Education Minister Erica Stanford says her associate minister David Seymour was “overstepping the mark somewhat” when he announced a crackdown on teacher-only days late last year.

Speaking to TVNZ’s Q&A, Stanford suggested Seymour had not run the announcement past her before making it.

“I think he knew at the time he was overstepping the mark somewhat because it is my decision – I am the Minister of Education, and when we are rolling out a new curriculum, we have to have curriculum days.”

Seymour announced a crackdown on teacher-only days in September last year as part of wider plans to increase attendance rates.

He said teacher-only days were not something schools could take “willy-nilly.”

“We are saying teacher-only days are at the discretion of the Minister of Education; they are not something you can just take willy-nilly because if the teachers aren’t showing up, it’s pretty hard to motivate the students to show up.”

Seymour said it would be more difficult to encourage students to attend classes if the “school then decides to close itself on days it should be open”.

“That’s why we are enforcing the rules. If you want to have a teacher-only day, then you need to get the permission of the Minister of Education. It’s actually always been the rule, we’re just enforcing it.”

The issue came up during Stanford’s interview with Q&A as she was discussing the new school curriculums.

She said it was important teachers had teacher-only days to go through that curriculum before teaching it to students.

“We are trying to keep them to an absolute minimum but my message to parents is during those times, those teachers are looking at the new curriculum, the year-by-year, knowledge-rich curriculum that is now internationally benchmarked ... they will be unpacking it all on those days.”

Stanford also spoke about the Government’s aspirations for increasing mathematics achievement rates for students. She told host Guyon Espiner, filling in for Jack Tame, the aim was to raise the success rate for Year 8 students to 80% by 2030. It currently stands at 22%.

“Today we have a year-by-year, internationally-benchmarked, knowledge-rich curriculum that lays out what should be taught and when that teachers love.

“We have resources to support the implementation of that we have never had before, that [with] the feedback we are having, teachers are loving.”

Regarding school lunches, Stanford rejected the suggestion recent reports on the scheme’s shortfalls – including reports of lunches arriving late – were a distraction.

“I think David Seymour, if he were here, would say, ‘Of course there [are] going to be teething problems ...’”

Stanford asserted school lunches were Seymour’s responsibility.

“In the last week or so, he’s been saying publicly, ‘We’ve managed to get up to over 95% of on-time deliveries. Things are improving’.”

Stanford said she spoke to Seymour recently and he’d made it clear he knew what the problems with the scheme were and what needed to change.

“One of the things he said was: ‘One of the key things for us is that we didn’t factor [in was that] ... the traffic in Auckland has been so much worse than it has this time of year’; things like that ... were things that weren’t expected, which [are] things they are having to work through.”

Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.