The Procurement of Maths Textbooks
On the 4th of August 2024, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education announced the transformation of maths education. The justification was the (now debunked) shocking data that demonstrated extreme and unacceptable maths failure. The Prime Minister was “appalled” and empathised with all the parents who are “frustrated and despondent”. This failure is not a surprise, he said, because (and here he echoed his election tag-line of getting us back on track) it’s a reflection of where we’ve been going wrong as a country: “for years we have not been setting our kids up for success” because education had been overseen by a “distracted bureaucracy”1 and teachers subject to a “vague curriculum”. The crisis is urgent, they claimed, and so the plan for maths was to be brought forward a year2 because “if we aren’t setting our kids up for success, we aren’t setting New Zealand up for success.” Now is the time to get back to what we all value, he said: “achievement, opportunity, and success”.
But there is a distinction between valuing something and holding a value. At no point during the announcement, or since, have we had clarity about what values are guiding the direction of these education changes. Achievement is not a value, no matter how hard we value it. Success is not a value, no matter how much we want it. Opportunity is not a value, no matter how deserving we think we are of it. And so, the Prime Minister and Education Minister presented us with nothing more than a circular argument around opportunities for success and achievement. But they are certain about how this is to be enacted, and achieved successfully.
Where has this certainty come from?
Like many, I was surprised at force of this announcement. To me, it came out of nowhere, especially the pace of the plan. It took me a while to gather my thoughts into a coherent enough shape to start to see what it was that bothered me, and it wasn’t that the data they were relying on as justification was irrelevant — I had already come to expect that level of deception from this Government and the Minister of Education. What really bugged me initially was the ahistorical nature of the announcement: it denied the existence of any of the work that had been done during the curriculum refresh programme under the Labour Government, and instead opted, by using language that has been used repeatedly by Luxon in his attacks on that Government — “distracted”, “vague” and “bureaucratic” — to paint them as the principal agents of the crisis. That denial of history is a real problem because it warps our understanding of the present. No longer are we being asked to consider a proposal anchored in an accurate reflection of where we’ve come from. Instead, we are whisked into a blurry, malleable state, shaped in the interests of power. This denial of history in the interests of The Story means the past is only useful on inasmuch as it provides the teller with touchstones, allusions and symbols that support the story. It is this that really bothers me because democracy can only function when we are honest.
When those in power stop acting from a clear-eyed account of how we got to where we are, we are in a political situation where reality no longer matters; this is how democracy is made subservient to the interests of those with power. Understanding the source of that power becomes very important if we are to protect our democracy and the institutions that uphold it. And so, I became interested in what had been left out of the story and what those omissions might reveal about the motivations driving the changes to our education system. It seemed unrealistic to me that the Government could go from, in no time at all, not being aware of the problem to it being a crisis long in the making and them being certain of the solution. Stanford would like us to believe that she is merely responding to a situation she has been thrust into, and doing what she must to staunch the bleeding. How secure is her story?
First, I wanted some insight into the Minister’s thinking, and so I had Jan Tinetti submit a few Parliamentary Written Questions (PWQ) about the process behind the plan, specifically with a focus on the textbooks (I published those questions and the Minister’s response to them: ‘Parliamentary Questions, Part 2’). All answers to PWQ are official — they must be truthful. Second, I was interested in whether there had been any kind of lead-up to the announcement, and so I submitted an OIA looking for communications between the Minister and the publishers who were successful in winning contracts to provide textbooks to schools. Third, I helped Jan Tinetti and Lawrence Xu-Nan develop questions about the maths textbooks and actions of the MAG to be put to the Ministry leadership team and the Minister during the December education select committee. My plan was that the PWQ would give me a baseline through which to examine whatever came through in the OIA, with the select committee answers providing added detail.
The emails reveal the Minister has not given the full truth in some of her responses to the House. Furthermore, her actions, and the actions of the Ministry, are unusual and possibly unjustifiable when placed against the procurement rules for government. These actions, which are emerging as the modus operandi of the Ministry under Stanford’s watch, suggest a flippancy when sticking to public service processes and guidelines and, accordingly, are dangerous.
