Tears Weren’t About the Fight
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
by ELV
On the way home, I cried.
Tears stung the unhealed cold sore on my lip,
and the aircon dried them hard against my chin.
I didn’t cry because I was exhausted from breaking up a fight before morning tea.
I didn’t cry because a recently solo mother — shaking, ashamed, trying to soothe her furious son — looked at me with that silent question: “What do I do now?”
I didn’t cry because one of our girls fell forward on the concrete, grazing half her face, and sobbed harder at the cost of new glasses than at her wounded skin.
No.
These weren’t tears of tiredness, or compassion, or overwhelm.
Somewhere between the school gate and the long straight stretch toward home, something inside me cracked open —quietly, cleanly, devastatingly:
The adults in this country are letting our kids down.
Utterly.
Spectacularly.
Consistently.
And that grief — that fury — burned hotter than the cut on my lip.
Because just after morning tea, another anonymous “helpful leak” landed in ELV’s inbox.
At first I read it with weary vigilance: How many more maggots can one system hide?
But as the chaos of the day settled into my blood, something else rose to the surface. This wasn’t just another maggot. It was a mirror — held up to a system where the people with the purse strings, the contracts, the procurement decisions, the legislative pens —
are not holding our children.
They are holding
Power.
Politics.
And a secrecy so thick you could cut it with a scalpel.
The SMART Tool
For months, our sector has stood in uneasy anticipation, waiting for the SMART tool to finally appear.
We were told it would help.
We were told it would support teachers.
We were told it would bring clarity to learning progress.
And yet behind the glossy promises, a quiet irritation festered.
We began hearing whispers:
the procurement was done offshore
an Australian company had won
no NZ alternatives were seriously considered
the data of our own tamariki — born of our whenua, our hapū, our iwi — would be sitting on Janison’s overseas servers
and we would be paying to access our own children’s information once it had been processed and packaged through a foreign platform
Still, we tried to trust.
We tried to believe someone, somewhere, had done the due diligence.
We tried to believe this wasn’t just another example of Aotearoa outsourcing sovereignty for convenience.
But then the questions grew louder:
Who was evaluated?
What was compared?
What were the scoring criteria?
Where will the data live?
Who will have access?
What protections exist for Māori data sovereignty?
And finally — inevitably — someone filed an OIA.
Reasonable questions.
Basic questions.
Questions any parent, teacher, or Board deserves to know before the system goes live.
Where the Story Turns From Suspicious to Concerning
Instead of answers, the requester received:
delays
extensions
vague references to “substantial collation”
and then — a 40-day extension with almost no justification
Then came today’s intel — the full OIA correspondence, dropped quietly into ELV’s inbox. A polite, precise request for:
the business case
the RFP
the tender documents
the evaluation criteria
the contract with Janison
the list of unsuccessful bidders
Procurement 101.
These documents should be sitting in neat, consolidated folders.
But instead?
Silence padded with bureaucracy.
A 40-day delay.
Excuses that don’t stack.
This was the moment everything snapped into focus.
What Section 15A Really Signals in the Ivory Towers
Section 15A allows deadline extensions only when:
the request is so complex it requires substantial collation, or
consultations are genuinely required and cannot be completed in time.
But this request wasn’t sprawling.
It wasn’t messy.
It wasn’t fishing.
It was standard.
Which leaves three alarming possibilities:
1. The documents don’t exist in the form they should.
No RFP.
No scoring matrix.
No evaluation.
No procurement trail.
If so, this extension is a smokescreen.
2. The documents exist — but they are politically dangerous.
Maybe:
the business case is thin
an NZ company scored higher but wasn’t chosen
there was no Māori data sovereignty analysis
Treasury raised concerns
Janison was chosen for convenience, not quality
If so, the Ministry needs a lot of time to prepare their defence.
3. Senior leadership and legal teams are panicking.
In OIA language, “consultation” often means:
legal sign-off
Ministerial sensitivity checks
comms crafting defensive lines
procurement staff scrambling
policy advisors muttering, “This will look bad…”
In plain language:
This could blow up.
And parents deserve to know why.
What Janison Already Does — and Why That Should Alarm You
Here’s what we know because it is public, factual, and verifiable.
Janison already manages large-scale assessment data for multiple countries.
Their systems collect:
item-level student responses
longitudinal learning profiles
time-on-task
patterns of disengagement
device metadata
login behaviour
demographic groupings
teacher scoring
automated scoring
national analytics
predictive modelling (in some jurisdictions)
This is normal for global ed-tech.
And here is the crucial truth:
We do not know what SMART will collect because the Ministry refuses to release:
the data schema
the Privacy Impact Assessment
the data governance framework
the architecture
the Māori Data Sovereignty analysis
the contract contents
If the Ministry won’t release the procurement documents, then by definition, nobody outside their walls knows what SMART will capture or how it will be used.
That is why people filed an OIA.
That is why your stomach tightens reading this.
That is why secrecy is the biggest red flag of all.
Because even if SMART starts small, these systems rarely stay small.
They grow.
They expand.
They creep quietly into new territory without parental consent and without public understanding.
That’s the business model.
That’s the risk.
That’s the reason for the secrecy.
The New Education & Training Act: Where This Gets Even More Concerning
And here is where today’s leak collides with the law that quietly passed weeks ago.
The amended Education & Training Act now allows the Minister to mandate:
any national assessment
any international assessment
any data collection tool
any digital platform
Boards have no opt-out mechanism.
Schools cannot refuse participation.
SMART is being positioned as the compulsory data pipeline — and Janison as the offshore warehouse.
In the AI world, data isn’t information.
Data is currency.
It fuels a trillion-dollar global market of assessment platforms, digital analytics, and algorithmic products built from the digital fingerprints of children.
Once our data leaves New Zealand, we lose control.
The vendor does not.
And So We Must Ask —
When the Ministry cannot explain how a foreign company won a national contract to hold the learning data of every child in Aotearoa, it is not an administrative inconvenience.
It is a breach of trust.
When the OIA clock is stretched to breaking, when documents “cannot be located,” when officials suddenly need 40 days of “consultation,” we must ask:
What do they already know?
And what are they preparing to cover up?
Meanwhile, in our classrooms, with scraped faces and broken glasses
and angry boys and heartbroken mothers, we are living in the messy, human reality of children whose futures hang in the balance.
And somewhere far away, behind locked office doors, people we have never met are making decisions about their data, their privacy, their identity, their sovereignty.
Without them.
Without us.
Without transparency.
That — more than the fight, more than the chaos, more than the tears — is why I cried all the way home.
Because our tamariki deserve better than a scraped face on concrete —and far, far better than what the adults in power are doing with their futures.
Before Your School Engages With SMART… Ask For This First
And maybe — before any school signs up for SMART PLD,
before teachers are trained,
before Boards quietly approve a data model they have never seen,
before our children’s learning is uploaded to a foreign server —
maybe we should all do something very simple.
Maybe we should all file an OIA.
Because before we hand over learning profiles, progress pathways, achievement data, and the stories of our children’s challenges and triumphs — we deserve to see:
the full data schema
the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA)
the data governance framework
the technical architecture
the Māori Data Sovereignty analysis
the vendor contract
the tender evaluation criteria
These are not optional extras.
They are the bare minimum parents, schools, Boards, and iwi should expect before a national tool touches a single child’s data.
If the Ministry cannot produce these documents quickly — or tries to delay again —that tells its own story.
Because informed consent matters.
And no PLD session, no digital tool, no Ministry directive is worth more than the trust we owe our young people.