Alwyn Poole: The World’s Most Educated Countries

Versions of below have been in media around the world in the last two weeks.

“In its 2026 assessment, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development highlighted the world’s most educated countries, pointing to strong higher education access and sustained investment in learning.

Corey Smith: When Indoctrination Masquerades as Education

New Hampshire Republicans recently pushed a bill through the state House to prohibit public schools from teaching curricula such as critical race theory, LGBTQ, and gender ideology. The bill, titled the CHARLIE Act (Countering Hate and Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education), is named after the late conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk. It was partly inspired by the discovery of race-based training materials in handouts and in recommended reading found in three NH cities, including Manchester, the largest city north of Boston. The measure has predictably caused arguments between both parties in the Granite State.

Roger Partridge: In defence of educational caution

Education Minister Erica Stanford stands accused of compressing a generation of reform into two years. Her programme is “radical,” “ideological,” and risks turning children into guinea pigs.

Auckland University’s Professor Peter O’Connor calls it neoliberal “shock-and-awe.”

These are serious charges. History teaches us that haste in education leads to disaster.

Kerre Woodham: Back to the future with specialist schools for complex needs

I've always understood the theory behind mainstreaming. We're all different, we all have different abilities, different attitudes, and a classroom of individuals with diverse personalities and levels of learning prepares young people for the real world. You're not among your own kind once you leave school and enter the workplace, enter the community. Mainstreaming means that kids who are different physically, intellectually, socially, aren't siloed or separated or marginalised. They're part of the wider school community and if they need extra time or attention, well in an ideal classroom, the teacher gladly offers it and the other students make space, accepting that some people need more resources than others.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: From blueprints to building

After many difficult years, 2025 felt different. It was not easier. The economy remained stagnant and the reform agenda demanded hard choices. But attitudes shifted. New Zealand stopped merely diagnosing its problems and started taking practical steps to solve them.

Roger Partridge: The Open Mind and the Closed University

Last month, Dame Anne Salmond issued a public challenge to the very idea of reason – the commitment to shared standards of inquiry that has delivered unprecedented human flourishing over the past three centuries.

Salmond is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated public intellectuals. She was writing in Newsroom on 18 November – the same day legislation requiring universities to protect open debate and remain “institutionally neutral” received royal assent. Salmond opposes the reform. For her, neutrality is a fiction: there is no common ground – only competing worldviews.

Kevin: Another One Who Doesn’t Get Freedom of Speech

Anne Salmond.

Newsroom’s series of articles on the Free Speech Union has been illuminating.

Perhaps the most entertaining was David Williams’ account of their AGM in Christchurch, which featured the Wizard of Christchurch, Brian Tamaki and ‘prominent conspiracy influencer’ Chantelle Baker as well as Jordan Williams from the Taxpayers’ Union and Eric Crampton from the New Zealand Initiative.

Note the subtle put down of using the word entertaining.

Scott Kennedy: Refocusing Education On Education

In early November, the New Zealand Principals’ Federation (NZPF) released a media statement criticising the Government’s plan to remove Treaty of Waitangi responsibilities from school boards. The Federation described the move as “extreme” and “far right,” urging boards to continue giving effect to the Treaty in their governance.

It’s hard to overstate how disconnected this concern is from the real challenges facing education in New Zealand. It raises serious questions about whether the Federation is primarily interested in education itself or in promoting a programme of left-wing social engineering.

Roger Partridge: Heretics in the Temple of Educational Orthodoxy

A Moral Reckoning, Not a Culture War

When my colleague Dr Michael Johnston took the stage at a national education conference late last month, he didn’t expect applause. Johnston, a cognitive psychologist and Senior Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, chaired Education Minister Erica Stanford’s Ministerial Advisory Group reviewing the primary-school English, maths and statistics curricula. He continues to serve on the Ministry’s Curriculum Coherence Group. He was speaking at UpliftEd, a conference organised by the Aotearoa Educators Collective.

David Farrar: Here’s some wasteful spending the Government could redirect

The Herald reports:

The Government’s fees-free policy reset is at risk of following its predecessor in failing to incentivise tertiary study and only benefiting the more advantaged.

The warning is included in a Ministry of Education-led analysis, which found the “deadweight” policy to be so poor that it recommended axing it and spending the money elsewhere.

