Our Education System Will Be the Battlegrounds for the New Culture War

Luxon has much bigger problems than attendance, and he has absolutely no idea.

Luxon is the best negotiator. He’s just negotiated us into a culture war and he doesn’t even know it.

Neoliberalism is preventing our school system from serving the population. People — most people — cannot really select the schools their children go to unless they are wealthy enough to pay the fees for private, integrated, and/or boarding schools¹. The rest of us are locked within zones that prevent us from sending our kids to better schools in richer areas.

Oh, there’s the pretence of selection. There are all sorts of ways to get around zoning, including literally just moving house, but neoliberalism has turned this into a class issue because house prices are now locked into school zones, with more expensive house prices in areas with better schools² that has resulted in some very well-off people becoming even more well-off as they lock poorer people out of equal education.

This has created many, many difficulties for us and is the root of much of New Zealand’s housing crisis, which Bernard Hickey often talks about on The Kaka — New Zealand’s political, educational, and real economy are all based around the value of land, and the value of that land is informed by our school zones. Just this September, a spike in rejection letters from elite schools has again caused a surge in interest from buyers in catchment areas.

There are a lot of areas in modern life where New Zealand’s political ideals (egalitarianism) and our economic ideals (neoliberalism) are at war with each other and have started spilling over into a deepening cultural divide caused by class tensions. House prices is an obvious one. Healthcare is another.

But I bet you didn’t expect sex education to be next.

What the right think our kids are being taught

New Zealand has never had a nationwide debate about how we should teach our children about sex, let alone about sexuality and gender.

Until now, we have had a compulsory health ‘curriculum’ for years 1-10 that only outlines learning goals and then allows schools and teachers to pick from individual modules to teach. The responsibility of actually developing a sex education curriculum has been left to the community — but this is a serious problem for public schools, because Boards are underserved and most parents just do not have the time or freedom to engage with them the way the system demands.

This compromise wasn’t designed to be an effective means of determining a curriculum, it was a way for previous governments to avoid the controversy of dictating what children will learn about topics the country has always been, and still is, deeply divided on.

How we teach children about relationships and sexuality is changing. Again.

This week, National have announced that the sex education curriculum will be reviewed due to of a recent ERO report that found gaps in sexuality education.

This is not true.

The review released alongside the announcement is not the same as the much longer 2018 report that found our sex and sexuality curriculum was not up to snuff. That report has already been acted on in 2020, by Labour as part of their coalition with NZ First and the Greens. They added a requirement for ‘sexuality and relationship education’ to be added to the curriculum.

Because of this, schools were forced to consult with parents over gender and sexuality in 2020 via the parent-set curriculum arrangement we have with school boards. Their alarm over this then fed into the polarisation between 2020 and 2023, especially around gender and how it’s being taught in schools, stoking queerphobia as parents were confronted with a curriculum containing topics and information many of them themselves do not understand. This then caused many parents to vote for Winston Peters’ calculated transphobia in 2023. And he kept his promises to them; his coalition agreement with National required the government to remove the sexuality and gender requirements that Labour and, ironically, Winston Peters, added after ERO’s 2018 advice.

Now ERO have released their truncated review of sexuality and relationship education and presented this as a spontaneous recommendation to remove the curriculum guidelines that allow parents to dictate inthe sex ed curriculum.

It was not. This had been decided in coalition talks back in 2023.

You see, National can’t be seen to be backwards themselves. They still need to attract the votes of middle New Zealand while pretending they appeal to the deep conservatives by using vague phrases like “age appropriate sex education” to mask what they mean.

So Luxon signed an agreement knowing the plan was to remove ALL curriculum requirements as part of the total education overhaul, including removing the sex and gender requirements from our health education as per Peters’ requirements, and instead implement a compulsory, state-led sex education curriculum in New Zealand for the first time ever.

“Great,” says Christopher Luxon, an evangelical Christian who isn’t good at politics and thinks sex shouldn't even be taught about in schools.

“Great,” says Erica Stanford, who wants to improve education.

“Great,” says Simeon Brown, an evangelical Christian who is good at politics and who wants Luxon’s job.³

“Great,” says David Seymour, who gets votes from this sort of strife and also needs a distraction from his charter schools.

“Great,” says Winston Peters, who made the PM chase him halfway across the country in order to get this concession.

