Simple questions some schools won't answer

Tactics vs transparency

Last month RGE sent ten simple questions to primary schools under the Official Information Act.

We wanted to find out information that the Ministry of Education does not collect, such as whether schools record and manage students according to their sex or their gender identity and whether children are compelled to use ‘preferred pronouns’. The questions had two or three tick box choices and could be easily answered in a few minutes at most.

Although the majority of schools answered the questions in a helpful manner, there were over 40 schools that used various tactics to try to avoid their legal duty to answer.

The overarching principle of the OIA is that all requested information should be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it. There is a “public interest test” that says if the public interest in the information outweighs the harms that may arise from releasing it, the information should be released.

Some of the grounds that schools might legally use for withholding information are:   

• to protect privacy

• the information is already publicly available

• the information does not exist or cannot be found

• providing the information would require substantial collation or research

• the information requested is not held by the organisation

• the request does not have enough detail to identify the information requested.

In an effort to thwart our OIA enquiry, every one of these excuses has been employed by one or more schools.

Several schools, instead of simply ticking ten boxes, sent a barrage of their School Docs policies that didn’t answer our specific questions. (Read more about School Docs in our substack from August 2023.)

Some said they didn’t hold the information we sought  - even the simple Yes/No question, “Does the school have a written policy about how to manage requests for social transition?”

One school said they couldn’t answer because stating whether or not the school had a policy on gender identity might breach student privacy.

Another principal wrote saying he “didn’t understand the questions.” (That’s rather alarming!)

We also received invoices from a few schools for the “substantial” time taken to tick ten boxes.

Our OIA questions easily pass the “public interest test” because they collect vital statistics about gender issues in schools that are not being recorded by the Ministry of Education. We are currently collating the answers and will report the findings in a few weeks to parents, schools, and to the Minister and Ministry of Education.

You can read the difficult, confusing, and intrusive questions that we asked here on the RGE website.  When your school next has its RSE consultation, why not ask the same questions to find out how prepared your school is for managing the effects of gender identity beliefs and how transparent they are about school policies?  

We have a follow up question for all the schools that have deliberately obfuscated and hindered our investigation:

If you are confident that your school policies are the best practice and that they benefit all your students and families, why won’t you be transparent about them?