Whistleblowers offer to aid Education Ministry probe

By John Gerritsen of RNZ

Education Ministry whistleblowers, who contacted RNZ in the past week, plan to add their voices to an investigation by the Office of the Ombudsman.

The investigation was announced after publication of a video showing a ministry manager asking staff not to mention contact with the Education Minister’s office in writing.

Nine people with inside knowledge of different parts of the ministry subsequently contacted RNZ to corroborate claims that ministry managers routinely asked staff not to write down sensitive information, least it be discovered through the Official Information Act.

Some were from the ministry’s curriculum centre, which was the subject of a negative report about workplace culture published last week.

Others said that a culture of secrecy and avoidance of written records was common in other parts of the organisation.

The Education Ministry said the comments made in the leaked video did not meet its expectations, but it would not comment on claims made by the people who contacted RNZ.

Education Minister Erica Standford. Photo / NZME

It initially said it was investigating whether there was a wider problem, but told RNZ it had dropped plans for an internal inquiry in light of the Ombudsman’s investigation.

Three of the sources confirmed they would contact the Ombudsman to make a protected disclosure and others said they were likely to do so.

A 10th person - former ministry staff member Claire Coleman - told RNZ she had already offered to participate in the Ombudsman’s investigation.

This week, Chief Ombudsman John Allen said he had formally notified the ministry of the investigation.

“I will be looking at various practices, including whether the ministry’s curriculum centre staff have either deliberately failed to make records or have been told not to do so,” he said.

“My investigation will concentrate on administrative conduct, and whether the Ministry has met its legal obligations under the Official Information Act and the Public Records Act.

“I will not be considering any substantive advice or decision making relating to the curriculum itself.”

Coleman, who has been a strong critic of the government’s approach to the curriculum rewrite, said she hoped the Ombudsman “might get to the truth of things”.

“I hope we can hold some people responsible and any future processes are transparent.”

Coleman also hoped the Ombudsman’s work might lead to a wider inquiry into the curriculum rewrite.

“There were far too many things that were done in a secretive and unethical way,” she said. “Too many financial interests that have no business in that space.”

Coleman previously claimed work on the curriculum was heavily politicised and several of the ministry insiders who contacted RNZ made similar allegations.

One source told RNZ the new curriculums felt like a step back in time.

“It felt like I was taken right back to the 80s of ‘we don’t let brown people have any rights’ and ‘we’re going to whitewash everything,’ and ‘we’re going to make sure that this is back to how things should be’,” they said.

They said the curriculum was too directive of what teachers must teach.

“Some of the prescribed nature is needed, in order to be consistent and to make sure that children have all got equity wherever they are,” they said. “I get that, but not to the extreme this is.

“New Zealand is innovative, creative... yet we’re just throwing it all down the tubes.”

Another source said schools could teach the new curriculums with resources left over from 20 years ago.

“It misses how young people learn today and it misses what’s important for young people today,” she said. “It’s such a missed opportunity for what a good curriculum could look like.

“It’s devastating, actually.”

Another source said: “I think the public deserve to know, in no uncertain terms, that the quality of primary and secondary education in this country is being directly compromised and coloured by the government’s ideological position, that the people responsible are consciously aware of it and that the minister, ministry and related parties have taken steps to circumvent proper protocol, and intentionally obscure the truth about how they have been operating.”

Foreign influence

Several of the nine whistleblowers said the Australian firm Learning First had a major hand in draft curriculums and some ministry staff were flown to Melbourne to work with the company.

One said the primary school maths curriculum was completely rewritten by Learning First and other learning areas were heavily influenced by the company.

“The general feeling amongst internal staff was that the work being produced by Learning First was bad and unnecessary,” they said. “There was a lot of confusion about why they were involved at all.”

Another said Learning First wrote a lot of curriculum content, but ministry staff were told not to imply or say that the ministry was not the author of the curriculum.

“Learning First replaced everything we had done,” they said.

They also said Learning First’s understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi was “completely wrong”.

A third source said Learning First provided a lot of content for some curriculums, but not for others, and ministry staff rewrote much of it.

“A lot of it was wrong, literally wrong,” they said.

However, Learning First chief executive Ben Jensen denied the allegations.

He said the claim Learning First wrote most of the content for several curriculum drafts was not true.

“We did lots of research, benchmarking, provided advice and so on, but this is just completely false,” he said.

Jensen said his company did not write the revised version of the maths curriculum

“We provided comparisons with other systems and made suggestions,” he said. “We do a lot of work on how to sequence foundational learning in maths and what this means for the curriculum, but as above, we were not even doing this work when the draft was written.

“A lot of the feedback we provided was rejected by the ministry, so the idea that we wrote most of it is simply not true.

