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

The Ministry had hired Learning First to advise on curriculum development. The distinction it is making — between sourcing content (finding and gathering material) and authoring the curriculum (making the actual writing and design decisions) — sits at the centre of the debate. Critics want to know exactly what the firm was asked to do and how that boundary worked in practice.

This scrutiny arrives as New Zealand's schooling system goes through a substantial overhaul. The government is removing NCEA Level 1 and replacing it with curriculum-driven learning in Year 11, announced in March 2026. New secondary school subjects are planned to arrive from 2028 as part of a future-focused curriculum, signalled in September 2025. The updated curriculum framework, Te Mātaiaho, will underpin these refreshed learning areas from 2027, confirmed in October 2025.

Mathematics sits at the heart of these changes. The government announced a transformation of mathematics education in August 2024, describing it as a response to long-running underachievement in the subject. Learning First's role emerged within that broader transformation.

The firm's involvement was first publicly flagged in November 2025 by Engaging Learning Voices, a group that said the Ministry's handling of the curriculum process had damaged trust among practitioners — teachers and other educators involved in schools. The RNZ report in June 2026 brought these concerns into Parliament and political discussion.

The wider curriculum reform programme is also moving through the law-making process. The Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill, currently before Parliament, changes the Education and Training Act 2020 to put new policy decisions into effect and make technical adjustments. A separate Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Bill focuses on how early childhood education is regulated — an area governed by Te Whāriki rather than the general curriculum, as recommended by the Advisory Group on Early Learning in 2015. The Education and Workforce Select Committee examined the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) and reported back in May 2025; it also ran an inquiry into online harms facing young New Zealanders, tabled in March 2026.

The question of overseas advisors helping shape domestic curriculum content is not new in New Zealand education policy, but it matters more now given how much is being rewritten at once. The government is reshaping assessment at Year 11, updating the national curriculum framework, introducing new secondary subjects, and overhauling early childhood regulation. Learning First's work is specific to mathematics, but the Ministry's claim — that the firm sourced rather than wrote — will be tested by how much of the final curriculum can be traced to material it found.

For officials and educators following the process, there are two linked but distinct concerns: whether the Ministry has been transparent about how it worked, and whether the curriculum belongs to New Zealand or has been shaped from overseas. These matter differently. A Ministry that uses an external firm to research international evidence about what works in mathematics teaching is doing something professionally sound; a Ministry that hands over the actual writing decisions to an outside firm is something else. The Ministry says the first is what happened. Whether records and documents support that claim remains to be tested, and may depend on whether the Education and Workforce Committee decides to dig into it.