An Australian consultancy's involvement in rewriting New Zealand's school curriculum came under scrutiny on 17 June 2026, with Ministry of Education officials clarifying that Learning First — led by Ben Jensen — helped find content for the new mathematics curriculum but did not write it, according to RNZ.

Learning First was engaged by the Ministry to advise on curriculum development. The distinction the Ministry is drawing — between sourcing content and authoring the curriculum — is the central point of contention. Critics have questioned what, precisely, the firm's brief covered and how that boundary was maintained in practice.

The scrutiny lands in the middle of a substantial overhaul of New Zealand's schooling system. The government has confirmed it will remove NCEA Level 1 and replace it with curriculum-driven learning in Year 11, announced in March 2026. New secondary school subjects are planned to phase in from 2028 as part of a future-focused curriculum, signalled in September 2025. Underpinning the delivery of those refreshed learning areas from 2027 is Te Mātaiaho, the updated curriculum framework, confirmed in October 2025.

The maths curriculum sits at the heart of all of this. The government announced a transformation of mathematics education in August 2024, framing the move as a response to persistent underachievement in the subject. It is within that transformation that Learning First's role has now drawn attention.

The firm's engagement was first flagged publicly in a November 2025 commentary by Engaging Learning Voices, which described the Ministry's handling of the curriculum process as having collapsed trust among practitioners. The RNZ report on 17 June 2026 brings that concern into the parliamentary and political frame.

The broader curriculum reform programme is also proceeding through legislation. The Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill, currently before Parliament, amends the Education and Training Act 2020 to give effect to new policy decisions and make minor and technical changes. A separate Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Bill targets the effectiveness of the early childhood education regulatory system — a space where Te Whāriki, not the New Zealand Curriculum, remains the governing framework, as the Advisory Group on Early Learning recommended in 2015. The Education and Workforce Select Committee has examined the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2), reporting back in May 2025, and conducted an inquiry into the online harms facing young New Zealanders, tabled in March 2026.

The question of offshore advisory involvement in domestic curriculum content is not novel in New Zealand's education policy debates, but it carries particular weight given the scale of what is currently being rewritten. The government is simultaneously reshaping assessment at Year 11, refreshing the national curriculum framework, introducing new secondary subjects, and overhauling early childhood regulation. Learning First's role sits specifically within the maths strand, but the Ministry's line — that the firm sourced rather than wrote — will be tested by how much of the final curriculum product can be traced to material it identified.

For officials and sector stakeholders watching the process, the scrutiny is in part about transparency of process and in part about national ownership of the curriculum. Those are distinct concerns. A Ministry that uses an external firm to identify international evidence about what works in mathematics teaching is doing something methodologically defensible; a Ministry that outsources the authorial decisions is a different matter. The Ministry's current position holds that the former is what occurred. Whether the record supports that will depend on what documentation is available and whether the Education and Workforce Committee pursues it.