Removing Treaty responsibility from school boards undoes decades of progress

Te Pati Maori’s descent into personality politics meant it missed the government’s recent announcement about changing school board obligations under te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi.

This is important: like last month’s refendums on Maori wards in local government, which the party also seemed not to notice, the schools issue goes to the heart of its mission: to achieve mana motuhake (self-determination) and to uphold te Tiriti.

As it currently stands, the Education and Training Act 2020 requires school boards of trustees to “give effect” to te Tiriti o Waitangi. But according to Education Minister Erica Stanford, this has been too onerous an obligation for the country’s roughly 2,500 self-governing schools.

She implied the Treaty requirement was not central to educational outcomes, saying of school boards:

Their focus should be on the practical things that make a difference for students: ensuring children are turning up to school, progressing in their learning, and succeeding.

While Treaty obligations “sit with the Crown”, Stanford argued, schools must still ensure equitable outcomes for Maori, offer the Maori language and be culturally competent.

But removing the overall Treaty element from their governance requirements means schools will now not be obliged to work with their communities to ensure local tikanga (culture) is recognised to achieve those goals.

Deputy Prime Minister and Associate Minister of Education David Seymour has also said the Maori language will only need to be taught to those who request it.

Separating equal opportunity from culture

There is an inherent tension in all this because schools are Crown entities.

Saying it is a burden to expect school boards to give effect to te Tiriti is to understate their role as a place where people are entitled to work and learn according to te Tiriti’s third article: “nga tikanga katoa rite tahi” – absolute equality of people and tikanga.

Section 127 of the Education Act explains how a school “gives effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi”, including by:

• working to ensure that its plans, policies, and local curriculum reflect local tikanga Maori, matauranga Maori, and te ao Maori
• taking all reasonable steps to make instruction available in tikanga Maori and te reo Maori
• achieving equitable outcomes for Maori students.

This should be no less difficult to interpret than school boards’ many other requirements relating to finance, staffing, safety and property.

Essentially, the current legislation tells boards that giving effect to te Tiriti means Maori citizens are entitled to expect schools to work for them as well as they work for anyone else.

That has been hard-won. Historically, schooling was used to support assimilation. As the director-general of education put it in the 1930s, the purpose of the native schools system (which lasted from 1867 to 1969) was “to lead the lad to be a good farmer and the girl to be a good farmer’s wife”.

Denying schooling’s transformative possibilities to Maori was a matter of political choice. The modern Education Act provides one way of thinking about how and why things may be done differently.

But Seymour’s explanation of the government’s intention points to a wider policy objective “to make educational achievement the paramount objective of school boards”.

This objective is already clearly set out in the act. Therefore, removing the requirement to give effect to te Tiriti suggests the government believes equal opportunities to achieve at school can be separated from culture.

A system for everyone

As it stands, the Education Act says boards must ensure “every student at the school is able to attain their highest possible standard in educational achievement”.

The Treaty requirement gives context and guidance on what that means in practice, including that Maori knowledge, customs and aspirations – not just language – inform teaching practices.

Removing it, as Whakatane High School’s board has argued, “deprioritises the focus on equity, inclusion and cultural identity”.

All this must be seen in the context of the government’s general policy focus on diminishing Maori distinctiveness in public life. This has already extended to removing Maori words from primary school reading materials.

The net result is to suggest language and culture may be present only on terms the minister, and not one’s community, has set.

There is another consequence, too, as the president of the New Zealand Principals’ Federation, Leanne Otene, has pointed out: “Without a clear obligation, schools will be pressured by extremists to delete Maori from the curriculum […] Without accountability, everything changes…”.

Accountability through the school board – which is a governance mechanism much closer to the point of policy delivery than the minister’s office – should provide Maori people with an additional level of confidence that the system belongs to them as much as to anyone.

As the political theorist Will Kymlicka put it, everyone reasonably expects to “live and work in their own culture”.

Dominic O'Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.