Getting Serious About Our Future

We agree that achieving coordinated, system-wide change is crucial. We must act decisively, act as a whole system, and start now.

Brett O’Riley, Chair, 21st Century Learning Reference Group, 2014

This week the Royal Commission into COVID-19 phase 1 report was released, prompting all sorts of reaction from different quarters. So far, the focus of news reports has been primarily around the economic impact of the pandemic and the decision to shut things down for a period of time. Given the extent to which citizens were affected by decisions around the length of lockdown etc. it’s not surprising that this emphasis is getting air-time.

It’s important, however, to recognise that the purpose of the report was to investigate the wider impacts of the pandemic response with a view to understanding what we can do to better prepared in the very likely event of another pandemic occurring. The scope of the report, therefore, contains findings and recommendations across a broad range of areas – including education. A key recommendation in the report reads:

The health, economic, social, education and justice sectors should be prepared to keep essential services going as much as possible in a pandemic, but without compromising the long-term capability to continue delivering these services in the future.

The role digital technologies played in the pandemic response, and the issue of digital access is a key factor here. In my experience, while a good number of schools had systems and resources in place to enable access to learning from home, our system as a whole in New Zealand was woefully ill-prepared to respond quickly and equitably to this challenge – something I highlighted in my overview of over 40 national and international research reports that were completed in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused schools to close and moved teaching and learning online.

In their immediate response to address this issue as the lockdown took place, Cabinet authorised $87.7 million to support the switch to remote learning. This sum was to cover connecting the homes of 40,000 eligible learners to the internet, providing schools with 49,000 fit-for-education devices for students, producing English and Māori medium educational television broadcasts, and distributing printed learning resource packs to most schools and early learning centres.(COVID report page 38) While this was an encouraging response it was really a case of ‘too little too late’. Many of those devices and internet connections were still being delivered well after the lockdown had been completed, and where they were put in place, there were widespread reports of them not being used effectively for learning purposes due to the lack of teacher and student preparation – and the lack of resources. For example, while Te Kura went to great lengths to make all of its resources available to every teacher and student in the country (thanks to the huge effort of their LMS provider), their data shows that only a handful of schools and teachers actually accessed and used them.

The Royal Commission report acknowledges this happening, highlighting how this lack of preparation contributed to exposing high levels of variability and inequity in our system:

“All parts of the system faced a common challenge: it was not keeping pace with the educational needs of an increasingly diverse country. Various system-wide and sector-specific reforms were underway. However, statistics consistently showed marked inequities in educational outcomes and participation rates for some groups, including Māori and Pacific peoples. Digital access was also highly variable across the country and between population groups – something that became problematic during the pandemic when many educational institutions switched to online learning” (p. 34)

My point here is that there should have been a lot more done to prepare for this eventuality well before the lockdown actually occurred. It’s simply too late to expect a system to be able to pivot to an entirely new way of operating at the time of the event without the level of detailed planning and preparation being well established beforehand. It’s a case of anticipating these things happening and designing for system resilience so that the response can be made without the need for sudden, urgent action as we saw at the time of the lockdown in NZ. This is something I’ve blogged extensively about previously (see further reading list at the end of this post for more).

It’s pleasing to me that the Royal Commission report is, again, making recommendations that will ensure we design a more resilient system to withstand future pandemics – and other disruptive events. It recommends (p.93) that to ensure access to education can be maintained during a pandemic for the Education sector we must:

• Continue to coordinate planning work within the schooling sector (including peak bodies) which will allow schools and places of education to remain open as much as possible in a pandemic – by, for example, pivoting to remote learning, flexibility of the curriculum, teacher capability for teaching in online and hybrid learning environments, and planning for student access to digital devices and connectivity.
• Plan support for the early childhood sector which can be urgently activated, so that early childhood education can. continue as much as possible in a pandemic of extended duration.
• Plan support that can be urgently activated for the international education sector, including consideration of financial implications and pastoral care for international students.

It is the first bullet point that stands out for me here not simply because I believe it to be a significantly important recommendation (it is!!) but because it’s not the first time such a recommendation has been made.

Back in 2014 I had the privilege of serving on the 21st Century Learning and Digital Literacy Reference group, responsible for analysing the considerable amount of feedback submitted through the select committee process and writing a report we titled Future-Focused Learning in Connected Communities. The Minister responsible, Nikki Kaye (who sadly died this week, aged 44) was adamant that is process had cross-party support, and, as I understood as a member of the reference group, it did. The process of writing the report was one of the most challenging and stimulating times in my career – involving lots of consultation and feedback along the way before we were ready to submit it in May, 2014. Of course, no sooner had we submitted it than we headed for a general election in September that year, and, despite having received cross party support, the incoming government sent the report to the round filing cabinet and none of the recommendations surfaced to be acted on. Such a waste of effort on the part of so many people who generously gave of their time, expertise and experience.

I shouldn’t be surprised as that, it seems, is the nature of politics. But in this case I do feel aggrieved as it seems to me that by ignoring these recommendations, we denied ourselves the ability to design for a resilient system that addressed the issues of equity and variability – and in the process, we condemned future generations of teachers and learners to enduring the sort of turmoil we experienced during COVID-19.

