Our official curriculum is once again a site of major ideological differences in Aotearoa. We have been here before, of course — many times — but whether today’s political and curriculum policy actors have learned from our history of attempted curriculum reforms is another matter altogether. Let’s look into it.
Many lessons from curriculum reform struggles of the past, here and overseas, are worthy of reflection by tumuaki and principals this time round. Six stand out. They are that official curricula are:
- inherently political and contested
- grounded in national history, culture, and values
- shaped differently over time by competing civil society groups or alliances
- lack expertise in the inclusion of the knowledges of minoritised or marginalised groups
- reliant for their success on the personal, workgroup, institutional, and system resources to which teachers have access
- vulnerable to each classroom teacher’s practicality ethic.
In 1981, Margaret Clark, Professor of Political Science at Victoria University Wellington, observed that education in New Zealand was about to become more politicised “than ever before”. Resources were limited and in competition, while both the ends and means of education were disputed. At the same time, society was seriously questioning many of its basic social democratic assumptions. Clark rightly reasoned that “the education system [was] inevitably the prime arena for playing out such re-evaluations”. More than 40 years on, education policy discourse has hardly changed.
Compulsory schooling always becomes a prime political arena in times of economic, social, and cultural anxiety (and, from now on, also a time of environmental and demographic perma-crisis). Anxiety tends to frame schooling instrumentally as the means to greater productivity and self-sufficiency ends, not as an end in itself. Whether they want to or not, tumuaki and principals must become political actors at such times.
School leaders today must also hold fast to the moral principle that we cannot treat ākonga and whānau (and our colleagues, and our school community for that matter) merely as means in the ways they decide to fulfil the requirements of nationally mandated curriculum coverage, instructional approaches, and benchmarked learning outcomes. Tumuaki and principals must also accept responsibility for practically upholding the right of every child to an education that is directed towards “the development of the child’s personality, talents, and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential” (UNCRC Article 29a).
Children are ends in themselves.
- According to the late Professor Denis Lawton of the Institute of Education in London:
- curriculum may be defined as a selection from the culture of the society
- education should transmit knowledge that is relatively class-free
- societies should aim for, what he called, a common culture curriculum, appropriate for all children.
However, unlike the explicitly “knowledge-rich”, “science of learning” New Zealand Curriculum of 2025, Lawton’s starting point for developing curriculum is an examination of the culture of the particular society, “warts and all”. The what, how, and why of curriculum cannot be reduced to “a view from nowhere” or an exercise in cognitively loading children with what elite groups determine is “the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Its proponents argue that the national curriculum refresh exercise which led to Te Mātaiaho 2023 both celebrated and reflected the super-diverse realities of our contemporary bicultural and multicultural society and the unique constitutional promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Dr Wayne Ngata and members of Rōpu Kaitiaki emphasise that a common culture curriculum is to be experienced through active “examination and observation of the many strands and threads of learning”. As an exemplar, Te Mātaiaho recognised that many strands and threads of learning are a reflection of the many valued resources of knowledge, ways of being, and relationships to self and others that our children and their families embody in 2026. And this diversity will only increase in the future. According to the Ministry of Education, Māori will comprise 33% of all learners by 2040. And according to the Education Review Office, 26% of learners will identify as Asian in 2043 (43% in Auckland).
In 2026, tumuaki and principals are living through an unsettling historical moment when schooling policy discourse seems to be seismically shifting under our feet. Curriculum content, pedagogy, and assessment are all subjected to centrally co-ordinated and imposed change overnight in an approach the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein famously called The Shock Doctrine. (Recall our own shock doctrine reforms under the Fourth Labour [1984–1990] and Fourth National [1990–1999] governments!) According to this doctrine, swift change is essential. Urgency obviates resistance. Questions are summarily dismissed as ignorance, fear, or vested interest.
In contrast, American historian Professor Herbert Kliebard took a longer term view on curriculum reform in The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958. Across this multi-decade period of curriculum evolution and adaptation, Kliebard identified several different interest groups “competing for dominance over the curriculum and, at different times, achieving some measure of control, depending on local as well as general social conditions.” Kliebard suggests that such interest groups represent “a force for a different selection of knowledge and values drawn from the culture and hence a kind of lobby for a different curriculum.”
In Aotearoa today, it is the forceful lobbying of an opportunistic “knowledge-rich”, “science of learning”, “back-to-basics” curriculum alliance that has fed the imagination and ambitions of the current Minister of Education. In doing so, this alliance has managed to exert a significant measure of official curriculum control, for now. It remains to be seen how — and to what extent — this amalgam of knowledge and values will become an enduring schooling settlement where it counts: in staffrooms and classrooms and in the social imagination of parents and whānau. The fundamentalist zeal and short-termism that are ruthlessly driving today’s curriculum reforms will likely run aground, and for predictable reasons. For one, as Kliebard notes (quoting the pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey):
Science does not tell teachers what to do: it offers them the opportunity to re-examine their practice in the light of certain findings.
Tumuaki and principals and teachers are mostly pragmatists, not zealots. They apply a practicality ethic to external mandates that demand they change their practice. Tumuaki and principals must therefore constantly balance their own and their colleagues’ capability and capacity for yet more curriculum change against centrally mandated timetables for bringing those changes on stream. And in classrooms, teachers will continually be making their own decisions about whether the time and effort required to introduce mandated curriculum reform is worth any gains and losses that they see for the ākonga in their care.
Externally driven curriculum reforms, like those we are living through in 2026 and for the foreseeable future, are usually adapted in multiple small ways to suit the particular school setting, classroom context, and the individual teacher’s deeply sedimented assumptions about the most appropriate teaching and learning mix for the children in front of them. The supposed gold standard of implementation fidelity is challenging enough to achieve in closely observed and well-resourced research classrooms; across two and a half thousand schools, and tens of thousands of classrooms, it’s a chimera.