Who Is Catherine Law, Really?

by ELV

I have been wondering about Catherine Law for a while.

Since she called those pushing back against the curriculum changes “a small group of people … making a lot of noise” in 2025, she has been on my radar.

At the time, I did what I tend to do when something doesn't quite sit right with me. I went looking.

I looked at Catherine Law, Avonside Girls' High School and her relationship with the Ministry of Education. I looked at how a secondary school principal, who had received considerable sums of money for building upgrades (mates rates), had found herself appointed to the Curriculum Coherence Group; one of just six people charged with reviewing the direction, cohesion and consistency of the new curriculum.

I had questions then.

I have considerably more now.

Catherine Law didn't remain simply a principal offering her expertise to an advisory group. Her involvement grew as time passed and favour was won.

The Curriculum Coherence Group was established in July 2024. Alongside Law sat Michael Johnston, who had already chaired Erica Stanford's Ministerial Advisory Group for English and mathematics and statistics and had become a prominent advocate for the knowledge-rich direction of the reforms.

Released Ministry documents from March 2025 show Law involved directly in the curriculum development process. Meetings with her were recorded, including an all-day session, alongside repeated Coherence Group review and feedback cycles. The project timetable then moved through “Minister review”, updates following that review and final curriculum materials being prepared for the Minister.

By November 2025, Law's position had changed again.

She was seconded from Avonside Girls' High School into the Ministry of Education to become Programme Lead for the Years 11–13 curriculum redevelopment. By December she was appearing in official Ministry material explaining the ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum. In 2026 she continued publicly discussing its implementation and leading work around the senior curriculum.

The principal who had dismissed opposition to these reforms as a small group making a lot of noise had become deeply embedded in delivering them.

And now we know something else.

The bit that wasn't supposed to be written down

Leaked footage has reportedly captured Law telling curriculum workers not to put information shared with the Minister's office in writing and reminding them that it was “OIA-able”.

According to the reporting, the discussion concerned feedback passing between curriculum development and the Minister's office. Law reportedly indicated there did not need to be a written trail showing material going backwards and forwards and discussed using passive language so that feedback appeared to come through her (mates rates paid off then).

That is not a small administrative slip.

As Ginny Andersen rightly pointed out in Parliament this afternoon, the Official Information Act exists so that New Zealanders can scrutinise how public decisions are made. If decisions affecting our national curriculum have been influenced by a Minister's office, ultimately, Ministers are accountable for the decisions they make. Stanford is accountable.

Erica Stanford has denied instructing anyone to circumvent the OIA. She says neither she nor her political staff had seen the documents Law was discussing. At the moment unsurprisingly, there is no evidence establishing that Stanford instructed Law to behave this way, but it does leave us with another question that matters just as much.

Who benefited from there being no written record?

Follow the benefit

If feedback originating from or travelling through the Minister's office is instead presented as coming from Catherine Law, the obvious consequence is distance between the political office and the documentary record.

The national curriculum by the way isn't an internal Ministry memo. It shapes what teachers teach, what schools prioritise, what gets assessed and eventually what generations of young New Zealanders understand about mathematics, science, literature, history, Aotearoa, te ao Māori and themselves.

This is where the Catherine Law story becomes much bigger than just Catherine Law.

The concern is that someone occupying an extraordinarily influential position in the redevelopment of our curriculum appeared to understand that creating a particular written record could expose something to public scrutiny — and apparently suggested avoiding creating that record.

The first card

For nearly three years, enormous changes have been made across education.

Curriculum has changed. Assessment is changing. NCEA is changing. Structured literacy and mathematics mandates and requirements have been introduced. Attendance policy has shifted. Reporting has changed. Initial teacher education, the Teaching Council, the Education Act, learning support and the legislative framework surrounding schools have all been touched by reform.

These changes have not happened separately by different people, instead quite often it has been the same people and consistently the Education Minister has allowed all people found making errors to be thrown under the bus while she appears in Snow White blazers.

These blunders have involved advisory groups, academics, consultants, Ministry officials, political advisers, sector organisations, contractors and individuals selected to occupy positions of considerable influence. Today, Catherine Law's comments have exposed a weakness in the trust underpinning the stories. She may simply be the first card that has fallen from a much larger house. And when that first card reveals a conversation about avoiding the very mechanism designed to let the public see inside government decision-making, surely we need to look carefully at what the rest of the house is built upon.

This needs to be bigger than an internal review

The Ministry has begun an investigation and contacted the Ombudsman and Public Service Commission.

I don't think it is sufficient.

What has happened raises questions about the integrity of a process that reaches far beyond one employee. Independent scrutiny could examine how influential education appointments were made, the relationships between advisory groups and the Minister's office, contracts and external consultants, declarations and management of conflicts of interest, and how professional advice travelled through the system before becoming government policy.

There is a serious case for Parliament and the relevant independent authorities to consider what safeguards are needed around reforms touched by the process under investigation, including whether implementation should continue unchanged while confidence in that process is being tested.

The same applies to ministerial accountability. Stanford has denied directing this conduct. 

Behind all of this are children.

They will inherit these reforms.

Most of the adults currently arguing about them will eventually move on.

The curriculum stays in classrooms.

Children live with it.

Catherine Law once thought some of us were making rather a lot of noise.

Perhaps we were.

But there is a difference between noise and warning.

Right now, we don't know whether Catherine Law is simply one person who made a very serious error of judgement or whether the card that fell this week has exposed something structurally wrong with the way education reform has been conducted.

Pause the changes. Investigate independently. Follow the decisions, the relationships and the influence, and establish what has actually happened to education in Aotearoa over these past three years.

For a country that has long been proud of its education system, this is an utter embarrassment. New Zealand's children deserve better.