Why do I think this? Well, the recommendations we identified back then have a lot in common with the findings of the Royal Commission report. The Future-Focused Learning in Connected Communities document identified 23 recommendations under ten strategic priorities:

1. Commit to meeting the needs of 21st century learners
   Prepare learners with the knowledge, skills and digital competencies to actively participate in New Zealand’s rapidly changing 21st century economy and society.
2. Achieve equitable access to digital devices for every learner
   Ensure all learners have access to suitable digital technologies, regardless of location, background, abilities or socio-economic status.
3. Invest in people and innovation
   Build digital learning capability across the education system. Foster innovative teaching and leadership. Support leaders to manage change and stimulate innovation. Establish an Education Innovation Hub to nurture new and emerging approaches to teaching and learning.
4. Create future-focused learning environment
   Design vibrant, technology-rich, cyber-safe learning environments. Make these environments flexible enough to serve multiple learning contexts, including one-to-one, small groups, collaborative and community learning. Put learning at the heart of the system.
5. Invest in high-quality digital content and systems to make content easily accessible
   Design systems and policies that make it easy for students and educators to access online content, create and share knowledge, and collaborate across local and global networks of educators and learners.
6. Build regional capability through collaboration
   Invest in regional networks of educators to create, foster and spread innovative practice. These networks could also include tertiary providers, local government, communities and business.
7. Build a robust evidence base
   Establish an ongoing programme of research and evaluation to promote innovation and improvement across the whole education sector. Include exemplars of effective teaching and learning with digital technologies.
8. Implement a coordinated, system-wide effort to align curriculum, digital technologies, property, infrastructure, funding and legislation
   Integrate the core elements of digital learning with a relentless focus on promoting learning in safe, future-focused environments. Integrate curriculum, effective teaching and leadership practices, technologies, property and system infrastructure.
9. Design a coherent, flexible and robust funding structure to support 21st century learning
   Support with effective funding the new approaches to teaching and learning made possible by digital technologies. Align initiatives, reprioritise existing resources, establish public-private partnerships and create flexibility in funding policies.
10. Implement a comprehensive five-year plan from 2014
    Work with educators, education agencies and community leaders on an implementation plan for learning with digital technologies, with agreed goals and progress measures. Use the expertise that exists nationally and internationally to assist with implementation planning, oversight and evaluation.

In the context of this post I want to focus on item 4, creating a future-focused learning environment. The specific recommendations within this priority were:

1. That the Ministry of Education progressively equip all New Zealand schools, kura  and ECE services with an ICT infrastructure that allows rapid technological change, including:
   • fibre, high-speed internet connectivity
   • upgraded school networks that include wireless
   • fit-for-purpose school property
   • seamless ICT support.
2. That the Ministry of Education support the development of aggregated services, cloud-based applications, server-less schools and shared library services.
3. That the Ministry of Education urgently investigate providing a centralised system to collect, analyse and disseminate student data.
4. That the Government collaborate with businesses and communities to enable access to learning outside school hours. Initiatives could include:
   • support for affordable internet access for all households with dependent children
   • digital hubs in public libraries and other community facilities

Imagine if we’d had those things in place in 2019 – five years after they were made? Imagine if the money that was so urgently made available at the time of the pandemic had been allocated to address these recommendations? What difference would we have seen in the responses made?

When I read through this specific list of recommendations now I can’t help but wonder how much better off we’d have been when the pandemic hit if we’d actually acted on these? They are exactly the list of actions that the government and Ministry of Education found themselves having to urgently respond to at the time of the pandemic – where, we could instead have had the systems in place to simply pivot more easily.

Further, consider the similarities between what is listed here and the recommendations of the Royal Commission. Certainly the list of of concerns identified in the Royal Commission report and the recommendations they make would likely be rendered obsolete if these things had been acted on then. How many inquiries, commissions and reports will it take to see action taken? It’s not as if we’d be doing something that no-one else in the world has tried – NZ now lags well behind many other nations that have already established the sort of technology enabled ecosystem recommended in the Future-Focused Learning in Connected Communities report. Will we need to wait another ten years and endure the pain of another pandemic before we realise the importance of acting on this advice?

The future of education demands more than incremental improvements—it requires a fundamentally resilient and adaptive technologically-enabled ecosystem. In an era of rapid technological change and unpredictable global challenges, our educational infrastructure must be designed with flexibility, responsiveness, and sustainability at its core. These recommendations are not just about upgrading technology, but about creating an agile learning environment that can pivot, transform, and thrive under any circumstances. By strategically investing in robust ICT infrastructure, shared services, and community-connected learning, we can build an educational system that doesn’t just respond to change, but anticipates and shapes it. Further, it will provide a more secure foundation to address the issues of inequity and variability that exist currently. Our children deserve an education system that is as dynamic, innovative, and forward-thinking as the world they will inherit.

Further Reading

• COVID-19 Research: The role of digital technologies in the education response to the COVID-19 pandemic. – thought piece, 2021
• Time for resilience planning – blog post, June 18 2024
• Resilience Required Now! – blog post, December 17. 2022
• Resilience in Education – blog post September 17, 2022
• 8 Insights for Achieving Resilience – blog post, November 20, 2022
• Achieving Resilience – blogpost September 23, 2022
• Resilience Planning for Schools – blog post December 12, 2021
• More on Resilience Planning for Schools – blog post December 21, 2021
• Resilience Planning – Thought Piece March 12, 2022
• Being Resilient: Characteristics of Resilient Schools – Thought Piece September 6, 2022
• Characteristics of Resilient Schools – Blog Post September 24, 2022
• Empty Seats – Thought Piece, January 16, 2023
• Hybrid Learning: Means to an End – Thought Piece, May 17, 2022
• Future Focused Learning in Connected Communities – published May, 2014