ERO: The Watchdog That Forgot Who It Serves

By Rebecca Thomas

Back to Class — and Back to Class Systems

Oversight should be a light, not a leash.

ERO was created to help schools reflect, improve, and grow — to hold the mirror steady while we examined our practice. Its purpose was never to punish; its mana lay in guidance and integrity.

But lately, that mirror has started to look more like a searchlight.

In this government’s hands, ERO no longer feels like a guardian of learning — it feels like a bloodhound for the Minister, sniffing out fault and circling the same schools that have already carried the weight of inequity. 

It’s as though the professional independence that once grounded its credibility has been traded for obedience to political command.

Those who work within and alongside ERO can feel the shift. The tone has hardened. Reports read more like directives than insights. Schools are being reviewed with suspicion rather than curiosity. And when brown schools in the North find themselves under constant “special scrutiny” or with commissioners installed under the banner of improvement, it is impossible not to see the pattern — one that confuses control for care.

A true review body should listen before judging.

It should partner, not police.

Its role is to guide, not to intimidate.

Yet ERO’s new stance echoes the Ofsted regime in the United Kingdom — a system once built to assure quality that now strikes fear into the very schools it claims to serve. When educators prepare for inspection more than they prepare for learning, when language of improvement is replaced with threat, the profession itself begins to shrink.

When evaluation becomes enforcement, professionalism collapses into performance.

ERO must be restored to its purpose: a mirror to the system, not a muzzle over people.

When Evaluation Becomes Evidence for Power

The Back to Class report could have been a chance to explore why attendance patterns reflect deep social fractures — to trace the threads of poverty, racism, and colonisation that make engagement uneven across the motu. Instead, ERO chose a different lens: one that measured attitude instead of understanding, compliance instead of connection.

The survey questions ask families if they believe attendance is important, if rewards motivate them, if the law is reason enough. These are not neutral questions. They are carefully chosen — and deeply revealing of the worldview that shaped them.

Each one divides by socio-economic line, by assumption, by stereotype.

Each one whispers that poorer whānau need rewards to care, that Māori parents need discipline to comply — and yet look at the children on the front cover of the report.

Smiling faces framed as proof of inclusion, while the narrative inside quietly undermines the very communities those images claim to celebrate.

Representation without respect is not equity — it’s advertising.

Why does ERO ask questions that sort families by deficit?

Why are incentives and punishments treated as cultural indicators?

Why is “importance of attendance” measured as a moral virtue rather than a social outcome?

And why, when Māori educators like Te Akatea cry foul, does ERO defend the instrument instead of interrogating its bias?

If this is research, who does it serve?

If this is independence, why does it sound so much like the Minister’s script?

If this is accountability, why does it only ever land on the same schools, the same communities, the same faces?

A body that claims to champion improvement should model it.

It should reflect on its own conduct, its cultural assumptions, its growing proximity to power. Instead, ERO’s new stance feels punitive — professional detachment wrapped around political intent.

And now, with new fines waiting in the legislative wings, it’s hard not to feel the tremor of what’s coming. The first “examples” will likely be made of northern schools, of brown schools, of those least able to defend themselves from public naming and shaming.

Whether or not that decision has been made, the groundwork has already been laid in the narrative: non-compliance must be corrected; the system must prove its strength.

Punishment Masquerading as Progress

And now that the Government has the data it needs — the clear evidence that the lowest socio-economic areas are struggling most to attend — it uses that truth not to heal but to harden.

Instead of resourcing the reasons behind the absences, it readies new fines and penalties. Seymour calls these measures “targeted at the absolute worst” — those who “won’t” rather than those who “can’t.” But what does “worst” mean in the context of poverty? Who decides when hardship becomes defiance — and who will sit in judgement of that difference between won’t and can’t?

In a system already weighted against those living in survival mode, that distinction isn’t fairness; it’s privilege pretending to be justice.

The fines themselves read like this: $30 a day, up to $300 for a first offence, and as high as $3,000 for repeat offences. They will not fall evenly; they will land where hardship already lives — in homes juggling two jobs and one car, where food and attendance compete on the same budget line. They will be presented as a deterrent, but they are really a signal — a warning to the nation that the Government is “tough on truancy,” timed neatly before voting day.

The cruelty lies in the choreography: they’ve identified the struggle, then chosen to punish it.

A Lesson Already Learned — and Ignored

And this has all happened before.

The United Kingdom has spent more than twenty years fining parents for non-attendance. The system began in 2003 with small fixed-penalty notices and has expanded into hundreds of thousands of fines each year. Yet despite two decades of enforcement, persistent absence in England has doubled since 2018, now hovering around 22 percent of pupils.

Even their latest guidance (August 2024) pleads for a “support-first” approach — councils and schools asked to build partnerships, listen to barriers, and work with whānau before reaching for punishment. Still, the numbers show who bears the brunt: children on free-school meals — England’s marker of low income — are more than twice as likely to be persistently absent (36.5 % vs 15.6 %).

Critics describe police at doorsteps, threats of jail, and families frightened rather than helped. After two decades, the UK has learned that fines may raise compliance for a moment, but they corrode trust for a generation.

Attendance hasn’t healed — it has hardened into fear.

So before Aotearoa imports another broken model, we must ask:

Do we want numbers that look tidy or tamariki who feel seen? 

Do we want to lead through care or coerce through fear?

Do we want an education system measured by belonging or by obedience?

A Mirror, Not a Muzzle

This is a plea — and a challenge.

ERO, look in the mirror you were meant to hold for us.

Ask what professionalism means when empathy is missing.

Ask what evidence means when it is shaped by assumption.

Ask what independence means when your findings are echoed, word for word, in ministerial press releases.

Education deserves an evaluator that lifts mana, not one that manages optics.

Tamariki deserve to be seen, not statistically sorted.

Communities deserve accountability that feels like partnership, not punishment.

Because when the watchdog forgets who it serves, it starts serving fear.

And when data is used to divide rather than to understand, it stops being truth — it becomes propaganda.

We deserve better than that.

Our children deserve better than that.

And until we see integrity return to oversight, we will keep watching — and we will keep speaking.