All eleven partnership schools have received termination notices from the Minister and are being shut down by the government on 31 December but Sir Toby says that in the past few days he has personally undertaken “more consultation with the affected schools than Minister Hipkins has done during his entire term in Parliament”.
“What I discovered shocked me. School leaders have been given clear signals from government that they are to keep quiet now or risk being cut out of consideration for starting an alternative state-controlled school for their students next year,” he says.
Sir Toby lists a string of comments that he credits as direct statements from partnership school leaders:
“The Minister has been fooling the New Zealand public into believing the kids will be just fine, and a ‘designated character’ school is something different to what it actually is. Call them what you want, he is putting Māori children right back into a state school system that has failed them over and over again,” Sir Toby added.
“Now the school leaders tell me they have had enough. The Minister’s carrot-and-stick approach may work on his Māori MP colleagues who remain curiously silent. But the school communities and the Māori electorates those MPs serve won’t be silent for long. We’ll have those MPs all sitting up and taking notice over the coming weeks and months.
“The Minister – and all of his ‘silent’ partners in government – needs to halt the closures, put the proposed Education Act amendments on hold, and instead undertake genuine consultation with everybody who is affected.
“There’s a saying that just because you have silenced a person, it does not mean you have beaten or converted them. I’m confident that whatever happens now, this is a movement that will not lie down. It will continue to grow, and the Minister will soon find he’s on the wrong side of history.”
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