The Ministry of Education is using so much AI it can't tell us how much AI it's using
The Ministry doesn't seem to want the public to know exactly how much AI it's using - or what it's using AI for.
Last year, we discovered that the Ministry for Education was using AI to develop the new school curriculum. In a response to an Official Information Act request made by a member of the public, the Ministry said it was using AI to "enhance development processes across the curriculum as a whole, particularly by analysing and synthesising information from international curricula and related educational frameworks."
Josh Drummond
More than six months later, after a series of OIA requests and an investigation by the Office of the Ombudsman, we can reveal three things:
The Ministry is using an enormous amount of AI in the development of the new New Zealand curriculum, and;
The Ministry really doesn't seem to want the public to know exactly how much AI it's using - or exactly what it's using AI for;
And, finally: the slap-dash use of AI in Government Ministries is a huge problem for freedom of information and open democracy.
We can draw these conclusions not because the Ministry has complied with our OIA request, but because it has refused it.
Here's how it came together.
The Ministry refuses our request
We've been back and forth with the Ministry of Education on the question of AI use in schools since 9 December 2025. On that day, we requested the following via FYI.org.nz, a platform for making OIA requests:
1. All Copilot (or other AI tool) chat logs relating to curriculum
development, and
2. All documentation of the independent checking / review process that
AI-supplied information for use in the curriculum has undergone to
ensure accuracy, reliability, and safety, and
3. Documentation of how research or other material derived from or
filtered through AI has been utilised in the draft curriculum —
including via copy+pasting, paraphrasing, or other methods.
On 18 December, the Ministry responded, saying the request was broad in scope, and requested that we refine our request to avoid a refusal. We did, amending the request to cover:
the timeframe of 1 month, from September 28 2025, to October 28, 2025, for the Phase 2 (Years 4–6) Social Sciences Learning Area.
The Ministry responded again on 13 February, having seemingly delayed their response to the maximum extent possible under OIA law – with a request for an extension of another thirty working days.
After that thirty-day extension, the Ministry refused our request, saying:
the information requested cannot be made available without substantial collation or research.
We didn't think this was fair. So we went to the Ombudsman.
315 AI "interactions"
The Office of the Ombudsman is tasked with making sure that the Government and its ministries stay compliant with the Official Information Act. They are under-resourced, and act slowly - but very methodically. The Ombudsman launched an investigation, and reported back on 15 July.
The investigation – which we've attached in full at the bottom of this article – concludes that the Ministry acted lawfully in refusing our amended OIA request. Section 18(f) of the Official Information Act allows an agency to refuse a request if there would be "significant administrative impacts".
That's exactly what the Ministry told the Ombudsman: There was simply too much material covered by our amended request to release it. According to the Ministry, producing evidence of AI use across just one month of curriculum development would require an entire week's work.
In other words, when it comes to the development of the New Zealand Curriculum, they're using so much AI they can't tell the public how much AI they're using.
However, in correspondence with the Ombudsman's investigation team, the Ministry revealed some specifics about their AI use.
The Ombudsman's letter states:
The Ministry said it identified 315 interactions potentially within scope of your request (That is, Copilot interactions within the relevant timeframe and made by staff who were working on the curriculum. These interactions have not been assessed for whether they concerned Phase 2 Social Sciences curriculum development specifically.)
That's a lot of AI use, and thanks to the Ministry's refusal, we don't get to know how much AI slop is ending up in the curriculum.
We do have some clues. Remember, the Ministry itself says it is using AI for "analysing and synthesising information from international curricula and related educational frameworks."
We've read a lot of the draft curriculum, and we've noted how it seemed like a dense, confused mishmash of subjects and unsuitable topics, and that it contains a lot of the hallmarks of AI writing.
Meanwhile, teachers have been almost universally scathing about the proposed curriculum, saying (most recently) that it is "unrealistic," "a return to the 1980s," "boring," and that "students will be harmed."
Based on these new revelations, we think that an enormous amount of the curriculum is either paraphrased from or "synthesised" by AI, and if so, that may account for many of the problems that experts have with it.
But we don't know for sure, because – even after nearly eight months and an Ombudsman investigation – the Ministry refuses to be up-front with the public about its AI use.
This matters. School curricula are meant to last for many years. The curriculum affects every aspect of teaching in New Zealand schools. The public has a right to know how AI is being used in the creation of material that will teach their children.
On a more philosophical note, students using that curriculum will be expected to complete assessments using their own brains, because that's what learning is. If they just used AI to complete their work, that'd be cheating, and they wouldn't learn anything.
Do the same rules apply to the Ministry of Education? Why should students take their learning seriously if the people creating their learning are actually using AI to make it?
Acting on information
The Ombudsman's investigation has revealed another issue: The use of AI by Government agencies may be creating a legal way for them to dodge Official Information Act requests.
The Ombudsman says:
The Ministry acknowledges that you may find this frustrating, as it asked you to refine your request, but still maintains it cannot grant your request. It does not consider your request unreasonable. However, the Ministry says AI-assisted inquiries is a new area, and the Ministry is still familiarising itself with the technology. Prompted by your request and our inquiries, it has discovered it does not have an easy method to access your requested information without a disproportionate allocation of resource. (Emphasis added.)
In our opinion, this may be legal, but it's not good enough.
The point of the OIA is information transparency. The public has a right to know what their tax dollars are buying and what public servants are doing. If the use of AI creates so much work that agencies are not able to comply with OIA requests, then they should not be using AI.
At least not until procedures for complying with the OIA are put in place.
To us, using a technology that generates so much material that its use is impossible to disclose without "substantial collation and research" seems like either incompetence or wilful obfuscation. It also raises the question: Is AI use helping our agencies at all? Or is it just producing... slop?
One last point. The Ombudsman's investigation has told us something very important. We know now that asking for one month's worth of AI use in a specific area of curriculum development would take the Ministry about 30 hours. If that's the case, then producing evidence of one week's work should only take about 10 hours. Which – according to the investigation – would seem to be a reasonable request under the OIA.
If members of the public start making Official Information Act requests for one-week slices of the Ministry's AI use, perhaps we'll get to find out how AI has been used in the curriculum after all.
Here is the full correspondence with the Ministry of Education at FYI.org.nz:
Here is the full letter detailing the Ombudsman's investigation into the complaint:
Our previous articles on AI in the new school curriculum:
Emily Writes
Josh Drummond