In the PWQ, I asked whether the Minister had made “any recommendations to Ministry of Education officials about suitable providers of the math resources before, during or after the Request for Proposal had closed?”, with her response being “I have not made any recommendations about suitable providers before or during the procurement process”. However, in an article by Laura Walters published on 18 June 2024 on Newsroom, Walters writes, “While it had not been officially recommended, the minister has mentioned Prime Maths could follow on from her structured approach to literacy.” (Keep Prime Maths in your head). Now, this sounds like a recommendation to me, albeit with the qualification of “officially” and it not being to Ministry officials acting, I grant, as get out of jail cards. But that date: close to two months prior to the announcement AND the publication date of the data upon which the situation was deemed to be a crisis and the plan was justified, we have the Minister speaking about Prime Maths, who would go on the be one of the successful tenderers, and (almost) using the phrase structured maths, with a journalist. Clearly, the government hasn’t acted as quickly as they would have us believe. And clearly, she has spoken favourably about one of the successful tenderers to a national journalist before the procurement process. Are we happy to play semantics here? And why would she single them out? There are many providers of maths textbooks, not just one.3
Another PWQ I asked was “how did the Minister become aware of those providers?”, with her response being “I was made aware of the approved providers once the procurement process had been completed. From talking to principals and teachers I was aware of some of the resources schools are using.” But as the previous example shows, the Minister was enthusiastic about one of the providers before the tender, and the emails show it wasn’t just from talking to educators. She has given us a part-truth.
This is concerning, because one thing that has been odd for the whole time Stanford has been in office is how involved she has been in everything. Often, she has moved from a governance role into a management one. A clear example, and perhaps one of the most eyebrow-raising ones, is that she admits in her answer to this same PWQ that “I approved the criteria for selecting maths resources though the procurement process”. A Minister should not be involved at that level, approving procurement criteria, especially one who has publicly mentioned in favourable terms a company that is likely to put in a tender. The potential for a conflict of interest, or even the impression of one, is too great because the criteria determine the context for awarding contracts. In this case, the non-trivial amount of $26.8 million + GST in the first year with the promise of at least a second year of funding and then the lure of continued payments from school operational budgets once the approach is entrenched.
When I asked about the procurement process in PWQ, the Minister relied on “urgency” as justification for the pace with which the plan was being enacted, and this was repeated in the answers given in the select committee. A selected number of providers were approached, she said, “because their products were already working well in schools, as well as having a proven track record of supplying at a national scale” (as we have found out, this capability may have been overstated in some instances) as the Ministry wanted to “ensure a rapid turn-around in commissioning the design, production and delivery of the resources”. This language used by the Minister is found in the RFP document, which also shows the procurement was run as a “single step closed procurement process” (that means it wasn’t advertised on GETs—only selected providers were invited to tender). In the select committee, urgency was used again to justify this, with Ellen MacGregor-Reid saying “we’ve been talking for a number of years as a system about challenges in maths and numeracy ... it’s well evidenced. From our perspective, we could have followed a full and long procurement process.” I guess the inference to be made here is they decided it was time to just get on with things?4 Another inference that follows is that they did not have to run the procurement under the emergency provisions, which I think weakens the justification for doing so. MacGregor-Reid has introduced an untidy historical fact into the narrative: this isn’t a sudden problem, but a “well evidenced” and enduring one, and this reminds us that it was being responded to already. It is worth pausing and widening our factual, historical lens.
Perhaps the most pertinent fact is that the previous Government had been responding to the decline in maths achievement through the curriculum refresh process. That work was close to complete, so close in-fact that it would have been possible for schools to begin utilising it in 2024. Instead, the Minister chose to bin it and re-write it according to the recommendations of her MAG, effectively wasting a year. This makes a mockery of her claims to urgency in August 2024. It also means that the provisions in the procurement rules that are being relied upon to justify it being a closed tender do not apply: the emergency, as described by the Minister, is a direct result of the actions of this Government, and the rules are explicit in saying this is not a valid reason for a closed tender. Another fact we must attend to is that the last push for standardisation — National Standards — coincided with the biggest drop in our achievement levels we have seen. What is different about this plan to standardise that makes her so certain that will not repeat?
What, or who, has influenced her thinking and the creation of the plan? To answer that, we need to look into the past for things that have not been included in the story. We need to seek full-truths, not half ones.
For instance, it is a half-truth that the Minister became aware of providers of maths textbooks by “talking to principals and teachers”; we get closer to the full-truth when we see the emails reveal she has a relationship with Prime Maths stretching back close to two years (at least—that’s as far back as what I have shows). I do not know why she did not divulge this to the House in her response to the PWQ. Now, it is not unusual for an MP to have a relationship with a business, even if that business is a NZ satellite of a global corporation. What should concern us is that Stanford did not disclose this relationship to Parliament, especially given its length and that it is ongoing.
Here are the facts I have discovered about that relationship, as revealed through the OIA:
- On the 23rd of April, 2023, Robyn Southam from Scholastic, who are the publishers of PR1ME Maths, sends an email introducing Audrey Tan to Erica: “As we discussed, here are Audrey’s contact details.”