“When we finished, a lot of writing was still taking place, so just don’t know how people can say it was mainly written by us.”

Jensen said he was not aware of Learning First content being rewritten due to errors, and the company was up front about not having expertise on local knowledge and history, such as the treaty.

The Education Ministry also defended the process, and said it was responsible for all final content and decisions.

“Characterisations of the curriculum process based on individual recollections or particular examples do not necessarily reflect the full context of how curriculum content was developed, reviewed, and finalised,” it said.

“The ministry develops and writes the curriculum, drawing on input from teachers, subject matter experts, stakeholders and external advisers throughout the process.

“As previously outlined publicly, including during the Education and Workforce Select Committee scrutiny examination, external advisers may contribute specialist expertise and international perspectives.

“For example, ministry officials have previously explained that Learning First helped identify relevant international curriculum content, while the curriculum itself was written by the ministry.”

No written records

The Ombudsman’s investigation was sparked by a video showing a principal seconded to the ministry to lead work on the secondary school curriculum, warning staff not to mention in writing feedback from the Education Minister’s office.

The source of that video said they were outraged by the attempt to circumvent the proper processes for recording and providing information.

“These rigorous processes are put in there exactly to serve the children and to serve the schools, and us bypassing them is not okay,” they said.

They said they heard similar requests almost once a month.

Other sources who contacted RNZ shared similar stories.

“Verbal instructions were given for changes that were controversial and come directly from the minister’s office,” one ministry insider told RNZ.

Another source said the comments made by the ministry manager in the leaked video were not an isolated case.

“This was a routine and extensive problem before she was seconded,” they said. “The problem did not walk in the door with her.”

Another ministry insider told RNZ: “We have been told many times not to write things down.”

The Ministry of Education building in Wellington. Photo / Newstalk ZB

As RNZ reported last week, a person present at a ministry-run curriculum hui said ministry staff were present to take notes and one of those staffers revealed that they had been told to be very careful about what they wrote down.

“The things that they weren’t writing down were pretty obviously things that they didn’t want to be recorded as part of the feedback we were giving,” she said.

She said, later at the same hui, a ministry manager instructed their staff to stop recording what was being said, because it was beyond the scope of the meeting and because it could be discovered through the OIA.

An established culture

Several sources told RNZ they witnessed repeated attempts to keep information off the record prior to the change of government in late 2023, but it became worse after the election.

One said ministry managers would respond to complaints or potentially critical queries with face-to-face meetings, a tactic that appeared aimed at avoiding a written email response.

“The whole ‘have meetings, keep things off paper’ is deliberate,” they said.

The source said there were frequent meetings where nothing was written down.

“It didn’t feel like there was any integrity.”

A separate source said they commonly heard “that you shouldn’t write things down, because they would then be OIA-able” prior to the 2023 election.

“Recording discussions and notes was sometimes discouraged, with people encouraged to have conversations instead,” they told RNZ.

Another source said, prior to the change in government, reminders about the OIA and putting things in writing were light in tone and emphasis, but after the election, the term “OIA-able” was frequently used and, in 2024 meetings, became the preferred mode of communication.

Banned words

Most of the sources told RNZ they were told to remove Māori words from curriculum documents or noticed that others had done so.

They said the word “Aotearoa” was used as a synonym for or alongside New Zealand in original curriculum drafts, but was later removed.

At the Marae. Photo / Ministry of Education

“This instruction was never written down and, in some cases, senior staff made the changes themselves, rather than relay this change to the writing teams,” one source said.

Another said Aotearoa New Zealand was the blanket term used in the curriculum, often shortened to ANZ, but proofreaders and editors were told to replace it with New Zealand.

One source said the push to remove Māori words began before the new coalition government had even taken office, with some managers indicating they wanted to make the change because “it was in the pipeline”.

Two other sources said some English words were also apparently unwelcome, with instructions to remove words including “culture”, “identity”, and “wellbeing”.

The Education Ministry had previously denied that it sought to remove Māori language from the curriculum.

Bullying and fear

The source of the video said ministry staff were being asked to behave dishonestly.

“We’re public servants and we’re being bullied, which I would say strongly, we are being bullied,” they said. “The majority of people in the ministry are under a toxic environment.”

They said nobody felt safe to complain.

“If you speak up and ask a professional, polite question of ‘is this okay?’, you very quickly have your fixed-term contract ended,” they said.

Another ministry insider said staff felt they had to comply with government demands or lose their jobs.

“There was a lot of fear within the ministry that our jobs were now at risk, due to the change in government, and this contributed to what I experienced as an overall feeling that we had to say yes to everything and not question whether proper process was being followed,” they said.

A report published last week showed staff in the ministry’s curriculum division were unhappy about favouritism, workplace behaviour and application of public sector values.