Democracy Briefing: The Teaching Council and the rot at the heart of NZ’s public sector
The Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand is supposed to be the guardian of teaching standards. It registers and certifies teachers, vets who get to stand in front of a classroom, and enforces professional conduct. Right now it looks more like a case study in how public institutions go wrong.
Over the past two weeks, two devastating reports have landed in public view, exposing an organisation riddled with conflicts of interest, procurement failures, child safety breakdowns, and a culture that prioritised being popular over doing its job. This isn’t some minor bureaucratic stumble. The body entrusted with protecting children and upholding the standards of around 150,000 teachers has been found to have fallen “well short” of the most basic expectations.
And yet, despite the severity of what’s been uncovered, there has been remarkably little public outrage or widespread media scrutiny. That in itself tells us something about how New Zealand works. The Wellington establishment closes ranks. The professional managerial class looks after its own. The public barely gets a look in. What we are dealing with here is a textbook case of elite capture, and it deserves far more attention than it has received.
Following the money
The financial trail is the most logical place to begin. On Tuesday, the Public Service Commission released its investigation into procurement and conflict of interest management at the Teaching Council. The findings were brutal.
Between late 2018 and early 2025, the council awarded approximately $1.735 million in contracts to advertising firm Clemenger Wellington, whose managing director Brett Hoskin is married to Teaching Council CEO Lesley Hoskin. Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche did not mince words. The council’s management “fell short, and sometimes well short, of the standards expected in the public sector.” The failures were “not matters of minor or technical non-compliance” but “reflected poor oversight and immature organisational controls.”
The trouble goes deeper than a simple failure to recuse. While Lesley Hoskin declared that her husband worked at Clemenger and recused herself from procurement decisions, the PSC found this was “an overly simplistic approach and not sufficient to manage the Chief Executive’s conflict of interest.” She did not even declare her husband’s shareholding in the firm. That is not a minor detail when you’re talking about a financial interest in a company winning public contracts.
The Commission found that “many of the contracts linked to these initiatives were not procured through competitive processes.” One contract stands out starkly. A “Request for Proposal” was issued indicating a value of $75,000. The final contract came in at $570,000 (later adjusted to $530,000). The description of services also “differed significantly” from what was originally scoped. So, how does a $75,000 job balloon to more than seven times its estimated value without anyone raising an alarm?
Paul Catmur, the former chief creative officer of DDB Asia Pacific, wrote a useful piece for the Post about the dynamics at play. He noted that when a chief executive recuses themselves from a decision, “it does not remove their influence. The remaining members of the procurement panel are now aware of their boss’s interest in the matter. It is only human nature for them to lean towards an outcome they know would please the person who signs their pay cheques.” His suggestion was simple: don’t invite your spouse’s agency to pitch for the work. Not complicated. But apparently too complicated for the Teaching Council.
A Regulator that wanted to be liked
The procurement scandal is bad enough on its own. But it sits alongside another set of findings that are, if anything, even more damaging.
An independent review by consultant Debbie Francis, commissioned by the Council itself, painted a picture of an organisation that had fundamentally lost its way. Francis found the Teaching Council was more focused on “building the mana” of teachers and “being liked by the profession” than on fulfilling its core regulatory functions. “As a regulator, the council will not always be liked. Instead, it should aim to be respected,” she wrote.
The most damning finding was around child safety. Francis stated: “The most critical function the council performs is the prevention of harm and victimisation of children.” She found the organisation had the culture of “an advocacy body” rather than a regulator. Its leadership “appears to be personality-driven.” There were signs of “dominant cliques” that might “freeze out” dissenters. And the executive appeared “to some interviewees, to prioritise pliability over relevant experience and technical expertise.”
For an organisation entrusted with gatekeeper functions over who gets to teach our children, that is a devastating assessment. The council had essentially been captured by the industry it was supposed to be overseeing.
