Curriculum upheaval is darkening the mood in school staff rooms

Thursday, 23 October 2025

Tom Pearce is a primary school teacher and a doctoral student in the University of Auckland’s faculty of arts and education. His research looks at the use of assessment in primary schools.

OPINION: Since I started teaching 15 years ago, I haven’t seen the mood of staff rooms as dark as it is now.

Teachers have already been hit with an insulting, below-inflation pay offer that claws back other entitlements. And now Erica Stanford has seen fit to pull the rug out from under the profession by making extensive, last-minute changes to the English and mathematics curriculum.

For context, these are the curriculum areas that had already been “reset” by the current Government, after also being “refreshed” by Labour. We have already been teaching these curriculum areas for nearly a year, and most teachers around the country are busily writing reports based on them.

We have already had two days of mandatory professional development – two precious, teacher-only days in which schools were shut – so that we could learn to use the maths curriculum. Countless work hours have been spent on them at schools around the country, as well as within the Ministry of Education.

And now that curriculum has been rewritten. For the third time in as many years.

The worst part is that it should come as no surprise. Education Minister Erica Stanford has already done this to us once this year.

The much-lauded mathematics textbooks that the government invested in at the end of last year were to be used in all classrooms. Many schools embarked on professional development around the textbooks and planned out our year to fit them in.

But then towards the end of term 1 the minister advised that these textbooks were merely “supplementary resources”. Instead, we had a new curriculum to teach. Not only did schools have to pivot to this new curriculum after the year was well underway, but the textbooks and the curriculum did not even align.

As galling as this whole process was, it was still better than this new round of changes. What we are left with now in maths is not even a curriculum. It is a barebones syllabus that includes only very basic knowledge and skills.

Gone is any focus on the conceptual understandings or big ideas that students should develop. The application of skills and knowledge is nowhere to be found. Problem solving is out, as is the ability to communicate, reason, justify or explain mathematically. The purpose statement that prefaces the mathematics curriculum area mentions some of these things in a single paragraph, and they are never touched on again.

If the initial rewrite wound back the clock to the 1993 curriculum, these changes take it back to 1893.

The whole process makes it clear that Erica Stanford is much better at the politics of education than she is at the substance. Popular policies like banning cellphones, moving away from open-plan learning environments or scrapping NCEA were low hanging fruit. It’s easy to scrap unpopular things, especially when the substance of any replacements isn’t expected for years.

Meanwhile Stanford’s other big achievement, the mandating of structured literacy, was an easy win. The research was in, and the legwork of rolling out the program was already underway when she took office.

Now that she has turned to other curriculum areas, the wheels have fallen off. The minister has not even reverted to research or evidence for the maths curriculum changes, because there is no evidence to support them. The ministerial advisory group leading the curriculum rewrite has said this explicitly.

Instead she has wholesale adopted the advice of her advisory group. An advisory group led by a libertarian think-tank researcher who has possibly not set foot in a classroom since he left school himself. As a result, these changes put us out of step with every other country to which we would want to compare ourselves.

As Minister Stanford embarks on her curriculum roadshow, it is hard to imagine how she could have put herself more offside with the profession.

Teachers will have to waste precious time and energy grappling with yet another rewrite. We will have to turn around and map out the curriculum, yet again.

Then teachers will do what we’ve always done. We will get on with giving students the rich experiences that we know they need in order to learn maths. Despite the fact that we no longer have a curriculum that backs this up.

But unless life-threatening winds prevent it, I suspect there will also be a few more of us marching today, when we go on strike.