Labour’s Ginny Andersen challenges Erica Stanford’s education overhaul

“Those skills set us up well, but they’re not going to meet the needs of our children to confront a very different world that they’re going into.”

Among the reforms introduced by Stanford are structured literacy and structured numeracy, knowledge-rich approaches to teaching in which specific knowledge and skills for children to learn are set out for each year level.

She has also mandated primary and intermediate schools to teach an hour a day each for reading, writing and maths, has completed and introduced new maths and English curriculums, will require more regular assessment of children and reporting to parents, will make science compulsory in Year 11 and will replace NCEA in secondary schools.

In the interview, Andersen is at pains to say that Labour would not undo Stanford’s reforms, holus-bolus.

“I want to be clear if it’s reading, writing and maths, if there’s good progress being made there, we’re not going to rip that up or say that we get rid of that.

“We’ll be pragmatic. If it’s in place and it’s working well, we’ll leave it alone.”

Labour has unequivocally said it would abolish charter schools and it would reinstate the requirement for school boards of trustees to give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi.

But other than that, nailing down specifics from Labour is hard, partly because it is saving most of its policy announcements until after next week’s Budget.

It is also caught between reforms that appear to be popular with parents and unpopular with teachers – or at least teacher unions.

Labour would not put it this way, but Stanford’s success in education is causing political problems in this election year for Labour.

Since the days of Peter Fraser as Education Minister in the first Labour Government, Labour has traditionally seen itself as the party of education, in much the same way that National sees itself as the party of business. It is not used to being usurped.

In last week’s Taxpayer Union-Curia poll, one of the questions asked respondents which party they believed would provide a high-quality education. National rated ahead of Labour by 33% to 28% (including 10% of people who said they would vote Labour).

In the same question a year ago, Labour was ahead of National by three points.

It was not a surprise that Andersen got the job in Chris Hipkins’ March reshuffle of the Labour caucus. The former spokeswoman, Willow-Jean Prime, was getting no cut-through.

Embarrassingly, after Prime had called for a greater bipartisan approach, it was revealed she had ignored and then rejected invitations by Stanford to meetings about her reforms.

Andersen has responsibility for the compulsory education sector, as well as police, jobs and incomes, and Treaty of Waitangi negotiations. Former Education Minister Jan Tinetti has responsibility for early childhood education and Shanan Halbert has responsibility for tertiary and vocational education.

Andersen was raised by parents who were primary school teachers, and she experienced a wide range of schools herself before studying political science and te reo Māori at the University of Canterbury.

Her master’s thesis was titled, “Indigenous self-determination within the liberal democratic state: Ngāi Tahu rangatiratanga in the post-settlement era”.

She said that seeing the work her parents did to change young people’s lives was one of the reasons she was interested in politics.

She recalls visits to her home as a child by young people thanking her parents for putting them on the right path to study or work, which sometimes left her mother tearful.

“Seeing that early on made you see the power that a teacher has to make a positive influence, that people aren’t consigned to one pathway. They can change and there’s a role for education in being able to provide that.”

Andersen has been on a fast-track to promotion in Labour since Hipkins, a fellow Hutt Valley MP, was thrust into the Prime Minister’s job in January 2023. They both worked in the Beehive under the Helen Clark Government – she for Margaret Wilson, David Cunliffe and Trevor Mallard.

She also worked as a public servant – as a policy analyst at the Office of Treaty Settlements and for the police, including work on Judith Collins’ car crushing laws and Sir John Key’s response to the methamphetamine epidemic.

Andersen was first elected to Parliament in 2017. Under Hipkins she went from backbencher to Police Minister to replace the party leader and Justice Minister to replace Kiri Allan.

In Opposition, she is seen as one of the more energised attack dogs, although she has not yet had time to make her mark in education.

She said that on day one of the job, she asked Stanford for a briefing but was told it would not happen until after the Budget.

“For over three months, I have been waiting to be able to sit down with her to understand what a bipartisan approach might look like.”

