Building trust, avoiding polarisation

A conversation with Bali Haque about keeping things simple and focusing on what’s important for the future of education.

With NCEA results becoming available this week I thought it appropriate to that my first post for 2026 would be with the third of my series on ‘conversations on the future of education‘ where I had the privilege of sitting down with Bali Haque. Bali’s extensive career spans multiple principalships, work with NZQA on the development of NCEA, leadership of the Tomorrow’s Schools review, and three terms in local government. Our conversation ranged across the evolution of New Zealand’s education system, but what emerged most powerfully were insights about the future we need to build – and the tensions that prevent us from getting there.

The Original Vision: Flexibility and Trust

As we began our conversation, Bali took me back to the conceptual foundations of NCEA, reminding me that the original vision was remarkably future-focused. The idea was a national framework based on unit standards with no artificial distinction between “vocational” and “academic” pathways. Schools would build appropriate programmes, there would be trust in professional judgment, and students would emerge with records of learning that demonstrated genuine achievement.

The flexibility was key. As Bali noted, “it was perfectly reasonable to go down a pathway where you do a vocational based course, but come out with a record of learning which is as valuable as somebody doing the traditional curriculum based subjects.” This wasn’t about the content alone – it was about recognising that how we learn matters as much as what we learn.

His example of outdoor education resonated deeply with my own background as an outdoor ed teacher – it’s not so much about preparing students for careers in the outdoors as it is about building confidence, resilience, collaboration, problem solving etc – all of the skills identified as being essential to succeed in our modern, constantly changing world.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All

What struck me most forcefully in our conversation was Bali’s frustration with current approaches that “fly in the face of what we know about good teaching and learning.” He returned repeatedly to the theory of constructivism – the idea that effective teaching starts with where the child is and builds from there.

The current shift toward prescriptive, centralised control represents what Bali called “de-professionalizing our teachers” – treating New Zealand as though we’re “a country that’s starting an education system where you need to say this is what you need to teach, this is when you teach it, this is how you teach it.“

His warning is sobering: “in five or 10 or 15 years, we are going to be in a position I suspect where teaching workforce is going to be more challenged than it is now because we’re not doing the literacy or the science of this the right way.“

The Literacy Paradox

Bali shared a fascinating case study about literacy assessment in NCEA that speaks directly to how we might think differently about measuring success. When he was with NZQA, they proposed identifying six to ten achievement standards across various subjects – geography, history, outdoor education – that would demonstrate literacy competency. Students would prove their literacy through authentic achievement in rich contexts.

The Ministry transformed this into hundreds of standards, “torpedoed the whole idea,” Bali said, “and we’ve ended up instead with a testing regime.” He went on to say, “if we’re interested in literacy and numeracy, we should be looking at the outcomes across the curriculum… rather than pulling through a testing regime.“

This speaks to a fundamental question for future-focused education: Do we want to measure discrete skills in isolation, or do we want to see competencies demonstrated in meaningful contexts?

System Over Islands

Perhaps the most important insight for thinking about educational futures is Bali’s emphasis on system-ness over autonomy. HIs view is that the Tomorrow’s Schools model created “two and a half thousand islands of autonomy,” and while the principle of subsidiarity has merit, the reality has been fragmentation.

Bali quotes a 2016 State Services Commission report that found that “the adoption of good practice almost always referred to as patchy… and the uptake of promising innovation is seen as slow to spread across the system.” This is the cost of isolation – successful practices remain trapped in individual schools rather than enriching the whole system.

Bali’s anecdote about the Auckland principal asking “what will I have to give up?” captures the mindset we need to move beyond. Future-focused education requires us to think collectively about what serves all learners, not what protects individual institutional interests.

The Leadership Imperative

When I asked Bali what would characterise a fit-for-purpose future system, he was unequivocal: school leadership is key. Not just principals leading their own schools, but regional leadership that understands “what’s happening in every school” – people with the skills to support and connect rather than simply manage.

This connects to his point about schools needing to be integrated into communities with support services wrapped around them, particularly for schools facing socioeconomic challenges. Education happens in context, not in sanitised isolation.

Trust and Polarisation

One of Bali’s most striking observations was about the polarisation created by our system’s structure. Higher-decile schools, he noted, “have much more clout and influence than the lower decile schools and influence the politicians massively.” He observed that when policy changes are made – such as tightening grade boundaries – it’s often the schools serving more disadvantaged communities that bear the brunt, while advantaged schools continue to thrive. The irony? “The higher decile schools are the ones that are responsible for this so-called grade inflation… those are the very schools that are complaining about grade inflation.“

A Message for Parents

Bali’s message to parents navigating current debates is both cautious and hopeful: “It is much more complicated than it sounds and beware of data which is problematic at best.” But he also reminds us that “fundamentally, our schools still are doing generally a good job and many parents think that.” The challenge is to look beyond simplistic solutions and quick wins, to resist the appeal of easy answers, and to stay focused on what genuinely prepares young people for futures we cannot fully predict.

What emerged from this conversation is a vision of education that is:

• Flexible in pathways and recognition of diverse learning
• Professional in trusting teachers to exercise judgment
• Connected through strong leadership and collaboration
• Authentic in how we assess and value learning
• Equitable in serving all communities, not just the advantaged
• Complex in acknowledging that good education cannot be reduced to simple formulas

As Bali put it with characteristic directness: “Let’s just train good teachers. Let’s focus on leadership of schools and the system. Let’s provide a flexible curriculum, which enables teachers to do that constructivism thing. And magic will happen.“

The question is whether we have the courage to embrace that complexity rather than retreat to the false comfort of simplistic solutions.

View the full conversation below:

Read the transcript here

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Access the other podcasts in the series of conversations on the future of education here.