Two more years of telling gender lies to children
The NZ government has delayed the removal of gender ideology from the primary school curriculum.
No time to waste
In January 2025, Erica Stanford, the Minister of Education, declared there was “no time to waste” in enacting a major overhaul of the NZ curriculum, adding, “Every single year, 60,000 new kids start school, and we want to start them off on the right track…”
In regard to the curriculum for Relationships and Sexuality Education that was in operation at the time, RGE fully agreed. The sooner gender identity beliefs were purged from the curriculum, the better it would be for our children. There was no time to waste in stopping activists from teaching children that sex is a matter of choice and that being ‘trans’ is bursting with rainbows and glitter.
Fast forward to May 2026 and suddenly the government thinks there is plenty of time to waste. The Minister has announced that the newly written RSE curriculum will now only become compulsory in primary and intermediate schools from 2029.
That’s two more years of parents having to suffer their primary-aged children being taught lies about their bodies.
This delay only applies to primary and intermediate schools. For Years 9 and 10, the new RSE curriculum will still be introduced as planned in 2027. That’s better than nothing, but many students will start secondary school needing to be de-programmed from the eight years of indoctrination into gender beliefs they have undergone, and now that indoctrination is set to continue for two more cohorts of students.
Why the delay?
Teachers, especially those in primary schools who teach all subject areas, have been telling the Minister for the past two years that the pace of curriculum change is overwhelming and unmanageable. It is not normal practice in education for every subject’s curriculum to be rewritten at the same time and for teachers to be expected to have the necessary new lessons and resources ready for use only six months later. Belatedly, the Minister has recognised that radically changing the content of eight subjects all at once is not achievable and she has announced a slow down to phase in the ‘less important’ curriculum changes over three years.
Unfortunately, RSE (as part of Health and Physical Education) is one of the subjects that has not made the cut as being of enough importance to be implemented in 2027, despite the coalition promising as long ago as November 2023 to remove the ideological teaching in RSE.
Since that promise was made, the RSE curriculum has been thoroughly investigated - first by ERO (Education review Office) and then through two opportunities for public feedback. Of all the curriculum areas, this is the one that has been most closely reviewed and has public support for urgent change, yet the Ministry has chosen to put it on the back burner.
Teaching the truth should be prioritised
The last public consultation for the RSE curriculum ended in April and the Ministry of Education has promised that the finalised new curriculum will be ready in “mid 2026”. There is no good reason why it cannot be put into use in 2027 as first planned.
Why is Social Sciences deemed a more important subject than RSE to prioritise in 2027?
Why is learning about the ancient Greek Peloponnesian War (yes, truly) for 9 year olds considered to be more important than learning the truth that sex is binary and immutable?
The changes that have been made to RSE - purging it of gender ideology - are urgently needed in schools to prevent the continued harm of our children being taught that they can choose their sex. Waiting another two years means exposing thousands more children to damaging gender identity beliefs.
In addition, InsideOut, Rainbow Youth, Qtopia, Rainbow Tick and other activist groups are continuing unhindered to push gender ideology in education. Although schools are self-managing, the Ministry needs to set an example by clearly disavowing the unevidenced beliefs of these extremist groups.
Two more years of gender lies
The Minister is aware that many schools did not change their RSE lessons at all after the flawed Guidelines were removed in 2025. They carried on as before with MOE approval on the grounds that the new curriculum was close to finalisation for 2027. But now, those same schools will be able to continue teaching gender identity falsehoods for another two years, even though the confirmed new curriculum will be available soon.
It is not good enough for the MOE to use the self-management of schools as an excuse for condoning the continued use of the Navigating the Journey resource. I am sure you are well aware that this resource coaches teachers to say "Some people with penises might feel more like girls and some people who identify as boys might have female body parts." The new draft RSE curriculum does not contain any reference to gender identity and correctly identifies the binary reproductive system in humans, therefore the NTJ resource is not compliant with the new direction of RSE and should no longer be in use in any schools… (Extract from RGE letter to the Minister June 2025)
It would be very easy to separate RSE from the rest of the HPE curriculum and mandate its use in 2027 on the grounds that consultation has already been completed and the changes are well supported. For the sake of our children, urgent implementation is essential. There is ample evidence now that one of the major sources of severe distress about “gender” comes from school lessons that falsely tell vulnerable children that rejecting their sex is a panacea for life stresses.
Timeline of a broken promise
NOVEMBER 2023 Coalition agreement to remove and replace “the gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines.”
Wait one whole year…
NOVEMBER 2024 ERO review of RSE finds the curriculum needs to be rewritten.
Wait four months…
MARCH 2025, 16 months after the coalition agreement, RSE Guidelines removed. Schools told to follow the 2007 curriculum but the Ministry “advised schools that existing plans did not need to be altered for the 2025 school year.”
Wait five months after the ERO review (quite fast!)...
APRIL 2025 New draft framework for RSE released and public feedback sought.
Wait seven months…
NOVEMBER 2025 Draft RSE curriculum released and opened for public consultation until April 2026.
Wait six months…
MAY 2026 Promise broken. Implementation of the gender identity-free RSE curriculum for primary and intermediate schools pushed out to 2029.
RGE and the thousands of parents who support scientifically accurate RSE are dismayed by the government’s lack of commitment to removing gender ideology from schools. Despite changes to RSE being a coalition promise in 2023, here we are nearly three years later facing a further 2.5 years delay before children will be protected from gender identity indoctrination in primary schools.
The coalition government has broken its promise without a thought for our youngest children who are the ones who will pay the price.
What you can do:
According to the MOE, the new RSE curriculum will be finalised and available for use in schools from 2027 - secondary schools must use it from that date but primary and intermediate schools have until 2029 to implement it.
If you are a parent:
Your job is to convince your school that there is no time to waste and the newly available curriculum should be put into practice immediately. (See www.resistgendereducation.nz for more information.)
If you are an exasperated citizen:
Write to the Minister and coalition partners to voice your dispaproval of this unjustified delay.
By Fern Hickson
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Sheesh, I would have thought that teachers would have jumped at the chance to remove a few lessons from the packed teaching schedule. I mean, just skip all the gender identity crap, explain sex in appropriate level language and job done!
If some kid with a penis claims to feel more like a girl, no problem. He can feel any way he wants to, but it's not his teachers' or his classmates' obligation to play pretend that he is actually a girl then. Primary school teachers do not have any medical or specialized psychology training that allows them to affirm a clearly delusional belief. Teachers should be exploring and using magical thinking as a teaching tool, not enforcing this as any sort of reality.
My younger sister was going to be a horse, and the husband of a friend was going to be a helicopter when they grew up. Everyone around them played along for a while in a gentle fashion and amazingly they both grew out of this normal phase of child development. Why would an adult want to cement in a belief that can never be realized? Since when is blatantly lying to children considered the right thing to do?
Regarding the curriculum changes you agree with - do you mean RSE or the many other changes?