Erica Stanford defends ‘coffee on Gold Coast’ before $2m education ministry contract
Thursday, 25 June 2026
The Ministry of Education believed just one Australian company could deliver on a multimillion-dollar contract to help update the curriculum, exempting them from normal procurement processes.
But Labour and a New Zealand company excluded from open tender say that isn’t the case and the work could have been done closer to home.
Labour MP Ginny Andersen has questioned whether a coffee between Education Minister Erica Stanford and Melbourne-based company Learning First’s founder Ben Jensen led to the $2 million contract being signed.
“Erica Stanford needs to explain if a coffee on the Gold Coast is all it takes to be awarded a multimillion-dollar contract.”
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She called Stanford to explain why she thought overseas consultants are better at giving direction on a curriculum being designed for Kiwi kids.
Stanford responded that the coffee was a pull-aside meeting she had at an Australian conference and it had no bearing on the awarding of any contract.
“International benchmarking and advice on knowledge rich curriculum design was an important part of ensuring our curriculum was comparable with high-performing systems overseas.”
Stanford told a select committee she could not recall whether the coffee meeting with the founder occurred before or after the contract was signed, but documentation suggested the meeting happened nine months prior.
Stanford would not answer questions put to her about the contract, referring instead to the Ministry of Education.
MoE: ‘No real competition’ to Australian firm
Official Information Act documents released to Labour show the ministry sought a procurement exemption on the basis that Learning First was the only “proven, international and independent expert” able to support curriculum development and design.
It listed technical reasons as there being “no real competition”.
While other providers had been given subject expertise and knowledge to support curriculum development work, none had been able to provide templates or support in how other jurisdictions have dealt with challenges in developing a knowledge rich curriculum, it wrote.
New Zealand Council for Educational Research director and chief executive Graeme Cosslett said his company “certainly” would have bid for the work if it was put out for tender, but had received no communication from the ministry on the specific line of work.
He said his firm had years of “deep expertise” in curriculum benchmarking, assessment design, scaling, standard setting and the interpretation of learner achievement data.
He believed the tender should have been open to local firms, saying “the more that we can invest in New Zealand and growing that capability of Aotearoa, the better”.
“We would certainly put forward our best abilities and capabilities that we could offer, and then we would hope that the Ministry of Education or the client work would select the organisation most appropriate at this place to do the work.”
Stanford met with provider
Correspondence released from Stanford to Labour show her office had been corresponding with Jensen since mid-2024, a little over a year before the contract was signed with the Australian firm in August last year. The correspondence includes details of a scheduled catch-up between Jensen and Stanford in the Gold Coast in October 2024.
Stanford could not recall in the select committee whether she met Jensen for coffee before or after the contract was signed. The documents suggest the meeting happened about nine months prior to the contract being signed.
Emails detailed a separate “virtual coffee” with a member of Stanford’s office in July 2024, with a follow-up email from Jensen speaking of messaging to win “hearts and minds”.
Education Ministry deputy secretary Pauline Cleaver told MPs last week that Learning First helped source content for the curriculum and New Zealand firms were excluded from the contract because the ministry was already working with Learning First.
Cleaver said in a statement to The Post the ministry had engaged with a range of sector experts and organisations as part of programme development, including Learning First.
“This engagement involved early discussions and input alongside wider engagement with sector and international experts and was not specific to any future procurement. It did not involve contracted work or deliverables.”
Other contracts awarded overseas
Learning First is not the only overseas provider to receive government contracts under the curriculum overhaul, with Australian-based company Janison Pty Ltd chosen to deliver the new Student Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting Tool (SMART) to schools.
RNZ reported the ministry had given $100m in contracts in the past two years for maths resources and training, all of it to four companies that were either foreign-owned or sold products originally developed overseas.