A Credible Case Now Exists for an Independent Inquiry into Aotearoa’s Curriculum Refresh

by Rebecca Thomas

For the past few years, those of us questioning the curriculum refresh have largely been treated as though we are just having an educational disagreement. 

Knowledge-rich vs skills-rich; explicit teaching vs inquiry; science of learning vs sciences of learning; structured literacy, assessment, content made in Australia. The disappearance of teacher autonomy; Mātauranga Māori; Te Tiriti. Left vs Right. Pick your battlefield. There have certainly been plenty of them.

Amongst it I, like many others grew angry and frustrated. But as we plod on this tail end of September 2026, I don’t think that is where we are anymore. Relief is beginning to settle in, lots of us are breathing out again.

The questions surrounding this curriculum refresh have gone far beyond arguments about pedagogy, they no longer sit as disagreements on Facebook posts. There are now serious questions about governance, transparency, evidence, consultation, public service and accountability. Those questions are now also beginning to converge in the same place. Perhaps it is time somebody looked at the whole thing.

I say that as somebody who actually has to make curriculum reform work in a real space, my Year 6 classroom in Tai Tokerau. I don't simply experience the curriculum as a press release, a policy announcement or a formatted document launched from Wellington with an empty thank you note attached. I experience it in my classroom. I experience it while trying to work out what a Year 6 child actually knows, what they need next, which assessment gives me useful information and which one simply generates a number for someone to use as a stick to wave at us, or colour in a red square for us.

I see what happens when assessment doesn't align neatly with the important responsive curriculum we need to teach to the students in front of us today. I see what happens when exhausted teachers are given another implementation deadline while still trying to understand the last change. I see children whose learning doesn't move obediently along a nationally prescribed line. I see neurodivergent learners, children learning at very different curriculum levels in the same room, Māori children whose identity and whakapapa aren't optional extras to be squeezed in once the favoured knowledge has been transmitted.

You see, despite all the drama and shouting and ‘world-class’ rhetoric curriculum decisions eventually arrive somewhere very ordinary. They arrive at my desk and then they arrive in front of my children.

The questions are no longer coming from one place

On 16 September, the Waitangi Tribunal released its report into the reform of the national curriculum. Its findings were not insignificant. I have no doubt you have already read plenty about the seriousness and breadth of those findings. You will know it concluded that the Crown had not demonstrated that its approach would address inequitable outcomes for Māori. 

Then, on 25 September, another accountability process began. The Chief Ombudsman, John Allen, announced a formal investigation into allegations of attempts to circumvent the Official Information Act at the Ministry of Education. 

Two different processes. Different evidence. Different questions.

Both touching the soul destroying machinery surrounding one of the most consequential changes to education in Aotearoa in decades.

I want to know what comes next. Who looks at the whole thing? Who reconstructs the curriculum refresh itself? How did we move from Te Mātaiaho to what followed? And, perhaps the most important question of all is remarkably simple: Is this how a country should rewrite what its children learn?

I think there is now a credible case for an independent inquiry into precisely that.

And I don't want an inquiry designed to prove me right

I don't want an inquiry whose terms of reference assume the curriculum refresh has failed.

I don't want an inquiry designed by people who already know what they want it to conclude.

That would simply repeat the problem.

I want one prepared to discover that some decisions were well evidenced.

Perhaps common expectations will make it easier to identify children who need support.

Perhaps parts of the refresh will prove stronger than what came before.

This inquiry shouldn't be about protecting anyone's educational ideology.

It should be about protecting our children from ours.

So, who do we ask

There are several possibilities.

A Government can establish a public inquiry. Parliament can also be petitioned; a parliamentary petition can ask Parliament to pursue or recommend an inquiry. A petition doesn't require thousands of signatures before Parliament can consider it. Parliament says a petition can proceed with only the petitioner's signature; signatures demonstrate public support, but don't create some magic threshold that automatically produces an inquiry.

So perhaps somebody petitions Parliament. Perhaps this Government decides that independent scrutiny could actually strengthen public confidence in its reforms. Perhaps a future Government commissions a review.

Another possibility? Perhaps we invite the OECD back to Aotearoa to complete a very independent review.

This isn't an imaginary role I have invented for the OECD. Its Reviews of National Policies for Education are specifically designed to provide countries with customised, in-depth analysis of an entire education system, a level of education or a particular policy area. They happen when a country asks for one.

