GORDON LIGHTFOOT | National
NOT IN WRITING
The Ministry of Education’s planned changes to the curriculum have been deemed so awesome that if the public found out it would cause a riot of zealous joy.
A Ministry of Education senior official has been caught on camera telling staff not to put information shared with education minister Erica Stanford’s office in writing because it could be made public under the Official Information Act (OIA).
Staff at the MoE are often coming up with fancy new things to make teachers teach kids, usually stuff they’ve found out about at university, and it’s always been wildly popular with the taxpaying public.
MoE staffer and official information expert Laura Hunter says sometimes the OIA needs to be sidestepped as a way of maintaining public order.
“There’s some really popular stuff in these undocumented discussions. So much cool stuff that we want teachers to teach kids on top of reading, writing and maths.
“If the public found out about our ideas during the early stages, you never know what could happen. There could be a stampede of people rushing to our offices to give us an excessive amount of high fives,” said the concerned policy advisor.
“We have to think about public safety.”
Hunter would not elaborate further about what new changes the Ministry wants to make to the curriculum, for the reasons she’s already given.
“Look, our work is so awesome and revolutionary that you can’t just go around making official records of it. What if the information got into the wrong hands? Imagine if the Taxpayers Union got hold of it!” she said in horror.
“Sometimes when you’ve got big plans, you’re better off keeping them all under wraps until the time is right.”
More to come.