Erica Stanford: Refreshed national curriculum to raise achievement

Education Minister Erica Stanford today announced the release of the full draft of New Zealand’s new Year 1–10 curriculum, another significant step toward delivering a world-leading education system for every learner in New Zealand.

“This is a major milestone. It’s been almost 20 years since our New Zealand Curriculum was last fully updated, much has changed in our country and the world since then. Going forward, New Zealand will have a clear, knowledge-rich, year-by-year curriculum that sets out what every child should learn and when, ensuring consistency, coherence, and a fairer education system,” Ms Stanford says.

Mike's Minute: How miserable it is if you can't celebrate good news

Dr Hosking would diagnose a kind of "funk" as a result of observations this week.

There's been two very clear examples these past few days of good news, of uplifting events and of indisputable progress. Yet for too many it was not a reason to acknowledge, or accept, or congratulate, but rather moan a bit more or find a reason as to why it can't be so.

Alwyn Poole: Seems not to matter much who is leading in National on Education ...

I wrote this week on the fact that the school with the highest EQI (most at risk students) gets less to help each year than the Minister of Education’s salary anly only 2.14% more than the lowest EQI schools.

I then looked back at a piece I wrote when Paul Goldsmith was the spokesperson for Education … I found it interesting … hope you do also.

Point the Hose at the Fire Paul!

Bob Edlin: Oh dear: look what the Government has done to the wananga..........

Oh dear: look what the Government has done to the wananga – but what about the cutbacks in humanities at Vic?

A tertiary education organisation with around 1,500 staff is about to cut its work force by 4 per cent.

We learned this from the Tertiary Education Union which identified the reason: it is citing “the National-led government’s assault on Māori as the underlying cause of a proposed net loss of 60 jobs at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa”.

An assault on Māori has triggered the wananga’s staff cuts?

Really?

Alwyn Poole: Erica Stanford’s solutions to the problems posed by her inner circle have positive aspects …

But they are not the highest priority problems.

I have a son who is a professional fire-fighter. I would imagine that they most basic advice they receive is to point the hose at the fire.

Stanford has done almost nothing on what all data and research show to be the most important aspects for the education of our children and young people. There is barely any water going on the flames.

Andrew Dickens: What should we do with NCEA?

So here we go again. A national conversation about whether NCEA is C.R.A.P

A damning Government briefing presented in June has raised significant concerns about the credibility of New Zealand’s main secondary school qualification.

Tui Vaeau: Fluency for the Few, Cost for the Many

Why You’re Paying for a Language Almost No One Uses - or Understands

“We’re all forced to echo small words that make big noise and mean nothing to most of us.”

Indeed. Small words, big noise. That, in essence, is what te reo Māori has become in modern New Zealand: a disproportionately celebrated state hobby enforced by bureaucrats, virtue-signallers, and treaty-industrialists under the pretext of national identity. Te reo is not our national language. It is not widely spoken, understood, or requested. It is being rammed down our collective throat by Wellington’s bureaucratic caste and the Māori elite, a partnership more obsessed with symbolism than with service.

Bob Edlin: Teachers say Treaty must be included in our English curriculum......

Teachers say Treaty must be included in our English curriculum – but are we envied by overseas schools?

Time is running out, if you want to contribute to the consultation on a draft intermediate and secondary school English curriculum that reportedly prioritises Shakespeare, grammar and 19th century literature. A report from RNZ says the consultation “ closes on Friday”, which is today.

Tony Vaughn: Racial Romanticism Is Not Policy - The Cost of Coddling a Myth

David Seymour committed the cardinal sin of contemporary politics - he told the truth! Race-based funding is racist. A statement so obviously true that it ought to be stitched onto the curtains of the Beehive and should be self-evident to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. Yet, predictably, Tama Potaka emerged, starch-shirted and squinting in moral indignation, to denounce Seymour's comments as “unhelpful.” No, Mr Potaka. What is truly unhelpful is the systematic diversion of public funds into a racial fantasy built on grievance economics and revisionist nostalgia.

Corey Smith: Is It Time to Rethink the Role of Teachers?

Maybe a bloated bureaucracy and ideological practices aren’t helping.

For a long time, many people have blamed public school teachers for the decline in student learning. They’re on the front lines, so it makes sense. Surely not all educators are at fault, and even the ones who are part of the problem can’t be fully to blame when they have so little authority.