Audrey Young: Why Education Minister Hipkins has shot to the top of the class

Education Minister Chris Hipkins.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins goes straight to the top of the class for his handling of the Tomorrow's Schools review.

Of the myriad of reviews undertaken by this Government, this one was not only justified after 30 years of self-governing schools, it was promised before the 2017 election.

And in the release today of the taskforce's final report and the Government's response to it, Hipkins has turned a controversy and potential electoral liability into a consensus.

He has done it through consultation and avoiding confrontation.

Hipkins took the most unpopular feature of the original report - creating regional "hubs" to take over many of the functions of school boards - and gave the taskforce a clear steer to rethink it, and has accepted an alternative.

The hubs were called undemocratic, autocratic, one-size-fits-all, and Stalinist. Yet some of the changes that have now been made are just a matter of language and emphasis.

Essentially the 20 previously proposed regional hubs were seen by many communities as taking power away from parents and schools.

The hubs have been dropped and replaced with agencies which will support schools and boards, to be known as education support agencies.

Like the ditched hubs, they will also be regionally based, but they will be part of the Ministry of Education rather than separate entities.

The hubs were to have taken over the legal responsibilities of elected school boards of trustees, including employment, property, zoning, and suspensions, supposedly to leave the boards to concentrate on the quality of education.

The new agencies will take responsibility for zoning policy but schools can keep responsibility for property if they want it, or transfer it to the Ministry of Education if they don't have the inclination or expertise.

Exactly how the MOE regional agencies will operate is not yet clear.

But what is clear is that the Government has accepted that one rule does not have to fit all schools.

It has also placed greater emphasis on developing leadership in schools, by creating a leadership centre and giving strong incentives for good principals to take on under-performing schools.

That is the development of a policy started by former minister Hekia Parata and one that is likely to be endorsed by a profession that knows the importance of school leadership to educational outcomes.

National leader Simon Bridges has called the final report a "humiliating backdown" for Hipkins but others have called it listening.

Hipkins has won praise from some detractors in the Community Schools Alliance for having listened to parents, school communities, trustees, principals and teachers.

Whether he stays at the top of the class will depend on how he addresses the gaps in the report and how he implements it.