In 2010-11 the OECD did conduct an independent review of New Zealand's evaluation and assessment system. This wasn't undertaken during some mythical educational golden age in which governments didn't have political positions on education. It happened when John Key was Prime Minister and National Standards had just arrived.

The OECD report itself records that, at the time of its visit in 2010, New Zealand had a National-led Government. You see, this isn't really a National-versus-Labour story, our Curriculum needs to survive both.

The opening of the OECD report's executive summary described New Zealand as having developed: “its own distinctive model of evaluation and assessment characterised by a high level of trust in schools and school professionals.”

At the time there were no full-cohort national tests. Teachers held primary responsibility for assessing their students. Teachers had considerable ownership of appraisal and school self-review. There was ‘a high level of trust in schools and school professionals.’ There is something almost heartbreaking about reading that sentence in 2026.

Back then teachers could be trusted and expected to provide evidence. Schools could respond to their communities and operate within national expectations. Children could have common entitlements without every child having to demonstrate learning in exactly the same way at exactly the same moment.

The OECD wasn't arguing for some assessment-free educational free-for-all. It supported common expectations. It supported better moderation. It wanted reliable teacher judgements. It wanted coherent assessment information. It wanted teachers to become more assessment-literate. But it also recognised what can happen when measurement becomes the purpose rather than the tool.

The OECD specifically identified potential consequences of high-stakes testing including curriculum narrowing and teaching to the test. New Zealand's use of professional teacher judgement and multiple sources of evidence was seen as a way of mitigating those risks.

It also warned that concentrating on literacy and numeracy must not marginalise other curriculum areas simply because they are harder to measure.

The OECD described New Zealand education policy development as having a “strong tradition of consultation with key agencies and stakeholders”. And it explained why. The purpose was to build buy-in and ownership amongst the people who would ultimately have to implement the change.

When did we stop doing this?

That is exactly the sort of question an independent review could answer.

The OECD conducts reviews of national education policies at countries' request. Its programme allows reviews to focus on particular areas of policy and to bring international evidence and comparison to national questions.

So invite them back.

Ask them to examine the transition from the earlier Te Mātaiaho work into the subsequent refresh. Invite them to examine the evidential basis for the knowledge-rich approach. Evaluate our curriculum coherence and teacher involvement. Ask them to compare the process used here with curriculum reform across other OECD countries.

If this curriculum refresh is genuinely “world class”, internationally evidence-informed, educationally robust and appropriately developed, then independent international scrutiny should not threaten it.

Perhaps it could also help us work out what happens next.

Labour has proposed moving detailed curriculum and assessment development further from direct political control through an independent curriculum and assessment body. I don't think the interesting question is whether that is a Labour idea. The interesting question is whether curriculum independence is a good idea.

If we genuinely want curriculum stability, an independent body cannot simply protect curriculum from National Ministers. It has to protect it from Labour Ministers too. And the next National Minister. And the Labour Minister after that. Otherwise we haven't created independence. An independent curriculum body could potentially do more than decide what survives from the current curriculum. It could safeguard the process by which curriculum is changed. That would be a legacy worth creating.

Where we stand now and what we need to learn moving forward isn't really about winning a curriculum war. I don't particularly want to return to 2011. Our children are growing up in a world radically different from the one we were preparing them for fifteen years ago. But there is something in that old OECD report that feels almost like a message in a bottle from another version of New Zealand education.

Trust in teachers.

Professional judgement.

Local responsiveness.

Consultation.

Evidence.

A broad curriculum.

Assessment designed primarily to improve teaching and learning.

And an explicit commitment that Māori students should experience educational success “as Māori”.

That was written about us.

Not Finland.

Not Singapore.

Not some educational utopia we keep flying delegations overseas to investigate.

Us. Aotearoa New Zealand.

Perhaps an independent inquiry would conclude that some of what we are doing now is better. Perhaps it would conclude that some of what we left behind deserved to be left behind. Perhaps it would find mistakes, gaps in evidence, unintended consequences or decisions that need reconsidering.

Ultimately this isn't about Erica Stanford.

It isn't about Chris Hipkins, or Ginny Anderson.

And it certainly isn't about teachers wanting to win an ideological argument.

When serious questions about Te Tiriti obligations, evidence, consultation and public-sector transparency begin accumulating around the same enormous reform, asking for independent scrutiny isn't an attack on that reform.

We don't need an inquiry to tell us who won. 

We need one to help make sure our children don't lose.