Draft HPE Curriculum Misses the Point - and the Future

In 2015, I moved from the United States and stepped onto the University of Auckland campus with the confidence of someone who thought he had life figured out.

I was there to begin a PhD in Education. This was a new chapter, sure, but one I thought I knew the end goal. After all, I had been a teacher, a director overseeing 75 schools (300+ teachers and 60k+ students), and I’d just finished two postgraduate degrees at Columbia University. I was, by any reasonable standard, at the pinnacle of expertise.

And yet, as I walked those paths in Auckland, something shifted. The feeling was different, the questions were harder, and the rules I thought I knew didn’t apply anymore. I realised that all the certainty I had built - that identity of being an “expert” - wasn’t a destination at all. It was a point of departure.

When I first learned the New Zealand Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum, it felt like stepping into a different world. Up until that point, a ‘novel’ HPE curriculum had a certain structure. You organised everything around types of games - invasion, net and wall, aquatics, dance - because the logic was tidy.

The same tactics, conceptual knowledge and skills could be repurposed from one category to the next. It was a system built by David Bunker and Rod Thorpe (1982), two British educators who had rewritten the playbook with their model for Teaching Games for Understanding.

Their idea spread like a quiet revolution. In the United States, it became the Tactical Games Approach. In Australia, Game Sense. In New Zealand, Play Practice. Each with its own local accent, its own promise of change.

As the years went on, something curious happened: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. We all know the story. The same kids kept winning. The strong, fast, confident boys (kids like me) ruled the gym .

Everyone else orbited around them: the girls who hung back, the artistic kids who moved differently, the LGBTQ+ students who never felt quite safe, the boys that did other physical activities. What was meant to be a revolution became just another repetition.

Because if you weren’t already a good athlete, this “game-based” physical education didn’t liberate you, it locked you out. What should have been an invitation to movement, health, and wellbeing became just another stage for the sporty to perform. And for everyone else, it was a reminder: this isn’t really for you (Landi, 2025).

The New Zealand HPE curriculum

The New Zealand HPE curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007), on the other hand, played an entirely different game. It didn’t begin with specific units neatly divided into “invasion” or “net and wall.” It began with concepts. Four of them: (1) socio-ecological model, (2) attitudes and values, (3) health promotion, and (4) Hauora.

Each concept opened a new doorway into movement. The socio-ecological model asked students to notice how their bodies respond to the world around them in games, but also in life. Attitudes and values peeled back another layer, asking how our beliefs, our cultures, and our values shape which games we choose, and why.

Health promotion carried the conversation beyond the self, suggesting that movement isn’t just about personal growth, but can help transform the communities and people we touch (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022.)

And then there was Hauora, a distinctly New Zealand idea that wellbeing is like a house with four walls: physical, mental, social, and spiritual. Take away one wall, and the structure falters. In this way, the curriculum invited students to see development as something far richer than physical fitness. Indeed, movement was about developing the physical body, but it was also a way to think critically, to connect with others, and build a community. It was, in essence, a way of learning what it means to be a New Zealander.

This wasn’t physical education as I knew it. It was a quiet act of re-imagining: a curriculum not only about improving the body, but about understanding the self, and the world the body moves through (Ovens, 2010). It gave teachers freedom, too! Permission to choose the kinds of activities that spoke to their own communities and students. That, in itself, was radical.

As Justen O’Connor and colleagues (O’Connor et al., 2025) have shown, the “game-based activities” we teach in schools (netball, hockey drills, touch games) are not the activities most young people will do once they leave. The reality is far more improvised. They play pick-up games, join group fitness clubs or work out at the gym. They swim at the beach, cycle along paths, or roller derby. In other words, while the old curriculum was training them for sport, the New Zealand HPE one was preparing them for life.

And now, 10 years later, I watch as the rest of the world begins to catch up, trying to replicate what New Zealand had already mastered: a curriculum built not on rigid content, but on concepts. Not on prescription, but on possibility. Australia, Canada, Sweden... they’re all edging toward that same flexibility, that same ingenuity and creativity.

And then, almost as if in déjà vu, I opened the government’s proposed new New Zealand HPE Curriculum, and there it was again. The same familiar categories: net and wall, invasion, aquatics, dance. The same architecture. The same ghosts.

When I first stepped onto that Auckland campus in 2015, this approach was already 33 years old. Today, it’s 43. And in all that time, it hasn’t really changed. We tell ourselves that it’s modern, student-centred, even revolutionary. But the truth is harder to ignore: the very students we’re trying to reach are the ones who don’t see themselves in it.

I look at this draft and think, what happened? What went wrong? When did New Zealanders stop building waka and start drifting with the current?

For generations, this country led the world in navigation, guided not by fear but by stars, courage, and curiosity. It didn’t wait for the world to catch up. It invited the world to think differently.

Sure, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But if this curriculum goes through, one thing has surely changed about New Zealand HPE. It no longer voyages. It floats. And drifting, as any navigator will tell you, is not how horizons are found.

About the author

Dr Dillon Landi is a Lecturer in Health, Sport and Education in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at The University of Queensland (Australia). He received his PhD from the University of Auckland in 2019. Dillon teaches courses and conducts research in sport, health education, physical education, and research methods. He has been a faculty member at universities in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Scotland (UK) and the United States.

References

Bunker, D., & Thorpe, R. (1982). A model for teaching games in secondary schools. The Bulletin of Physical Education, 18(1), 5–8.

Fitzpatrick, K., McGlashan, H., Tirumalai, V., Fenaughty, J., & Veukiso-Ulugia, A. (2022). Relationships and sexuality education: Key research informing New Zealand curriculum policy. Health Education Journal, 81(2), 134–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/00178969211053749

Landi, D. (2025). All physical and no education? – Gender, sexuality and the ‘affective atmosphere’ in physical education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2025.2517649
Ministry of Education. (2007). The New Zealand curriculum. Learning Media Limited.

O’Connor, J., Penney, D., Jeanes, R., Magee, J., Spaaij, R., & O’Hara, E. (2025). An Informal Sport Education: Integrating Informal Sport Through Negotiated Practice in Physical Education. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2025-0039

Ovens, A. (2010). The New Zealand Curriculum: Emergent insights and complex renderings. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 1(1), 27–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/18377122.2010.9730323