Spending beyond the brief
David Farrar drew attention on Kiwiblog today to something equally noteworthy: almost all the contracts at the centre of the scandal were for projects that had nothing to do with the council’s core business of teacher registration and regulation. As Farrar put it, even if these projects had been properly procured, they were still a massive cost that teachers were being levied to fund. He highlighted $400,000 spent on “unteaching racism,” $600,000 on raising awareness and a stakeholder engagement plan, and $500,000 on digital engagement.
“I am sure the Medical Council doesn’t need to spend $500,000 on digital engagement,” Farrar wrote. “You’re a regulatory body, not a social media agency. Spending $600,000 on a stakeholder engagement plan is just an excuse to fund contractors.”
He’s right. This is what mission drift looks like in practice. A regulator that was supposed to be focused on standards and safety was instead running advertising campaigns and building its brand, all while funnelling work to the CEO’s husband’s firm without proper competitive processes.
Teachers were footing the bill through fees that have skyrocketed in recent years. The current renewal cost sits at about $506. Teachers have every right to ask why they are being squeezed to fund a regulator that spends $1.7 million with the boss’s husband’s firm and can’t effectively safeguard children.
Real victims
The child safety failures are not abstract. They have real victims.
The Herald’s Lane Nichols revealed the case of Timothy Fisher, a convicted child sex offender who was granted registration by the Teaching Council despite historic indecency convictions and a 2014 police warning that he should not have unsupervised access to children. Fisher used the Clean Slate Act to hide his convictions. But even after the council was alerted to his criminal record, it still recertified him. He went on to abuse nine young girls at an after-school tutoring company in 2024. He is now in prison.
The Teaching Council maintained it did nothing wrong. Education Minister Erica Stanford pushed back hard. She wrote to the acting CEO noting that teachers receive “core worker police vets” under the Children’s Act, which disclose specified offences “even if the Clean Slate scheme would otherwise apply.” The implication is clear: the council had the information but failed to act. The Ministry of Education backed her up. Stanford has now ordered a King’s Counsel investigation to check whether other potential predators may have slipped through. The Fisher case, she fears, may not be isolated.
It shouldn’t take a minister ordering a KC probe to get a teaching regulator to take child safety seriously.
Cosy relationships and the chair’s conflict
As if the procurement disaster and child safety failures weren’t enough, there is the question of Teaching Council chair David Ferguson and his relationship with the Minister.
RNZ’s John Gerritsen reported that text messages obtained under the Official Information Act show Ferguson had a notably close relationship with Stanford before she appointed him. In 2024, while setting up a private teacher training institute, Ferguson messaged Stanford asking for meetings, advice, and support related to government funding for his education business.
One message from October 2024 stands out. Ferguson wrote: “The big thing now is TEC funding which is worth $750k to us... Any advice or support would be welcomed.” Days later: “Morning Erica. I wondered if you’d managed to speak to Penny Simmonds about TEC funding for us.” When the funding came through: “TEC funding confirmed yesterday, thank you.”
Stanford’s office insists she did not provide ministerial assistance. But NZEI national secretary Stephanie Mills said the documents show Ferguson “received personal support from Stanford for successful bids for government funding for a private tertiary institute.” Stanford then appointed him as chair of the very body that approves teacher training programmes.
Professor Joce Nuttall, Chair of the Council of Deans of Education, was blunter: “Ms Stanford has some explaining to do about how a private teacher education provider came to have such a ‘cosy’ relationship with the Minister in setting up their business. This appalling conflict of interest is even more shocking given that Mr Ferguson is now Chair of the Teaching Council, the very body that approves the Teaching Institute’s programmes.”
The irony of Ferguson overseeing a council under fire for conflicts of interest while having his own unexplored conflict is hard to miss. In a small country like New Zealand, these connections scream cronyism. This pattern of mates helping mates is a recurring theme in Wellington’s political culture.
