Enriching Local Curriculum (ELC) funding, local curriculum and the new National Curriculum: what NZ schools need to know in 2027
If you lead a school or kura in Aotearoa right now, you are probably holding two thoughts at once.
The first: the National Curriculum has just been fully rewritten, it is knowledge-rich and year-by-year, and from 2027 the framework that sits over it becomes a legal requirement.
The second: your community, your whenua, your hapū and your school's own history are still the reason your tamariki show up and stay engaged.
A lot of leaders are quietly worried those two things are now in tension. They aren't. But the way you hold them together has changed, and so has the funding landscape that supports it. Here's the current state of play, answered question by question.
What is the Enriching Local Curriculum (ELC) programme?
ELC is a Ministry of Education programme that funds community organisations to deliver learning experiences outside the classroom for ākonga from early learning services, schools and kura.
Providers include museums, zoos, art galleries, ecosanctuaries, iwi and hapū organisations, science and STEM trusts, marine studies centres and storytelling projects. Experiences can be in person, virtual, or a blend, and are available across a range of te reo Māori proficiency levels.
Critically for budget-conscious schools: the Ministry contracts and funds the provider, not the school. Schools book directly with providers in their region rather than applying for a grant. The full provider list, ordered by region, sits on the ELC page on Tāhūrangi.
Is Enriching Local Curriculum funding ending in 2027?
No. It is being extended, renamed and redesigned.
Here's what the Ministry has confirmed (page last updated 28 August 2026):
Existing contract holders have been offered a 12-month extension through to 31 December 2027. The stated reason is to let schools and kura focus on implementing the updated National Curriculum without losing their existing providers mid-transition.
The programme will operate under a new name: EOTC Programmes (education outside the classroom).
The extension also buys time to redesign the programme so it aligns with the updated National Curriculum.
A procurement process will begin in 2027 for the redesigned programme, commencing in the 2028 school year.
Current and prospective providers are being told to familiarise themselves with the new curriculum content as it is released, and to watch GETS for procurement updates.
What this means for schools: 2027 is business as usual. Your existing providers (like Telling Your Stories) are funded. 2028 is the year the offering may look different, and the providers who survive the redesign will be the ones who can show clear alignment to the year-by-year teaching sequences of the updated curriculum.
What this means for providers: the bar is moving from "engaging and local" to "engaging, local, and demonstrably aligned to specified knowledge at specified year levels." Start mapping now.
Can schools still develop a local curriculum?
This is the question everyone is really asking, so let's be precise about it.
Yes, but the word means something narrower than it did in 2007.
Under the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum, schools had genuine latitude to decide what was taught, in what order, and how learning areas were integrated. "Local curriculum" meant designing a curriculum.
Under the updated National Curriculum, the Ministry specifies the knowledge and practices to be taught, and when. Each learning area has year-by-year teaching sequences, progress markers and expected proficiency at the end of each year. The New Zealand Curriculum Framework, Te Mātaiaho, was published on 9 September 2026 and is proposed to be made as a National Curriculum Statement under section 90(1)(a) of the Education and Training Act 2020. Once gazetted, it sets the overarching requirements for teaching, learning and assessment in all state schools on the NZC pathway, and schools are required to start using it from 1 January 2027.
Notably, "local curriculum" does not appear as a defined term in the published Te Mātaiaho glossary. That is a meaningful signal about where the emphasis now sits.
So the honest framing is this: local curriculum has shifted from designing the curriculum to contextualising it. You no longer choose the destination. You still choose the road.
That is a real reduction in autonomy, and some sector commentators have said so plainly. It is also not the death of place-based learning that some leaders fear. Choosing the contexts, examples, texts, sites, people and stories through which specified knowledge is taught is a large and consequential professional decision, and it is still yours.
Does local knowledge still have a place in a knowledge-rich curriculum?
Yes, and arguably a stronger one than before.
A knowledge-rich curriculum is built on a simple finding from cognitive science: what you already know determines what you can learn next. Comprehension, inference and retention all depend on background knowledge. A student who has walked the awa, met the kaumātua and heard the story of their maunga is not "doing extra" when they meet a text about river systems or colonisation or erosion. They are reading it with schema already loaded.
Local knowledge is knowledge. Treated properly, it is not a competitor to the teaching sequence, it is the fastest way to give students the prior knowledge that sequence assumes.
Where local content gets into trouble is when it replaces the sequence rather than servicing it. A term-long inquiry into the local wetland that produces a beautiful mural and no gains against the Science teaching sequence is the thing the new curriculum was written to stop. The fix is not to abandon the wetland. It is to be explicit about which specified knowledge the wetland is teaching.
The Social Sciences learning area is the clearest example. Aotearoa New Zealand's histories has been compulsory for Years 1–10 since 2023, and its structure has always assumed national, rohe and local contexts sitting alongside each other. The fully updated Science and Social Sciences learning areas were released on 12 August 2026 and must be used from the start of 2027, with two years to fully implement. Local history is not a nice-to-have in that learning area. It is part of the content.
How do you integrate storytelling into an explicit, knowledge-rich curriculum?
Storytelling and explicit teaching are often set up as opposites. They aren't. Narrative is one of the most efficient vehicles for explicit instruction we have: it sequences information causally, it carries vocabulary in context, and memory for narrative is markedly better than memory for lists.
Six practical moves:
Use story to front-load, not to replace. Tell the local story first, teach the specified content second. The story becomes the shared referent the whole class can point at when the abstract concept arrives.
Mine local stories for tier-two vocabulary. A local pūrākau or settler account is a vocabulary text. Pull ten words, teach them explicitly, use them across the unit. This is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with a local text and it costs nothing.
