Allan Alach – More Reasons Why Stanford Must Go!

There’s an old joke which goes something like this – how do you know if a politician is lying? Answer – their lips are moving.

That would appear to apply to many ministers of the current government, Simeon Brown being a prime example. It certainly appears to apply to Erica Stanford who doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with the truth.

You will have seen the news item about a Ministry of Education staff member advising members of a working committee on the new curriculum to avoid writing down anything that could be subject to an OIA. It is indisputable that this is what was said. 

Since then the same whistleblower has revealed more accusations about the devious happenings in the Ministry of Education over preventing OIA access to curriculum developments.

Education whistleblower claims OIA subversion not an isolated incident

‘The person who leaked a video of an Education Ministry official apparently attempting to subvert the Official Information Act (OIA) claims it was not an isolated incident.

The ministry insider, who RNZ has agreed not to identify, also revealed that they and other ministry staff were repeatedly asked to delete the word “Aotearoa” and other Māori terms from draft curriculums – but the instructions were deliberately verbal and never put into writing.

The person said they were speaking out because they had “had a gutsful”.

“I was just so over the dishonesty and the toxicity of the workplace,” they said.’

The old saying ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ comes to mind.

So ignoring the principle that the buck stops at the top, Minister of Education Erica Stanford has dumped this on to the Ministry of Education. 

Firstly, Minister, you are responsible for the actions of the Ministry, in the same way Minister Upston is responsible for the actions of MSD. You can’t sidestep this by blaming the Ministry, whose purpose is solely to implement government policies and the instructions of the minister.

However, the immediate question that comes to mind is why has the culture of avoiding being subject to the OIA became widespread through the Ministry, and for all we know, through other ministries as well? One inescapable conclusion is that this is due to instructions from the Erica Stanford, regardless of her protestations, or is it a government wide directive?

Martyn Bradbury discusses this here:

Erica Stanford’s Ministry caught out manipulating OIA scrutiny

‘On top of that we now have officials specifically manipulating the OIA process so critics can’t find out what new fuckwittery Erica is up to.

Here’s the question to the Right Wing Hate Trolls, if what you are doing is so above board in education, why the Christ are you having to hide it?’

That, Martyn, is an excellent question.

Moving on, we need to examine yet another of Erica’s attempts to spin the success of her educational genius.

One of her signature moves, as usual heavily influenced by the New Zealand Initiative, this time Dr Michael Johnson, was to completely overturn the way reading is taught to junior children, moving to a phonics based programme, defined in Wikipedia as

‘Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language.’

I won’t get into the argument of the merits or otherwise of this – suffice to say that for every research paper promoting its success, there are others which tell an opposite story.

For example: 

The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics

Recently an article by a primary school principal was published on the Aotearoa Educators Collective substack.

Whose experiment has ‘failed’? 

Unpacking the national Phonics Check Data…not all that glitters is gold.

‘In October 2025 our Minister of Education put out a press release titled ‘Transformational new entrant reading’ where she celebrated the success of the Term 3 Phonics Check results. In the release we got a quote from Minister Stanford:

“This is an incredible improvement in reading scores in less than half a year and reflects the brilliant work teachers are doing. These results are evidence our structured literacy reforms work for everyone, all schools, all ethnicities, all deciles. Raising reading achievement right from the first year of school gives our young people the best chance of success at school,” Ms Stanford says.’

Hey, marvellous, maybe Erica is an educational genius after all, except for one tiny issue – the testing was based on children’s ability to sound out nonsense words. Definitely not a test of reading which requires the ability to decode and understand meaningful sentences.

‘We have also had press releases, headlines, quotes from the Minister about New Zealand’s ‘failed experiments’ in education:

Modern Learning Environments – failure

Play-based learning – failure

Project/Maker learning – failure

And just recently…device use in schools – failure.’

Hmm, those are big claims, Minister, and big claims need big evidence.

The author continues:

‘Full disclaimer here…I’m principal of a school that is housed in modern learning environments, runs a play-based learning programme in the junior school and a project/maker learning programme in the seniors…and we are a recently accredited Apple Distinguished School…so all the claims of failure over the last three years have felt personal, hurtful and unsubstantiated. At every turn, every announcement, every soundbite…I’ve had to explain and defend to my community (who are super supportive of what we do). We are also a school that has been on the BSLA journey since 2021, and we are a school whose standardised test results are ‘pretty decent’ (more on that later).

Back to the press release…I remember reading it and thinking, wow…they are claiming that level of success right away?

