forwards” with the Education Minister [Erica Stanford]’s office.
The leaked video, obtained exclusively by the Herald, shows Dr Catherine Law, also principal of Avonside Girls’ High School in Christchurch, reminding workers their comments are “OIA-able”.
“This is them helping us. What we do not need is anything in response in writing that shows that this stuff has gone backwards and forwards between them and us,” Law said.
Stanford came out with a bullshit response that she expected the law to be complied with. Yeah right.
Then things continued to spiral downward. The leaker confirmed that the instruction the video showed was not an isolated incident but also that ministry staff were repeatedly asked to delete the word “Aotearoa” and other Māori terms from draft curriculums. But, and this is a big but, the instructions were deliberately verbal and never put into writing.
Then an OIA request from last year surfaced seeking information about communications involving the Minister’s office about the curriculum rewrite and, you would never ever guess what happened, yup, the Minister’s office claimed the information did not exist.
From Russell Palmer at Radio New Zealand:
Paraparaumu College teacher Bevan Holloway last October asked for information about changes the minister requested to the draft Year 7-13 English curriculum in the week of 10 February 2025, including what those requested changes were.
In her signed response letter – delivered on 18 November, two weeks after the due date under the Act – Stanford confirmed she discussed the content of the curriculum with officials.
“My office does not hold any documentation about what changes were discussed in meetings following receipt of draft curricula in the week of 10 February. I am therefore refusing this part of your request under section 18(g) of the Act as this information is not held by my office,” she wrote.
“There is no ‘main advocate’ for changes. As the Minister of Education, I gave feedback on the drafts to officials at meetings.”
This is nonsense. Every meeting I have been to involving public servants someone is making notes about what is being discussed.
And if no one was making notes then this must have been a deliberate instruction. And it does not save the Minister, official information does not have to be in writing.
Again from the article:
Stanford told RNZ she was confident her office had complied with the OIA.
“The requestor did not ask for what feedback I gave. The request was for what changes were made by the ministry, which is not held by my office,” she said.
However, that conflicted with Holloway’s request: “you requested additional changes … I would like to know what those changes were“.
Someone with such a poor grasp of literacy should not be our Education Minister.
And changes to the Curriculum have been met with outrage from those in the know.
This RNZ article provides the details.
Maths teaching experts said the rewritten curriculum appeared to be politically motivated, contained errors, wasted schools’ previous investment, and included too many learning objectives. They warned this could overwhelm students and leave teachers insufficient time to implement the changes effectively.
Dance, drama, music, and visual arts organisations also complained.
From the article:
[t]he four arts teachers groups said they were “blindsided” by an initial indication of what would be in their curriculum which they said had “dealt us and the arts education community a significant blow”.
It said the curriculum would narrow and diminish arts teaching in primary schools and place drama and dance in a performing arts framework.
It said the New Zealand arts curriculum was highly-regarded overseas, but the indicated changes were not world-leading.
“This framework shows a total lack of understanding of our disciplines and undermines our associations’ mahi over many years. We also see no mention of indigenous arts knowledges here – what will this mean for our extensive Māori and Pasifika arts community? We fear that this arts curriculum will not look like an Aotearoa New Zealand curriculum,” the letter said.
And there was an earlier call from 650 primary school principals for Education Minister Erica Stanford to pause the curriculum reforms so there could be proper consultation and consideration.
Things boiled over at the recent International Confederation of Principals Convention.
She was invited to speak but was told clearly that this was an apolitical speech and a welcoming speech only.
This point was reinforced in subsequent correspondence where the non-political, welcoming intent of the speech was mentioned again.
But instead she chose to give a heavily political speech and reiterate her pet topic of structured literacy.
Teachers I know, and I know many, say that structured literaciy has always been something they reach for when appropriate. But there are a diversity of learning techniques and one solution does not suit everyone. For her to insist that she knows better than teachers and quote dodgy statistics is unforgivable.
As his her snub to the Principals Federation by not even mentioning them in her speech.
Education is a mess. And like too many other subjects it is being politicised in a highly damaging way.
The Ombudsman is investigating and I am sure that he will give a highly critical opinion which the Govbernment will ignore.
But this is dangerous and will damage education in the long term. Stanford should be ashamed.
This is indeed a concerning development, and one that Stanford is lucky hasn't gained the salience it should have.
Stanford appears to have turned this dynamic up to 11 in every portfolio she holds. But ultimately, the problem isn't necessarily her per se.
I've spent most of my career in the public service. I've seen this behaviour, and behaviour like it, many times across different agencies and councils, under governments and administrations of different political stripes.
The problem isn't that it happens. Politics is politics. Elected officials want to minimise political risk, control messaging and avoid embarrassing headlines. Senior public servants want to maintain the confidence of the elected officials they serve. There will always be pressure at that boundary.
The problem is that our system has remarkably few effective ways of pushing back when that pressure goes too far.
This feels like the final evolution of a trend that began in the later Clark years and accelerated under successive governments: the slow morphing of the key public-service principle of "no surprises" from "make sure your Minister isn't blindsided" into "under no circumstances create political risk for the elected officials above you."
Those are very different things.
The first is a perfectly defensible convention of responsible government. The second risks turning a politically neutral public service into an extension of ministerial political management.
And while it is good to see that at least some of our senior public servants subscribe to the Stringer Bell theory of politics ("is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?") it's considerably less funny when officials apparently start thinking about what records they should create based on whether those records might subsequently prove politically inconvenient.
The problem isn't that Stanford influenced the curriculum. She's the Minister. She's entitled to set policy, give direction and make political choices, and she should be publicly accountable for those choices.
The problem is a system in which avoiding evidence of that influence can apparently come to be understood as good public-service practice.
Stanford makes this worse. She appears unusually willing to push against these institutional boundaries. But those boundaries cannot depend upon having Ministers who politely choose not to test them.
Whatever the solution is, it needs to restore some countervailing force: public servants need to be able to give unwelcome advice, keep proper records, comply with the OIA and occasionally tell Ministers "no" without reasonably believing they're putting their careers or their agency's relationship with the Minister at risk.
Because Stanford will eventually leave office.
The incentives and institutional habits that made this possible existed before her and will remain after her. That's the part we should be considerably more worried about.
The only right winger thanking Nicki Hagar I expect
The actual desire to conduct this form of political management stems, IMHO, in the OIA itself.
Public servants aren't going to do actual hard policy thinking if they keep getting scorched every time they sketch something on a whiteboard.
Every decent idea gets essentially Primaried before it has a chance for a proper public test.
So I would amend the OIA to exclude all public servant drafting that isn't straight advice to the Minister or to Cabinet. Nothing wrong with doing more proactive releases of the decisions that went into a Cabinet paper or legislative draft.
But no one other than lobbyists, their industry masters, and an ever-prurient media social or otherwise are the winners from endless informal consultations.
They are the primary reason we see Ministers constantly smudging their fingerprints over ideas rather than some smoky Machievellian political management theory.
We have plenty of formal consultation processes set out in various legislations. That's enough.
Brilliant post. Stanford is clearly devious and untrustworthy. That makes her ideal leadership material for the Nats.
It's surprising, therefore, that she didn't make a challenge for Luxon's job at the recent leadership meeting. Only Chris Penk challenged. Nobody else. Stanford wouldn't lie about that would she?
She's also got a very short fuse! And for someone who's supposedly on the "liberal" side of the Natz, she's as ideologically narrow as Seymour.
But, as you say, ideal for the Natz leadership!
Do you really believe that Stanford didn't want to be the leader I bet she did, but her colleagues rejected her Penk was the dumb fall man.
It came out in the wash that Penk … is not smart.