similar allegations<\/a> during a submission to the Education and Workforce Select Committee on the government’s Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill recently.<\/p>\nShe told Nine to Noon she started working for the ministry on a rewrite of the Arts curriculum in 2022, but that was paused in late 2023 following the change of government.<\/p>\n
“By the time that I left in the beginning of 2025, it was evident that none of the work that we had done was going to be used and they weren’t really interested in any of our expertise,” she said.<\/p>\n
Coleman agreed a change of government could bring a change of direction for the curriculum, but she said the process was inappropriate and the public should be concerned.<\/p>\n
She said she assumed government ministries would follow good-faith practices involving rigourous debate but that was not the case with the curriculum rewrite.<\/p>\n
“What I saw was a case of ‘we’re not interested in talking to the people who know, this is what we want to do and we’re going to do it regardless’ and it’s a sort of ‘my way or the highway’ approach,” she said.<\/p>\n
Coleman said the government should have listened to a wider range of views on the curriculum.<\/p>\n
“You need a diverse range of opinions. You need to work through all of the nuances that are in education. It is a complicated space and you need to know enough to know what you don’t know and to bring in the right people into those conversations and to rely on the expertise and that’s, I think, the point of having a ministry,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Regardless of which direction you want this to go in or regardless of what policy you want, you draw on the best people and the best evidence that you’ve got to make that a really solid piece of work.”<\/p>\n
Coleman said proposed law changes would give future education ministers the power to rewrite the curriculum again, but that work should be left to education experts.<\/p>\n
Education Minister Erica Stanford was asked to comment and her office referred Nine to Noon to an Education Ministry response supplied following Coleman’s select committee appearance.<\/p>\n
It said the ministry was responsible for writing the curriculum and worked with a wide range of local education experts, teachers and other stakeholders.<\/p>\n
“The curriculum-writing process is rigourous and includes multiple cycles of review and refinement. It combines evidence, insights, and experiences over the last 20 years with formal feedback and input from a wide range of groups from across the education sector,” the statement said.<\/p>\n
“Ministers have always been responsible for the curriculum sign-off as part of the process.”<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: RNZ \/ Quin Tauetau A former Education Ministry staff member says the government’s curriculum rewrite ignored the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[48,47,42,43,49,46,44,45,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-277115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-current-affairs","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-podcasts","13":"tag-public-radio","14":"tag-radio-new-zealand","15":"tag-rnz","16":"tag-top-news","17":"tag-top-stories","18":"tag-topnews","19":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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