Anti-Māori, libertarian ideology is increasingly determining what our tamariki are, and aren’t, learning at school, writes Jessie Moss.

Curriculum change is necessary. It is also political. What is and isn’t included in the New Zealand Curriculum is carefully considered, and always greatly influenced by the government of the day.

The curriculum for years 0-8 in maths and years 0-6 in English have recently been rewritten.

The changes have been driven by 12 members of a ministerial advisory group, appointed by education minister Erica Stanford in December 2023.

The membership of this group, tasked with far-reaching changes to our children’s education, deserves scrutiny.

At the helm of the advisory group is Dr Michael Johnston, a senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative — a right-wing think tank that draws ideas and funding from the neoliberal Atlas Network.

Another member is Melissa Derby, who often frames systemic racism in education as issues of individual responsibility. She has also publicly aligned with anti-trans rhetoric and backed anti-trans groups.

Then there’s Elizabeth Rata, a Pākehā sociologist of education whose highly contentious views on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and mātauranga Māori are well-known in te ao Māori. Educationalist and researcher Bevan Holloway describes her “extreme views” on Te Tiriti as “the intellectual bedrock upon which the ACT party’s challenge of it can be found”.

Professor Elizabeth Rata, who is a Pākehā sociologist of education. (Photo: Natalie Slade)

Elizabeth Rata often equates the inclusion of iwi, hapū and whānau knowledge and values into teaching with an emptying out of academic knowledge. She has been instrumental in shaping the new English curriculum.

Last month, the New Zealand Association for the Teaching of English (NZATE) took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the Ministry of Education working groups drafting the year 7–13 English learning area of the New Zealand Curriculum. In a statement to its members, the association said it was concerned by the curriculum’s development, and it didn’t want to be represented as agreeing with either the process or the document. It cited the “ad hoc directives the Ministry seems to be issued with” and a “rushed curriculum”.

NZATE wrote: “We feel the document is not fit for purpose as a curriculum document for teaching subject English in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

How does a newly drafted learning area for the New Zealand Curriculum fail to meet the basic tenet of “fit for purpose?” Whose values are embedded within it? And who holds the political, economic and cultural power over its formation?

The answers are to be found in an examination of Elizabeth Rata’s ideology, and what happened when the advisory group she sits on took hold of the Labour government’s 2023 curricula drafts.

Rata is an avowed libertarian. During her oral submission in favour of ACT’s Treaty principles bill, Rata declared: “New Zealand’s future may be that of a prosperous first-world liberal democratic nation or a third-world retribalised state. A first-world tribal nation is a contradiction in terms. It is not possible.”

Rata’s influence in education has long been challenged by Māori academics like Associate Professor Leonie Pihama, who points out that “education in Aotearoa continues to function on the assumption that schooling is only for the reproduction of epistemic and ‘rational’ knowledges, by which is meant Western, Pākehā, colonial-imposed knowledge forms”.

From the outset, Erica Stanford has claimed the advisory group is creating a “knowledge-rich curriculum”. So, what is Rata’s idea of knowledge-rich?

In January this year, American college professor Peter Boghossain and Rata talked education in an interview called “Ditching Equity and Reclaiming Our Schools”.

Rata proudly announced that she was leading the writing team for the New Zealand Curriculum’s year 7–13 English, describing it as “my opportunity to say what is a knowledge-rich curriculum”. She then said: “Social groups can believe whatever they want to believe, but school and university is for modern science . . . it is about conserving the best knowledge that each generation has.

“There is no place for traditional knowledge in a curriculum except as an object of study . . . If we take the Māori example, the Māori legends, the Māori language, the place for that in a curriculum is where it would be studied as any subject is studied, but as a belief? No. There is no place for unchallengeable belief in a curriculum.”

Stanford will surely have been aware of Rata’s views on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and mātauranga Māori when she appointed her to her advisory group.

In 2021, Rata and six other professors from the University of Auckland, who became known as “The Listener Seven”, penned a letter titled “In defence of science”, which was published in the Listener.

The letter responded to a 2021 NCEA working group report asserting that the curriculum should ensure parity between the systems of knowledge. The report followed a 2020 cabinet proposal to accord mātauranga Māori equal status to science in schooling.

In their letter, Rata and her associates dismissed the status and value of mātauranga Māori in our education system. A public storm erupted. Dr Michael Johnston, who’s now chairing Stanford’s ministerial advisory group, was one of the group’s supporters.

Then, in February 2023, Rata expressed her concern about the Labour-led refresh drafts inherited by the coalition government, on The Platform with Michael Laws.

