We need your help to ensure that there is mandatory teaching of the Holocaust
For the first time, the draft Social Sciences curriculum includes the Holocaust as mandatory learning at Year 10. This is a significant and hard-won step, and it presents an extraordinary opportunity: to ensure that every child in Aotearoa New Zealand learns about the Holocaust, its causes, and its consequences.
The Ministry of Education is seeking feedback on the draft Social Sciences curriculum.
Submissions matter, and the number of supportive submissions counts.
Deadline: Submissions close on 24 April 2026. Please submit before this date.
What’s included in the draft curriculum
The Holocaust
- Origins of Nazi antisemitism.
- Escalation: Kristallnacht (1938), ghettos, emigration, and mass shootings in Eastern Europe.
- The ‘Final Solution’: Extermination camps (e.g. Auschwitz, Treblinka).
- Victims, resistance, and liberation; legacy and remembrance.
Click here to read the New Zealand Curriculum: NZC-Social Sciences Phase 4 (Years 9-10)
How to Submit
You can give feedback in either of the following ways:
Option 1: Email submission
Send your feedback directly to: [email protected]
A short email is absolutely acceptable.
What to Say in an Email Submission
If you say only one thing, please say this and say it clearly: I support the mandatory teaching of the Holocaust in the Social Sciences curriculum.
Please add points to your submission, such as:
- Who you are and why it matters to you.
- Teaching the Holocaust helps students understand where antisemitism and hatred comes from and why it remains dangerous today.
- Holocaust education supports critical thinking, civic responsibility, and social cohesion.
- The Holocaust must be taught in a pedagogically appropriate way to ensure it does not re-victimise the victims or cause an increase in antisemitism. The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand is the most appropriate national institution to help ensure this.
- New Zealand should align with other democratic nations where Holocaust education is a core part of schooling.
- What the Holocaust was:
point in the Nazis ‘Final Solution’ and the establishment of unprecedented Extermination Camps, such as Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka,
Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Holocaust was the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews, defined by antisemitic ideology, propaganda, legislation, and the systematic
implementation of unprecedented extermination techniques.
The Holocaust did not happen in isolation, and many other people were also persecuted with dedicated measures. Some – such as the Roma people
and the disabled – were targeted for extermination alongside the Jews, while many others were also oppressed by the Nazis on the basis of their
ethnicity, political ideas, religious beliefs or sexual orientation.
Understood in this broader context, the Holocaust represents both a distinctive and unique historical event, and a tragedy with complex legacies
and universal relevance, with ongoing significance for the history of humanity.
Option 2: Online survey (SurveyMonkey)
This is quite a technical document and asks 18 questions. You do not have to answer them all! The most important questions to answer are questions 15 and 16, as well as the questions about you.
Complete the feedback form here: SURVEY MONKEY
The survey asks several general questions before you reach the relevant section. You can move back and forward through the form, but once you click “submit”, you cannot edit your answers.
To see the answers we have given, and you can copy, click the attached Word document or PDF.
Please take the time to make a submission and encourage others to do the same.
Together, we can help ensure that Holocaust education is not optional, not marginal, and not forgotten, but a core part of what we teach the next generation.
Together, we can help ensure that Holocaust education is not optional, not marginal, and not forgotten, but a core part of what we teach the next generation.