Great.

Why is our education system in such a mess?

Because in the 1970s, every religious school in the country should have gone under, but the government had to bail them out to prevent an influx of suddenly school-less children into the mainstream school system, and also to prevent angry Catholic parents who were unhappy their children were no longer receiving prestigious religious education from not voting for them.

In return for teaching the national curriculum, these schools receive funding at the same level as state schools, but are allowed to keep their assets and charge additional fees for attendance as well as buildings and other associated fees usually charged by schools. This has created the semi-private schools that now lead our non-existant scholarship league tables they then use to attract pupils. Rich pupils, of course, because choice in education mostly only exists for the wealthy.

New Zealand’s education system is a symbol of our societal inequality. NCEA is not a functional qualification, and it is designed to pass as many students as possible while also not providing much of a meaningful distinction between average and high achievement. It is so terrible a qualification that most of New Zealand’s best schools offer Cambridge qualifications to their high achieving students, and some schools ONLY offer Cambridge exams.

This means that the only nationwide qualification that all schools in New Zealand offer is the NZQA Scholarship exams, subject-specific exams taken in year 13 that are more difficult than the rubric for Excellence at Level 3 and is differently structured as well, supposedly evening the field between the regimented NCEA and the more traditional Cambridge exams (though in reality, this disadvantages NCEA students who been trained inside the “game-able” NCEA system and who are met with an unfamiliar examination structure for the first time in their lives.)

NZQA has forbidden schools from using scholarship results to create league tables; if they had not, the data would too easily show that there is really no competition between the top handful of schools and the rest of the country. The only schools that produce results worth writing home about are private or integrated schools, or schools with zones in wealthy areas where renting or buying is incredibly inflated as a result.

Charter schools will only compound on this inequality, providing a select few options for students with specific needs while mostly improving the quality of education for the upper middle class — and achieving those good results at an eye-watering pricetag that is not matched to pupils in regular state schools. Again providing a ‘postcode exception’ that won’t really be accessible to most parents, but sufficiently providing the illusion of choice to gloss over how limited our school options really are.

Another thing our ‘postcode lock’ does, I suspect, is create a significant barrier to gradually introducing compulsory Maori language classes into mainstream schools. Parental pushback is inevitable and justified in areas where children actually don’t have a choice about where they go. This is their right, and it is better for everyone if schools can easily advertise to parents that ANY compulsory or elective subject they offer is part of their curriculum knowing there is a viable alternative for students for whom that is offputting.

Meanwhile, the coalition curriculum overhaul will not address the depth of the issues with the NCEA system and the widening inequality in education it is producing. I have some hope for the primary school changes; I was a victim of exactly what Luxon is attempting to address, as I got to high school and found I was the only person in my class who hadn’t been introduced to algebra in primary — not a welcoming introduction to the topic! Ensuring that primary schools are ALL teaching concepts at particular year levels is not, to my eyes, a wasted venture.

But I have serious doubts about the results of a sex and sexuality curriculum written in this political climate.

Most of what is taught in the compulsory health curriculum is perfectly banal and about friendships and anatomy and school bullies — normal things for seven year olds to learn. Remember Harold the Giraffe? That was the workaround for primary schools having to teach this themselves after the responsibility for creating the curriculum was put into the hands of their board.

But education on puberty, sex and education starts in year 7 (and there is a compelling argument it should start earlier and finish later), and it will need to include information on gender; modern, scientific, sociologically, queer-positive information on gender.

There has already been much misinformation about what is being taught to children on this subject at all education levels, with fake slides with Ministry of Education branding appearing online earlier this year after the government announced changes to the curriculum, which MoE described as “designed to provoke anger”.

Family First is another group that has been stirring the pot.

All of these organisations and more are ready and riled to campaign to remove appropriate and important gender and sexuality education from secondary students, and to use any such inclusions as evidence of grooming, conspiracies, and “institutional wokeness”.

Can’t wait.

1. These are actually far more affordable than you'd think, but they don’t advertise themselves as such because their goal is to provide a religious education, and prestige is how they attract students with which to do that.

2. Many of which have boarding, for the rural rich.

3. He was also the MP with Luxon when he told voters National wanted changes to make the Sex Education cirriculum “age appropriate”. https://www.times.co.nz/news/national-calls-for-age-appropriate-sex-education-in-schools/