Looking at the Budget briefing last Thursday, I watched Education Minister Erica Stanford’s face light up as she announced the learning support funding increase. The emotion was genuine and reflective of something she should be proud of — $774 million over three years for students with additional needs. But as I sat there, I found myself thinking about another number: the 197 positions cut from Te Poutāhū, the Curriculum Centre, in April 2024.
The headline figures tell one story. Learning support gets a massive boost — and rightly so, given the crying need. In a pre-budget announcement, we also found out that something else teachers have been asking for had been granted — having their registration fees covered for three years, saving up to $550 each. These are good things.
But pause here and look at what patterns emerge when you track the dollars alongside the curriculum changes I’ve been documenting through my investigations.
Take, for instance, the maths textbook procurement. The $26.8 million flowing to offshore providers in year one, with similar amounts over the years two and three. What I uncovered in my investigations into this was Stanford’s documented relationship with Prime Maths — one of the four providers of the textbooks — stretching back nearly two years. It was a relationship where emails used the language that would later define the ‘Make it Count’ maths plan. That wasn’t a one-off. It was the template. Budget 2025 shows us this approach has become systematic.
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Professional development funding flows toward “structured approaches” — the same terminology the MAG championed despite its narrow evidence base that excludes other means and ways of learning. Assessment tools get resourced, but only those that align with standardised measures. The money follows a clear ideological path: toward compliance, toward commercial solutions, toward what can be measured and managed and claimed as effective by Stanford and the Government.
But what about what doesn’t get funded.
Where’s the investment in rebuilding the internal expertise this government dismantled? You would think that Te Poutāhū, The Curriculum Centre, would be the means through which the Ministry would provide educational leadership. After all, that in-house expertise is something that Singapore — a country whose education system Stanford repeatedly references as worthy of emulation — relies on this in-house approach.
But the Centre has been repeatedly bypassed, its work done instead by a small group of private, ideologically-aligned individuals. It now exists mainly as a rubber-stamping office, its role essential in giving an official sheen to procurement practices that favour private provision. The budget doesn’t restore its capacity. It doesn’t fund schools to develop contextual responses to curriculum. It removes funding for Kahui Ako. It doesn’t support the kind of professional autonomy that might challenge the narrow “science of learning” framework the MAG promoted.
Instead, we get what Ellen MacGregor-Reid called, in the December Select Committee session, the “evaluation of the use of resources”. To translate: compliance monitoring, not impact assessment. To be explicit: public money and Ministry resources now flow toward ensuring commercial products are used, not toward understanding whether they work.
Stanford has repeatedly boasted that she’s making things happen in education that no other Minister of Education has ever done, that (to steal a phrase from her boss) she’s laser focused on results. But what kind of results? Market penetration? Standardized test scores?
Because the results she’s so focused on aren’t the only ones an education system could, or even should, be orientated toward. What about the deeper democratically oriented education that helps young people think critically about their world? What about an education deeply rooted in culture and understanding others? What about the nurturing of creativity and the qualities that make us human that will be essential in age where machines have got the edge when it comes to knowledge? These objectives are still in the Education and Training Act, despite Stanford and the curriculum writing teams’ best attempts at ignoring them.
The budget choices reveal just how narrow this government’s definition of educational success is. It’s so narrow it’s neglectful. When the primary investment is in compliance systems and commercial products, education becomes a delivery mechanism rather than a site of inquiry. When funding flows toward predetermined approaches rather than supporting professional judgment, we’re not buying better education — we’re buying control. And we’re paying for it with our kid’s futures.
When budget decisions consistently favour commercial providers over internal capacity, when compliance takes precedence over pedagogical leadership, we’re watching the transformation of education from a public good into a market service. It’s a transformation that should alarm anyone who believes education should be a place where kids get to feel the power of community and democracy, not markets.
Feeling this too? Check out the Equip page on my website. There you’ll find a ‘Philosophical Audit’ — a free tool to check where your leadership practice sits in all “this”.
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Interested in learning more?
Download for free my report ‘Curriculum Overreach: How a special interest group took over the refresh of the New Zealand curriculum’.
Read on the blog:
Democracy Begins In The Classroom 