The politics behind call to depoliticise education

Summarised by Centrist

NZ Principals’ Federation president Jason Miles accused Erica Stanford of effectively campaigning for National during her address to an international principals’ convention, despite organisers requesting a non-political welcome.

Stanford described his subsequent behaviour as “rude, aggressive and unprofessional”. 

RNZ notes her speech discussed government reforms without referencing National Party policies. NZPF is advocating an independent curriculum and assessment council.

Editor’s note: Miles’s campaign to depoliticise education comes with political preferences of its own.

Miles himself previously championed structured literacy, but many of his published positions sit recognisably on the progressive left: strong emphasis on Treaty obligations, identity, wellbeing and professional autonomy. Defending the 2023 curriculum draft, he wrote in the Otago Daily Times: “It centred student identity and wellbeing and embraced Te Tiriti o Waitangi.” His checklist for the replacement curriculum asks whether “Matauranga Māori and Te Tiriti are sufficiently embedded”. These are not politically neutral positions.

There is also a revealing precedent. NZPF’s own magazine records that Chris Hipkins opened its 2022 conference and then discussed Labour’s abolition of National Standards, curriculum reforms, replacement of decile funding and school meals. The account records no objection to his policy content. 

The system Miles defends from radical reform plainly has serious shortcomings, although these figures do not establish that his preferred policies caused them. Ministry of Education figures show that in 2023, just 22% of Year 8 students met the study’s provisional maths benchmark. By 2025, that figure was still only 24%.

There are encouraging gains under the coalition government’s reforms. Regular attendance reached 64.3% in Term 2 this year, up from 58.4% a year earlier. Māori regular attendance rose from 43.7% to 49.1%.

Year 6 students meeting the provisional maths benchmark increased from 30% in 2024 to 36% in 2025; writing rose from 33% to 38%. Among voluntarily submitted Māori phonics results, the proportion meeting expectations at the 20-week checkpoint increased from 26% in Term 1 to 40% in Term 4 of 2025. 

These are promising results, although the figures alone cannot establish the reforms’ causal effect.

Read more at RNZ

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