When Stanford took office, the Ministry’s briefing documents were keen to stress the re-balancing work that had been done to date, but warned against “centrally setting a highly detailed teaching programme”. To do so would be a “significant departure from evidence about the value of enabling and expecting the profession to respond to individual learners needs and interests”.

This position is still evident in early March, 2024. In the agenda for the Curriculum Deep Dive Session on 6 March, after detailing Stanford’s six point plan, the Ministry make the following point:

“there will be significant anxiety in the sector that there is an intent to narrow the curriculum and standardise teaching to such a degree that teachers and kaiako feel they cannot respond to their students’ needs. This includes their ability to design teaching and learning programmes that contextualise the national curriculum with contexts that are meaningful and engaging for their students or that matter to their local curriculum.”

What was the outcome, as directed by Stanford? Fidelity to the national curriculum was to be prioritised. And so the Ministry set to work “deliberately shifting away from the language of school or local curriculum”. This shift became a focus of the changes to the Education and Training Act, despite Ministry warnings it will impede schools in meeting their obligations to Te Tiriti, as local curriculum was how they were enabled to do so in the legislation.

But it wasn’t just the Ministry warning of the narrowing. ERO’s international panel of evaluators of the rewritten English and Maths curriculums raised it as an issue in September, 2024.

When evidence and advice is repeatedly ignored, a logical conclusion is that he narrowing is the point.

When it is Māori knowledge and support that is repeatedly erased, a logical conclusion is that one culture is being asserted over all others.

When the Minister says the being culturally responsive is misdiagnosing the problem, a logical conclusion is that Stanford has listened to Rata and is sympathetic to her mission to end decolonisation’s success.