The plan to establish an advisory group to review the curriculum refresh work done to date was quickly actioned by Minister Stanford when she took office in November 2023. The Ministry attempted to make recommendations about its scope and makeup, but these were, in the main, unsuccessful, with the Minister being proactive in providing the Ministry with “feedback” on their recommendations.

As documented in my initial report into the MAG, this process was fraught, and the tussle is one that Stanford won.

Take, for example, the makeup of the MAG. In a Ministerial Briefing Note dated 4 December, 2023 (link since deleted) the Ministry provides a list of twelve names for the MAG. Four of those make the final cut: Michael Johnston (who is made chair by Stanford, ignoring the Ministry’s recommendation), Christine Braid, Fiona Ell, and James Chapman. Braid, Ell, and Chapman had been involved in the refresh work done under the previous Government.

That means there were eight appointees to the MAG who owed their appointment to Minister Stanford. Elizabeth Rata is one of them. Melissa Derby is another.

While there is no requirement for an advisory group to be representative, this one is particularly narrow in its perspective: eight of the twelve had collaborated or worked with Michael Johnston previously, some of them often, either in academic research, think tanks, formalised ‘forums’ (eg, Open Inquiry) or other education advocacy work (eg, webinars such as this one): Elizabeth Rata, Melissa Derby, Amy Tan, Iain Taylor, Christine Braid, James Chapman and Helen Walls.

This tendency to surround herself with the like-minded is a pattern of Minister Stanford’s tenure. For another example, see the NCEA Professional Advisory Group. It is a tactic that lends itself to the projection of confident certainty, but closes her off to the diversity of thought that supports the good decision-making that effective governance requires.

Stanford is actively choosing to surround herself with people, like Rata, who have a stated aim of ending decolonisation’s success, and who, like Derby, argue that structural racism doesn’t exist. The kind of certainty they are leading her to, a certainty she is actively choosing to have reinforced by the voices she surrounds herself with, is leading her to reassert and embed a worldview that favours how we were.