The release is doing more than reporting an improvement in one assessment measure. It connects the results to the effectiveness of the government’s structured literacy reforms across the education system.’

But wait…

‘Fast forward to the end of Term 1 this year…all Check results are submitted online, and I looked forward to reading my report. It never came, and after months of chasing the MOE they finally said that national level data wouldn’t be released until 2027. This annoyed me, and no matter how I tried (and I knew the data was there) they wouldn’t release it.’

Hmm, I wonder why. Any one care to guess?

‘In an email response to me at the end of July (start of Term 3) they said “You are still welcome to request the information via an OIA request.”…

So I did.

And the data isn’t great.

And that data isn’t being made public.

And our Minister certainly isn’t sending out press releases claiming her reforms have sorted reading achievement based on it.’

Oh…. 

Do I hear the sound of hubris collapsing?

‘The MOE’s own evidence shows that a strong result at the 20-week checkpoint does not automatically establish sustained achievement at 40 weeks. Even in October when the press release triumphed that in the 20 Week check 58 per cent of students were at or above expectations…that same cohort in their 40 Week Check were just 29% at or above expectations. They would have made progress (I’m not saying they went backward), but they aren’t maintaining the level of progress described in the test, unable to sustain their achievement.’

One would think that if Erica’s new structured reading was so good, children would continue to develop their reading skills.

‘The 2026 40-week results challenge the idea of a straightforward transformation. The OIA document reports the following for Term 2, 2026:

53% of students at or above expectation at 20 weeks.

27% at or above expectation at 40 weeks.’

To me, that is a definition of a failing system.

In October 2025, the Ministry crowed

“These results are evident [that] our structured literacy reforms work for everyone, all schools, all ethnicities, all deciles.”

Wow. Wonderful. Maybe I am so out of date. 

What does the author say?

‘The OIA evidence does not establish that proposition. Things are not getting better, things are not sorted. No change in 12 months overall. The Ministry continues to report disparities for Māori and Pacific learners and for schools in higher-barrier EQI groups. The Ministry’s own matched-cohort analysis identifies slowing progress between the two checkpoints.’

Oh dear…

‘The Minister specifically claims the reforms work for all ethnicities and all deciles.

The OIA reports, however, that:

“Achievement disparities persist for Māori and Pacific learners compared with other ethnicities.”’

I think we can see why Erica hasn’t been firing out self congratulatory press releases.

This next section gets to the heart of the issue.

‘The biggest problem is with the wording: “reading achievement” versus phonics achievement. This is another point I would debate. The OIA document is about Phonics Checks. These assess elements of early phonics learning against curriculum expectations. The Minister’s release repeatedly refers to reading achievement, confident readers and reading scores. The distinction matters because:

Phonics knowledge is an important foundation for reading.

Phonics Check performance is not the same as a comprehensive assessment of reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension or overall reading ability.

A rise in phonics attainment can be meaningful without demonstrating that all dimensions of reading achievement have improved to the same extent.’

Exactly.

‘Despite this…the Minister has repeatedly used her October 2025 data to show that ‘reading’ as a whole has improved. But we can now see that even in the limited slice of early reading development that these checks measure…phonics knowledge and related skills…we aren’t seeing the kind of sustained improvement that the Minister’s language suggests.’.

The author concludes:

‘Perhaps we should be a little more cautious about sweeping claims that particular approaches have “failed”…just as we should be cautious about sweeping claims that a new reform has transformed an entire education system based on a small slice of early assessment data.

Because educational change is complicated. Schools are complicated. Children are complicated. There are no magic bullets.

And if the evidence doesn’t support either extreme…perhaps it’s time we stopped looking for educational winners and losers.

So tell me Minister…who has ‘failed’ here?’

Good question.

Ponder on this: this article discusses one very limited aspect of Stanford’s education agenda.

We have no idea what will happen to all the other aspects of children’s learning, especially in the very untried area of the knowledge based curriculum. As I (and others) have written previously the research on which this is based is very limited, and so, regardless of Stanford’s bluster, this is very much an educational experiment.

New Zealand primary teachers are very skilled and adaptable and I have faith that they will find ways to ensure children learn – they’ve managed to do this through previous National led governments interfering in the teaching and learning programmes in schools. Doing this in a structured learning environment, where teachers are handed a teaching programme and told to work through it, will be an extra challenge.

In the short term, I hope for our children’s sake this works. 

In the long term I hope that this untried educational experiment is tossed out and we return to the teaching and learning philosophies and programmes that made this New Zealand a world leader in the years before the neoliberal takeover of education in 1990.