'Mis-speaking' in Select Committee About the MAG's Public Service Violations.
Under questioning by Lawrence Xu-Nan in the December, 2024, Education Select Committee, MacGregor-Reid made this initial statement about MAG (1:19):
“The Ministry, as it would with any MAG, provided secretariat support. We also provided background papers, information that was requested. The MAG produced their report. That report was considered by the Minister in discussion with the Ministry. The Minister took some decisions, some of their recommendations she agreed with, some of them she wanted to consider further, some of them she amended, and from there the Ministry looked to start work. We did remain in contact with members of the MAG as we commenced work on the curriculum areas that they had been tasked to look at by the Minister so that as we were thinking about criteria we were using for that design we were quality assuring, we were keeping in mind and getting that advice from them in the parts of their report that the Minister had agreed with.”
Xu-Nan then asked who gave authority for MAG members to continue in the design of the curriculum. She stated (1:20):
“The MAG ceased to be in place. The MAG itself did not undertake the writing or participate in the design. Once the MAG was completed and the Ministry was looking to set up writing groups, establish the processes around ourselves with the expertise we needed to undertake the writing, we contracted a range of people and we chose to contract some people who had also been part of the MAG, but the MAG itself ceased to operate.”
This is not true. The person sitting next to her, Pauline Clever, was in a meeting with Stanford on 6 March, 2024, where the agenda clearly stated the MAG was rewriting the Maths and English curriculums.
When challenged on this, MacGregor-Reid changes the story (1:21):
“We did have an issue, and it’s come out by OIA, where one MAG member, you know, they were very excited by the work, they threw themselves into it, commenced work. We rectified that situation. We looked at what was occurring and from our perspective, the MAG process came to an end, the Ministry then took over from there and groups were established.”
Why only reveal this when pressed? Why constantly claim the opposite? Even Stanford has denied the MAG wrote the curriculum documents. For instance, in an interview on Radio New Zealand on 12 June, 2024, she said:
“The MoE have now gone and put writing groups together which are quite separate from the MAG … they’ve used their own processes … I didn’t even know who the people were until just recently … and they’re now putting together some ideas … they’ve only just started writing”.
Why say this? She knows that's not true.
On 30 May, ERO, as part of the Quality Assurance process Stanford was so proud to have put in place, had refused to evaluate a draft of the English curriculum because the "materials were originally written by the Ministerial Advisory Group".