- Robyn emails Stanford in November 2023 to congratulate her on her appointment as Minister and suggests booking in a heads up meeting.
- The phrase ‘structured maths’5 is used in an email between Stanford’s office and Robyn in early December 2023.
- Stanford visits Kerikeri Primary in February 2024 to see PR1ME in action and indicates she wants to meet with Robyn “to talk to me further”. While this doesn’t happen, Stanford’s Senior Advisor picks up the chain and keeps the momentum going.
- The momentum is good. Plans for structured maths progress well, to the extent that Robyn emails Stanford in late July 2024 and asks whether it is “possible to give an update of where things are in terms of progress towards processes in terms of structured maths being delivered please?”6
- By July, that momentum has also swept Robyn and her team into the Ministry. She tells Stanford, in an email sent just after the announcement with the Prime Minister of the maths action plan on 4 August 2024, that she has “been supporting Denise Arnerich and her team”, meeting with them and “getting PR1ME books urgently to them at their request”. Given “student workbooks being mentioned specifically by the PM we are wondering what this means for PR1ME and how we can help?” Scholastic are ready to go. It looks like they may even have the inside lane.
It is easy to pick on Robyn here, but I want to be clear I am not. She is doing nothing more than her job asks of her: build relationships with commercial opportunities so that revenue can grow. It just happens that the biggest commercial opportunity in town is the National- led coalition Government7. What Stanford is asking us to uncritically accept is that Robyn’s KPIs sync with the learning needs of our kids.8 This is a myth. In a market, what a commercial entity needs is an angle, something unique that can be sold. What Prime are selling is structured maths, a rip-off of something developed by the Singapore Education Ministry. And while Singapore has strong maths achievement, their textbooks are only one piece of a well-resourced approach, with success helped along by the fact they have a student body that skews strongly toward being in the high-demographic category.
And just so we’re clear about where this story ends, PR1ME and Numicon become two of the four successful providers of maths textbooks for the maths action plan, securing a share of $26.8 million for the first year, with the promise of at least another year of government funding.
So what’s going on? Well, one place we can look to is the language the Government is using right now. For example, in a press release on 30 January 2025 headed ‘Relentless focus on literacy & numeracy at school’, the Minister says the textbooks “will help teachers and parents see the progress their children are making”. It’s a reasonable statement, but the language is slippery in its lack of definition. The speed things are moving forces us to be either for the approved vague-inition or against it (Seymour’s trying the same thing with equality, for instance, using it in a way that suggests it can only mean we are all the same in some kind of contextless way, and if you don’t believe that you don’t believe in equality. And if we wanted to go a bit deeper into the past, we might recall how President Bush used this kind of for/against positioning to justify the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq). A defining feature of a totalitarian system (which is what neoliberalism is) is that words start to slide into different places and mutate—eg, learning becomes learnings, and now gets used by people with specific targets in mind, thus losing its dynamic, human sense. When language begins to get worn and dissolve—when words lose their strength—they become tamed, shackled, and we then are in trouble: for us now, they are cover for the corporate colonisation of a public space. In this specific instance, academic progress is tied to progress through commercial textbooks, and thus linked with the commercial interests of a private education provider: more progress by the public equals more private profits.
One has to admire the effectiveness of it. The declared emergency has opened space for the fast entry of market players and their promises of efficient, dependable outcomes into the maths curriculum. But of course, as with all things that appear quickly, speed brings with it a kind of dizzying, distorting disorientation, which inhibits the full view. And of course, that momentum is relied on to carry us all far-enough-fast-enough for speed to make it hard to turn our heads, to open our minds, for our mouths to begin to question, and for the distance covered to make it seem futile to resist. Because of course, if we do, turning back means we see all things, not just the desired, blurred image drawn by a select few; we think more broadly, and we are able to get words out, in strings of questions.
Like, why are we moving so fast? Like, why is it The Market with the answer? Like, isn’t this the work of the Ministry? Like, where has this certainty come from? Like, why is the Minister so involved? Like, is it really true the Minister only knew of these private providers after talking to schools? Like, why was the Minister so involved in the procurement process? Like, will textbooks really save us? Like, wasn’t there already work being done on this? Like, why was that work set aside? Like, who’s accountable if it doesn’t work?
