A Coffee, a Muffin and a Trip to the Gold Coast

by Rebecca Thomas

Eight months ago, we joked that if we were wrong, we'd buy Dr Ben Jensen a coffee and a muffin. Eight months later, headlines about Learning First, a trip to the Gold Coast and a $2 million curriculum contract have brought many of those same questions into the national spotlight.

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The new wave of headlines around Learning First's relationship with our Minister, after we first raised those questions eight months ago, has felt like another small sign that the thaw is continuing.

I remember writing that blog back in October: Outsourcing of Our Curriculum Sovereignty

At the time, it felt like I was standing on a beach watching a wave coming while everyone else was happily building sandcastles.

I wasn't trying to predict disaster. I wasn't chasing headlines. I wasn't trying to become political. I was simply following the clues in front of me.

Back in October the clues were there, the language of our bread and butter, our curriclcum had changed. Understand Know Do had vanished – some of you might have even forgotten it ever existed by now. The curriculum had changed overnight. The process felt very different. Teachers who had poured years into the Curriculum Refresh were suddenly trying to work out where this shiny new 'glowed-up' version had come from and why it felt so unfamiliar.

So, naturally, I asked questions. Questions that, at the time, made some people laugh.

I remember the messages. The eye rolls. The suggestion that perhaps I'd wandered a little too far down the rabbit hole in my tin foil hat. Yet, quietly, I was also receiving text messages from people much closer to the action than I was. "I wonder if they realise how close they are to the truth."

I have thought about that sentence so many times over the past eight months. Because it perfectly captured what those months felt like. Knowing something wasn't right. Not having enough pieces to prove it. Watching people dismiss genuine concern as fear mongering. That's why I ended that original blog with, "If we're wrong, Ben, we'll buy you a coffee and a muffin."

I genuinely meant it. And the irony now that Erica was having coffee on the Gold Coast with MOE officials - there was bound to be a muffin involved.

The point ELV was making was never to accuse. The point was to understand.

Looking back now, I don't feel triumphant. If anything, I feel relieved. Relieved that people might finally understand that those of us raising concerns weren't making them up for clicks, followers or political theatre. We were asking because we care deeply about what happens inside New Zealand classrooms.

People have asked me over the last few days why I cared so much.

Why keep writing?

Why not just get on with teaching?

The answer has never changed.

Because it was never about Ben Jensen. It was never really about Erica Stanford, although her ego might think it so. It wasn't about contracts or consultants or political point scoring. It was always about our children.

Every curriculum is far more than a document. It decides whose stories are told.

What knowledge matters. How success is defined. What teachers will spend their precious hours teaching. It quietly shapes the future of every child who walks through a school gate. That isn't just another government project. That is one of the biggest responsibilities a nation holds.

When decisions like that appear to happen behind closed doors, teachers notice. Not because we think we know everything. But because we are the ones who have to turn those decisions into learning experiences for five-year-olds who still lose their first tooth, Year 8 students trying to work out who they are, and teenagers wondering whether they belong.

We see the human side of policy every single day.

Perhaps that's why the frustration became so heavy. There were days I became bitter.

Not because I wasn't being listened to. But because it felt like the children weren't being listened to. Sometimes I wondered whether any of it mattered. Whether another blog would simply disappear into the void.

So I stopped chasing every political headline. I tried to stop writing about Erica and the corruption I knew was happening.

I came back to where I have always found hope.

The classroom.

Because classrooms have a remarkable way of putting everything back into perspective. Children don't care who won Question Time. They don't know who signed contracts. They don't understand procurement processes or Parliamentary corrections. They just arrive carrying backpacks that are often much heavier than they look. They need adults who tell the truth. Adults who ask hard questions when something doesn't feel right. Adults who care enough to keep showing up.

That has always been my fight.

Not politics.

Children.

So when I read these headlines today, I don't feel like celebrating. I feel like quietly putting down a weight I've been carrying for a long time. Because perhaps now people will understand that the concern was never manufactured. The concern was real in October. It is still real today. And my hope moving forward isn't that one politician loses and another wins. 

My hope is much simpler than that.

Whether conversations happen around a boardroom table or over a flat white on the Gold Coast isn't really the point. The point is that decisions shaping New Zealand children should never leave teachers and communities trying to reconstruct the story afterwards.

Never again should teachers have to rely on whispers, Official Information Act requests or corrected Parliamentary answers to understand decisions that shape every classroom in this country.

Education is too precious for that.

Our curriculum is part of our identity and part of our children's childhood — they only get ONE childhood. Our children are not a procurement exercise. Their futures deserve openness. Their futures deserve honesty. Most of all, they deserve to know that the adults making decisions about their lives will never stop putting them first.

That was the point of the blog eight months ago.

It is still the point today.