Governance by legal gymnastics
The governance problems don’t stop there. When Hoskin was placed on leave in October last year, the council appointed a MartinJenkins consultant, Tom Gott, as acting CEO. However, Gott was already on the Council board, appointed by Stanford, and the Education and Training Act 2020 explicitly states the chief executive “may not be a member of the Teaching Council,” making the dual role potentially unlawful.
The council claimed this was OK because Gott had temporarily “stepped away” from governance. The Post Primary Teachers’ Association said the appointment breached the rules. Gott later resigned his board seat, with Ferguson saying it was “for avoidance of doubt.” That’s a revealing choice of words. It doesn’t inspire confidence when an organisation mired in governance scandals has to engage in legal gymnastics over its own acting CEO. The whole episode is symptomatic of an organisation that sees itself as exempt from the standards it imposes on others.
Stanford’s power grab
It would be easy to look at this mess and conclude the Government is justified in stepping in. The scale of dysfunction gives the Minister real political cover. But there’s a legitimate concern that Stanford is using the council’s failures to advance a much broader agenda of centralising control over education.
The Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill proposes putting the Teaching Council under ministerial appointees, giving the minister power to change the curriculum at will, and transferring standard-setting from the council to the Ministry of Education.
Principals’ Federation president Jason Miles has told the select committee the bill represents “a coordinated shift of decision-making power away from educators, communities and Māori and into the hands of the minister and ministerial appointees.” Researcher Fiona Ell warned the changes would “deprofessionalise teachers.” The School Boards Association reported 82% of its members opposed giving the minister power to decide curriculum content.
As Danyl McLauchlan detailed in a lengthy Listener piece recently, Stanford has compressed “a generation of reform into two years,” echoing Michael Gove’s approach in the UK of driving through sweeping changes via a small circle of trusted advisers rather than sector consensus.
Genuine failures at the Teaching Council are now being used to justify a restructure that concentrates more power in the Minister’s hands. The Council needs major reform, no question. But there is a difference between fixing an institution and hollowing it out. A regulator captured by its profession is bad. A regulator captured by a minister is not automatically better.
A Symptom of a wider malady
The Teaching Council saga matters because it is not just about one dysfunctional agency. It captures what’s wrong with government agencies and the professional managerial class in New Zealand: a world where integrity is treated as a box-ticking exercise, where conflicts of interest are “managed” by looking the other way, and where insiders can mostly get away with operating however they like because nobody is watching.
The only reason we know about any of this is because an anonymous whistleblower had the courage to write to the Minister. Prior attempts to raise concerns internally had gone nowhere. That is how broken our oversight mechanisms are. The fact that it then took persistent investigative journalism, primarily by the Herald’s Lane Nichols and RNZ’s John Gerritsen, to drag the details into public view tells you everything about the lack of transparency in these institutions.
The use of teacher fees and public funds to fuel a chumocracy of consultants and well-connected board members is an affront to democratic accountability. Teachers from low-decile schools, often Māori or Pasifika, face uneven support while scandals divert resources. The connected get funded; everyone else gets told everything is fine.
This is “Broken New Zealand” in miniature. Elites and vested interests dominate with little opposition or scrutiny. Once a regulator loses legitimacy, it doesn’t quietly fix itself. Teachers stop trusting the disciplinary process. Parents stop trusting the screening. Ministers reach for scapegoats and quick wins. Reform becomes a free-for-all.
The teachers of New Zealand, and the children they teach, deserve a regulator that is governed with integrity and focused on its actual job. What they got instead was an organisation where the CEO’s husband’s firm was awarded $1.7 million without proper competitive processes, where a convicted child sex offender was waved through vetting despite police warnings, and where the chair may have his own undeclared conflicts with the minister who appointed him.
Restoring trust will take more than swapping out the board. It means going to war on the culture of cosy deals and actually holding people to account when they let the system fail. The rot at the heart of the Teaching Council should worry anyone who cares about our public institutions.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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