In the 10 weeks since Andersen took over education, she has asked only one education question in the House. It was about Stanford mistakenly embedding a video link in a sector email that directed readers to a National Party website and Andersen was mocked by the minister for making that her first issue.

She issued a press statement calling for more detail and consultation after Stanford announced that NCEA would be replaced.

“Our children’s education shouldn’t be guided by political ideology and is far too important to get wrong,” Andersen said.

Last month, she published an opinion piece on Substack criticising Stanford’s embrace of the knowledge-rich approach to learning and accusing the Government of rushing reviews of the social science and science curriculums. She suggested the Government was taking “a wrecking ball” to education.

In this past week, with a raft of Stanford announcements and a big education bill before the House, Andersen has been more vocal in her education role.

In a few days, Stanford has announced that science will be compulsory in Year 11 from 2028, that the replacement for NCEA, the New Zealand Certificate of Education and the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education, will have a mix of internal assessment and exams, that students will be graded from A to E, that students will need to study at least five subjects each year and that they will need to pass a minimum of three.

She also announced a slowdown in the rollout of the science and social science curriculum and a Budget package of $131 million over four years.

Andersen and Stanford went head-to-head in debates over the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill, which, among other things, sets out new processes for future curriculum reviews, allows for a single sponsor to hold contracts for multi-school charter schools, overhauls the Teaching Council, and establishes the New Zealand School Property Agency.

They have had some testy exchanges during debates, including one on Tuesday night in which Andersen sarcastically suggested that Stanford was getting her ideas from her former work as a producer for Piha Rescue.

Stanford suggested she drop her “nasty” comments.

So is Labour opposed to a knowledge-rich education system?

Andersen doesn’t quite go that far. But she believes it is a one-size-fits-all approach to education that will not suit every child.

“I don’t support saying ‘my way or the highway’.”

Asked if there was an ideological difference between Labour and National on education, she said yes, with the caveat, again, that Labour agreed that reading, writing and maths were the fundamental building blocks of a good education system.

“The point of difference is that we think there are some additional skills that young people need to survive in the current world we find ourselves in, and that is critical thinking, that is being creative, that’s being able to solve a problem.

“If you’re waiting for the bus and it doesn’t arrive and you can tell it’s 22 minutes late, what are you going to do now?

“We want to equip our kids to be able to think of how they deal with a really rapidly changing world.”

She believed a knowledge-rich approach treated children as though they all learned the same way.

“Even if you’re a parent with more than two kids, you’ll know that your children learn differently between them, and we would like to have an education system that says there’s not just one science of learning.

“If knowledge-rich is one pathway teachers want to use, great, but there are other ways in order to make sure that we are reaching everyone we can.”

She believed the knowledge-rich approach removed flexibility from the system and did not allow teachers to understand what might spark excitement for a particular student to help them learn.

“The system strips that ability away from teachers because they’re expected to do a certain fact at a certain time and be tested on that at a certain time afterwards.

“It takes away the flexibility of what reaching all students will be able to do.”

So would a Labour Government change the knowledge-rich approach?

“I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it. I’m just saying if I was the Minister of Education, I would not say ‘this or nothing else’.”

She said school principals, teachers and parents had a good understanding of what worked for their kids, “not just the minister and the ministry having a top-down approach in prescribing the way it’s going to work, to the dotting the I and crossing the T”.

What about the replacement for NCEA?

“We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Andersen said. “If there are parts of NCEA that did need fixing, we’re happy to do that.

“I think this has been an overcorrection of fixing some of those issues.”

Labour has often been accused of being too close to teachers and the teacher unions rather than to parents.

Andersen puts a different slant on it: “I would personally like to think my kids’ teacher knows better about what to do for their education than Erica Stanford does.

“We’ve got a minister who’s got right down into the detail of micromanaging her ministry, of bringing in ideas she’s read from overseas… and all of that’s being done to our kids without the engagement and involvement of teaching professionals. That’s my concern.”