The market solutions approach is not a neutral, objective one. Despite the impression we are getting the same thing, but faster than the Ministry can provide it, what we are actually getting is an unexamined solution with its own imperatives and things it values: to profit, extend its reach, lock in customers—all markers of commercial achievement and success. These are diametrically opposed to what we expect as the purpose of government agencies. We must be really clear in understanding that point, because it illustrates both the extreme right-wing ideology of this Government and gives us a concrete example of how that ideology is being enacted. This is a fundamentally different way of solving education problems from the research-driven one guided and developed by our own Ministry that we have used in the past. The development of the curriculum and its core resources is the work of government. To claim and act otherwise is to demean and discredit the Ministry by undermining its capabilities, ultimately leading to the degradation of a key institution of our democracy. Before we realise it, it’s function gets twisted. For the warping is not only found in the words used to describe what the kids and teachers will do, but also the work of the Ministry. In the select committee, Jan asked what evidence the Ministry planned to collect, and Pauline Cleaver said,
“We’ll be evaluating the use of the resources alongside the PLD and of course the implementation of the new curriculum as schools start to use it from the beginning of next year. We have some independent probes into those specific things, and we also have ERO running a multi-year evaluation so that we can understand the implementation impacts, insights and be able to adjust and make decisions about how to prioritise going forward.”
Evaluating the use of the resources is not the same as examining their impact on achievement. What the Ministry have planned, first and foremost, is a data-gathering exercise focused on compliance. In other words, it is more important that the corporate products are used than whether they work—in this way, the data is for the protection of private interest. When pushed, Ellen MacGregor-Reid admitted the limits of this plan, saying “it does bring to the fore the need for that evaluation [of student progress]” and “I think if we’re really going to know if this is making a difference the information you have needs to move to the level of, are we seeing the shifts for students as well?”
As well?
We should all be alarmed by this intellectual hijack of education, which is a public endeavour that should not be a playing field for private interests. But that is exactly what the intellectual framework that surrounds the science of learning is enabling. I am made uneasy by its claims, which are underpinned by a presumption there is an enduring, ‘natural’ approach to learning that, unless undermined by misguided notions that knock it off-track, is eternal.9 Thus, every learner is reduced to a kind of faceless predicability, justifying a narrow ‘scientific’ approach that contains within it an (illusory) promise—stick to the script, the righteous script, and it is inevitable that achievement will come.10 And so, under Stanford, we have a Ministry in full-believer mode, focused on adoption, not impact. In the realm of (make) belief, this is how things roll: certain in their faith that achievement is inevitable if we follow the word, and once we have it becomes an eternal state. All we have to do is get back on track and things will be great again.
The degradation of public infrastructure is a threat to democracy. That degradation takes different shapes and forms depending on the infrastructure, but at root is an underfunding that constricts the ability of public servants to do their job properly and forces them to make impossible decisions. Water pipes can get by on minimal upkeep, until they can’t and they burst. This takes around about 30 years, and by then the problem is so big, and the public service so stressed and stretched, that private capital is seen as a sensible solution. See health as another example of this. Education is another.
But an education system can be degraded much faster than water pipes. Aotearoa New Zealand is a textbook example. In 2000 PISA data indicated we had one of the top performing systems in the world. Now we don’t. The period of most rapid decline occurred in the early years of the first Key Government (2010-2012) and we haven’t really arrested it since. So, there is a truth to Stanford’s message, but there is an ahistorical cynicism in how she’s using it — as a symbol, not something to be dealt with in a concrete, analytical way. The speed with which she is moving is helping her get away with using decline in a symbolic way. That use is enabling the creation of an impression of an emergency. It allows her to say, Quick! We need the emergency services! We must grab what we can immediately!
Stanford would like us to believe that she is merely responding to a situation she has been thrust into and doing what she must to staunch the bleeding. However, if we turn our heads to look behind us, if we step off the speeding train and take time to examine the details of how we came to be here instead of relying on the symbolic nature of it, that story starts to look less secure. The full picture shows she is overseeing the incursion of private interests into public education, interests she has a multi-year relationship with that she has not disclosed to Parliament; that the emergency is one mostly of this Government’s own making; and that the Ministry is being positioned as a procurement and compliance officer for the adoption of commercial products.
In the select committee, when asked about the late delivery of Numicon, Stanford said that it was ok because this level of resourcing of “high quality” resources “is the first time that this has ever happened ... it hasn’t happened, I don’t think ever ... we are airfreighting them!”11 With this, her face lit up, and with glee and she whooshed her right hand across her body, swiping the problem away, diminished, dismissed and dissolved. In a tyrannical world, even the inconvenient future can be ignored, overwhelmed by a story of the heroic action of the powerful, for the powerful, in the present.
And so I recommend you read the story of the transformation of maths not as a hero’s journey but as a cautionary tale.