She said she had hoped the refresh would mean “real knowledge in the curriculum” and criticised the drafts, saying they are “actually not about knowledge at all, it’s about creating our young people into so-called racialised identities — you identify with your heritage group”.

By this point, the drafts had been greeted positively by the teaching profession. Despite the furore stirred by the Listener letter, the drafts were grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and imbued with mātauranga Māori and te reo Māori. These drafts never made it to the classroom. A few months after complaining about the 2023 drafts on The Platform, Rata was appointed to the ministerial advisory group.

Emails released under the Official Information Act (OIA) to NZATE detail how the advisory group, and Rata in particular, backed by Johnston, gained control over the actual rewriting of the draft curriculum, acting well outside the scope of the group’s terms of reference by selecting the writers — herself included.

Holloway describes this as a special interest group taking over, “stretching the bounds of Public Service guidelines in order to achieve this.”

By April 2024, the OIA emails show that Rata and Johnston had begun working on curriculum content without ministerial authorisation.

An email to Rata from a Ministry of Education staffer implores: “Can you please not do anything further until the Minister has formally responded and we have everything set up for the writing teams”? Rata replies, “Oh dear, I wrote to 3 of the 7 members of the English Writing Team today to invite them to join.”

The staffer reiterates: “I don’t want you to fall foul of government processes for establishing these sorts of groups, including procurement rules.” Johnston chips in: “I understand that it is the Ministry’s job to put together the writing groups, but they need to do so in consultation with key [ministerial advisory group] members. In the case of subject English, that means Elizabeth.”

The ministry admitted to RNZ that Rata had acted outside the scope of the advisory group, but it had accepted the people she selected based on their expertise and capabilities.

Meanwhile, another OIA email shows a member of the advisory group, whose name is redacted, rejecting Te Tiriti as the basis for including Māori writers among the works children should read at school, stating “quality” as the only reason for author inclusion.

This line of thinking emerges again in Rata’s interview with Boghossain.

When he asked if curriculum literature content should depend on the culture of the host country, Rata replied: “No, literature should be selected for teaching at school because of its quality, and its quality is based on how it captures what it is to be human.”

In December 2024, the education union NZEI Te Riu Roa filed an urgent claim with the Waitangi Tribunal’s kaupapa inquiry on education, focusing on six of the government’s education policies, including curriculum change.

Last month, counsel for the Crown responded with an admission that “yes, there are fewer direct references to Te Tiriti and associated te reo Māori words and concepts in the curricula for years 0-6 English and years 0-8 Maths”.

The Aotearoa Educators Collective is now calling for “a transparent, published process for curriculum consultation” and for teachers to be at the heart of curriculum design, as they are “the curriculum’s most essential knowledge holders — not just implementers but designers.”

It shouldn’t have been NZATE, a national body of experienced English teachers, that stepped back from the creation of the next phase of the English learning area of the curriculum. It should have been Elizabeth Rata.

Will Erica Stanford defend this backward-looking, Te Tiriti-inconsistent curriculum rewrite, or will she be brave in preventing further damage, and commit to working with teachers and Māori for a Tiriti-based curriculum?

Thus far, she has allowed the libertarian Rata to mould the writing of the English learning area and influence the curriculum overview. In doing so, Rata has established a structure for the learning areas that are yet to be completed.

The curriculum should reflect the range of values and knowledge of the society it serves. Our English medium schooling system, which almost exclusively teaches the New Zealand Curriculum, is what educationalist Ann Milne calls a “white space”. Despite our Pacific geography and Indigenous inhabitants, our education system remains epistemically and culturally specific to western society.

Under this government, we’ve seen the de-prioritisation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi throughout the education system and the whitewashing of the curriculum itself by removing references to Te Tiriti as a guiding kaupapa. There have also been deep cuts to Māori and Pacific language programmes, along with a proposal to axe frontline Māori resource kaiako.

As Milne explains: “Mainstream schools in Aotearoa New Zealand are controlled by those who have political, economic and cultural power, where western values, knowledge, culture and the English language are the central focus of the school.”

Despite determined efforts by Māori and non-Māori to shift this over the last few decades, to better reflect who we are as a society, the coalition government is taking us backwards. Fast.

Jessie Moss (Photo supplied)

Jessie Moss is the professional education adviser at NZEI Te Riu Roa. She has a background in primary school teaching and has experience in national curriculum resourcing. She is also a musician and te reo Māori enthusiast. She lives in Te Awakairangi.

E-Tangata, 2025