Local publishers cry foul over education contracts

Local education publishers are unhappy foreign companies have beaten them to government contracts worth about $100 million.

They are worried they do not have a level playing field for future contracts and say the government should back New Zealand-made rather than return to the days when children learned to read with Janet and John books imported from England.

The situation prompted the Publishers Association to publish an open letter warning it was a cultural and long-term national interest issue.

It said education publishing firms earned more than $37 million last year, nearly $22m of it from locally-made products sold to local schools and $11m from exports to other countries.

That figure was dwarfed by the roughly $100m in contracts the association said had been let by the Education Ministry in the past two years for maths resources and training, all of it to four companies that were either foreign-owned or sold products originally developed overseas.

Association education councillor Andrea Tamatea from Learnwell, a long-standing publisher owned by the Open Polytechnic, said local firms did not feel like they had a fair go.

"No individual publisher wanted to be seen as having a grumble because they missed out but I think it's the unfairness. Has this government followed the procurement process correctly and if they have, it just feels as if the outcome was pre-determined," she said.

Tamatea said foreign firms had a big advantage because the new curriculums were similar to the Australian and English curriculums they already served.

"The criteria had been specifically catered for what they already had on the market," she said.

Tamatea said because the government was providing maths resources to support the new curriculum, schools had stopped buying local products and at least one company had pretty much lost all of its primary school sales.

The Education Ministry said it followed government procurement rules that required all suppliers to be treated equally, regardless of ownership.

"Contracts are awarded to those that best meet the specific requirements and offer the strongest mix of quality, delivery, and price," it said.

"Of the selected suppliers, one is New Zealand-owned, one is Australian-owned with a long-standing New Zealand team, and two are internationally owned. All four used New Zealand-based authors and teams, alongside international expertise."

RNZ understands the New Zealand-owned company was a distributor of products developed by a foreign firm, not a publisher in its own right.

Education publisher Dame Wendy Pye said the government's decisions were at odds with its policy of backing New Zealand companies.

It was also a big change in the way school resources work.

"In my experience never has any of this sort of money been dropped for resources. Never ever ever," she said.

"We're talking about huge amounts of taxpayer money so I think some of it should go to New Zealanders."

Dame Wendy said her books were rated highly in other countries and overseas resources were not necessarily superior.

"Fifty years ago we used to use Janet and John and we imported things from England," she said.

"But then we became our own decider of what we would do for the better of our children... so I don't always think that overseas is best."

Dame Wendy said New Zealand firms should be given fair consideration and if they missed out they should be told clearly why they had missed out.

The director of New Zealand publishing firm Edify Adrian Keane said three of the companies that won contracts last year won a closed tender a year earlier and that gave them an advantage.

"Being chosen in the first closed tender gave them a substantial advantage over other potential participants because they'll have had a lot of time with their products in the market, they'll have had time communicating with the ministry to hone their resources and ensure they are as close to curriculum outcomes that the ministry is looking for," he said.

"For the New Zealand publishing community it felt like running a 100-metre race against opponents who are starting on the 50-metre line."

Keane said the contracts could have been pivotal for the New Zealand industry.

"In a very small market like this the returns are not huge, but something like this which is on a national scale is a completely different beast and the kind of money that is available through this tender would provide an incredible amount of money for publishers to channel into new publishing and new resources and future opportunity for New Zealand learners," he said.

"This tender represented an incredible opportunity for the ministry to work with local publishers to develop their resources to fit the structured methodology that the ministry had determined to be its chosen path. Unfortunately that didn't happen."