Make the story the worked example. In Social Sciences, a local land transaction, a mill closure, a migration, or a flood is a case study you can interrogate with the same historical practices the curriculum specifies. Students learn how to weigh evidence on material they can walk to.
Reuse the same story across years. Knowledge-rich curriculum design depends on cumulative revisiting. One well-made local story resource, returned to at Years 3, 6 and 9 with increasing sophistication, does more than twelve one-off units.
Separate oral tradition from historical claim, explicitly. Teach kōrero tuku iho as kōrero tuku iho. Students should understand what kind of knowledge they are handling and who holds authority over it. This is both good history teaching and basic respect for the source.
Get permission and get it in writing. Local stories belong to people. Work with mana whenua from the start, agree what can be taught, published and reused, and record it. A story you cannot repeat next year is not a curriculum resource.
Where does the Telling Your Stories project fit?
Telling Your Stories is one of the national ELC providers and is run by Educulture with Ministry of Education support. It works with ECE services, schools and kāhui ako to research and produce a lasting set of resources telling the story of that school, its place and its community.
The project has worked with 85+ schools, 2,000+ teachers and 50,000+ tamariki, with published case studies including Te Uho o te Nikau, Churton Park in Wellington, the Bream Bay Kāhui Ako with Patuharakeke, and Sparrows Early Childhood Centre in Waikato.
The reason it maps well onto the new settings is structural rather than philosophical. The output is a durable, reusable knowledge resource about a specific place, built with local iwi and hapū and designed to be woven across learning areas. That is exactly the shape of thing a year-by-year, contextualise-don't-redesign curriculum needs. An excursion is an event. A researched, permissioned story of your place is an asset you teach from for a decade.
Other ELC providers do the same job in other domains: House of Science for science kits and teacher PLD, LEARNZ for virtual field trips, regional museums for local history and taonga, ecosanctuaries and marine centres for te taiao.
Ten ways to personalise learning without drifting from the curriculum
Start from the teaching sequence, not the trip. Open the year-level content first, then ask what local context teaches it best.
Build a local contexts map. One page per year level: which local places, people, stories and providers service which specified knowledge. This becomes your institutional memory.
Choose contexts, not content. Same knowledge, local examples. Photosynthesis in your school's ngahere. Statistics using your own rainfall data.
Book EOTC for consolidation, not introduction. Teach the knowledge first so the visit deepens it. A trip that front-loads content students have no schema for is a day out.
Audit for cumulative return. Every local context should be revisited at least twice across a student's time with you, at higher complexity each time.
Protect literacy and maths time. These are already required from 2026 and are where achievement is being measured. Local contexts should serve them, not compete for their hours.
Anchor the school's own history. Your buildings, your founding, your rolls and your alumni are legitimate, documented Social Sciences content that nobody else can teach.
Partner properly with mana whenua. Relationship first, resource second. Budget time, not just goodwill.
Write down the alignment. For each local unit, name the specified knowledge, the year level and the progress marker. When ERO or your board asks how local learning fits, you have an answer in one line.
Use your curriculum half-days for this. Four approved curriculum half-days per year are available for 2026 and 2027. Mapping local contexts to the new teaching sequences is precisely what they are for.
Key dates to keep on the wall
When | What |
Now | Years 0–10 English, Maths and Statistics, Te Reo Rangatira and Pāngarau already required |
9 September 2026 | Final Years 0–10 NZC content and Te Mātaiaho published |
1 January 2027 | Te Mātaiaho framework required; current NZC framework ceases |
Start of 2027 | Years 0–8 Science, Social Sciences, Pūtaiao, Pūmanawa Tangata; all Years 9–10 learning areas |
31 December 2027 | Existing ELC contracts end |
2027 | Procurement opens for the redesigned EOTC Programmes |
2028 | Redesigned EOTC Programmes begin; Year 11 curriculum required |
2029 | Remaining Years 0–8 learning areas; Year 12 curriculum |
Frequently asked questions
Is ELC funding still available in 2027? Yes. Existing ELC contract holders have been offered a 12-month extension to 31 December 2027. Schools book directly with funded providers; there is no application process for schools.
What is ELC changing to? The programme will operate under the name EOTC Programmes and will be redesigned to align with the updated National Curriculum. Procurement for the redesigned programme begins in 2027, for delivery from the 2028 school year.
Do schools still have to write a local curriculum? Schools must give effect to Te Mātaiaho when developing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating teaching and learning programmes. The national curriculum now specifies what is taught and when. Local decision-making centres on the contexts, examples and experiences through which that content is taught.
Can we still teach local history? Yes. Aotearoa New Zealand's histories is compulsory for Years 1–10 and sits within Social Sciences, which schools must start using from the start of 2027 with two years to fully implement.
Does a knowledge-rich curriculum rule out place-based learning? No. Background knowledge is what makes new learning stick. Local contexts are among the most efficient ways to build it, provided they are explicitly tied to the specified knowledge rather than substituted for it.
How do we find ELC providers in our region? The Ministry publishes a full list by region on the Enriching Local Curriculum page on Tāhūrangi, including contact details. Contact providers directly.
Useful links
Enriching Local Curriculum (ELC) Programme, Tāhūrangi: https://newzealandcurriculum.tahurangi.education.govt.nz/enriching-local-curriculum-elc-programme/5637255591.p
The New Zealand Curriculum, Te Mātaiaho: https://newzealandcurriculum.tahurangi.education.govt.nz/the-new-zealand-curriculum-te-m-taiaho/5637303584.p
Years 0–10 curriculum, Tāhūrangi: https://tahurangi.education.govt.nz/years-0-10-curriculum
Telling Your Stories: https://www.tellingyourstories.co.nz/
ELC enquiries: elc@education.govt.nz
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