An Australian Company Is At The Centre Of Our Curriculum

Today, I had confirmation in an OIA response that Learning First, a education consultancy based in Collingwood, played a key role in the development of our national curriculum docs.

They provided “insights” to help the Ministry with international benchmarking.

Little more detail was provided, but I do wonder why our Ministry did not have that capability in-house, given the extensive curriculum develop process it has been going through for the last 5 years.

And I do wonder about the procurement process here. Were the services of Ben Jensen’s company procured under urgency, as the maths textbooks were?

It gets worse. When you visit Learning First’s website, what you find is a small consultancy that has produced a few reports and offers programs for “teachers, school leaders, and system leaders”. Has our Minister signed up to a PLD course?

It will not surprise you to learn that Learning First advocate for a knowledge-rich curriculum based in the science of learning. It is this they claim is the answer to educational inequality. And, worryingly given today’s announcement, in 2015 they wrote a report critiquing ITE in which they suggested the autonomy of universities was a problem.

Erica Stanford has met a number of times with Ben Jensen. It seems she is convinced enough by his arguments that she has been happy to hand him control over our curriculum development.

A curriculum by kiwis for kiwi kids? Not quite, Erica.