What a leaked curriculum meeting reveals about knowledge, power and transparency
- The Ombudsman is investigating concerns over how curriculum feedback was handled within the Ministry of Education.
- Dr Stuart Deerness says curriculum development must be transparent so the public can understand what knowledge was prioritised and why.
- He argues that a visible decision-making process is as important as the curriculum itself because it determines whose knowledge counts.
The process of putting together a national curriculum needs to be visible, AUT education academic Dr Stuart Deerness says.
The Chief Ombudsman is investigating whether a senior Ministry of Education official was circumventing the law when she asked staff not to respond in writing to feedback that had come from the Education Minister’s office.
Dr Deerness wrote in The Post that whether the Official Information Act was followed is a serious question, but there is also a deeper issue.
This is around how curriculum decisions get made, whose knowledge and judgement shape them, and how much of that process the public gets to see.
“The question is not simply what knowledge made it into the curriculum. It is whether the process was sufficiently visible for the public to understand whose knowledge shaped it, what was contested and why particular choices were ultimately made,” he wrote.
Adding to his article in The Post, Dr Deerness says a record of how a decision was reached is not just administrative housekeeping but is part of what allows the public to take part in, rather than simply receive, decisions that affect their children.
Official information is not just that which is written down. That which exists in officials’ heads can also be requested, he says.
“An instruction to keep things verbal does not put that knowledge beyond reach so much as make reaching it depend entirely on someone later being willing to say what they remember.”
Dr Deerness says the Ministry of Education official, Dr Catherine Law, also described an informal stage of feedback from the minister’s office that was to be handled carefully and off the page, ahead of a later stage she called “formal ... public and transparent”.
It is true that not every conversation in the development of a policy needs to become a public document, he says.
Officials and ministers talk constantly and informally as ideas take shape, and this informal thinking is a normal, even necessary, part of how policy gets made well.
“But if a curriculum subject has already been substantively shaped, revised or effectively settled during an unrecorded informal stage, the fact that a tidy, signed-off version later passes through a formal and public process does not make the earlier stage transparent,” he says.
"What matters is whether the public can see, or at least reconstruct, the reasoning that led there.”
A national curriculum is a statement about what a country considers worth knowing: which subjects matter enough to be compulsory, which histories and perspectives are represented, which skills and ways of thinking are treated as essential rather than optional, Dr Deerness says.
“Deciding the curriculum is a process of deciding whose knowledge counts. This is why the process matters as much as the product.”
Dr Deerness says that whether this particular curriculum turns out to be knowledge-rich is a question people will keep arguing about for years.
“But the question is not simply what knowledge made it into the curriculum. It is whether the process was sufficiently visible for the public to understand whose knowledge shaped it, what was contested and why particular choices were ultimately made.”
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