In 2022, the Curriculum Centre at the Ministry of Education employed 308 staff, according to an Official Information Request. Earlier this week it was announced 202 of those staff were being cut. When you look up "The New Zealand Curriculum" on the Ministry of Education's Website, you find a notice that, "We are preparing to close this site as we transition to Tāhūrangi" but when you click on that site you get an incoherent jumble of chaos. At least it's amusing - you can click on a "unit" that helps "students develop an understanding of the financial challenges faced by superannuitants in their local community". That must get the youth of NZ excited out of their minds.
As for the document called The NZ Curriculum, it contains the flimsiest, shallowest, lightest-of-weight 60 pages of silly blurbs & patronizing cliches, mostly contained in bullet points, mixed with general waffle, with just 30 pages dedicated to specific subject-directed aims. Even those are full of comical lines like, "Key Competencies - Thinking, Managing Self ..". The entire shambles is introduced with the line, "It is my pleasure to introduce this revision of the NZ Curriculum" by the Secretary of Education. But when you have finished reading it, you are left wondering, "So where is the NZ Curriculum? Did I miss something?".
The bizarre feature of the document is that it is "Published in 2015 by the Ministry of Education" and was "First published for the Ministry of Education [in] 2007". But that pre-dates the Ardern government. So what have the 308 staff working in the Curriculum Centre been doing these past several years? Were the 202 staff just made redundant mulling over changes to a 60 page document? Maybe how to change font size & color? If the document called The NZ Curriculum was submitted as a Year 12 school project, it would fail. If you multiply the 308 staff by an average salary of $80,000, a conservative number given Wellington pay-scales, you get about $25,000,000 - yes $25 million dollars. Has the Kiwi Tax Payer been billed that amount of money year after year - that is, over $100 million - for 60 pages of PR, marketing and communications-inspired glossy pages of nothingness?
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Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. Rob blogs at Down To Earth Kiwi