In my previous two posts, I’ve argued that we need to rethink how we measure system success – expanding beyond test scores to include the capabilities young people actually need (Post 1) – and that this requires sustained investment in teacher professional learning, leadership development, learning support, and cultural responsiveness (Post 2).
Many of you have engaged thoughtfully with these arguments. But several have also asked the most practical question of all:
“Even if we agree on what to measure and commit to resourcing it properly, who actually decides what happens? How do we avoid either top-down prescription that ignores local context, or fragmented autonomy that produces inequity?”
In this post I want to tackle exactly that question. Because how we distribute decision-making authority will determine whether broader measures of success remain aspirational rhetoric or become lived reality in our schools.
The Paradox We’re Living With
New Zealand’s education system presents a troubling paradox. Since 1989, we’ve operated one of the world’s most devolved school systems, giving individual schools unprecedented autonomy. Investment in education has steadily increased. Yet our system-level outcomes have remained stubbornly flat or declined, and the inequities that Tomorrow’s Schools promised to address have, if anything, deepened.
In my recent conversations with Bali Haque (who chaired the Tomorrow’s Schools review task force) and Cathy Wylie (who has been tracking our education system since 1987 and was also a member of the Tomorrow’s Schools Task Force) both reflected on what went wrong. As Bali put it, we created “2,500 islands of autonomy” where the whole concept of subsidiarity meant decision-making power sat with individual boards of trustees. The result, as both researchers found, was that the connections schools need for genuine improvement “got shredded in that process.”
Cathy describes it as “a very segmented system” that left schools isolated, racing through curriculum changes, managing property and competition, but without the ongoing connections and support needed to genuinely improve teaching and learning for all students.
The wastage has been enormous. Schools made technology decisions based on whoever “knew something about computers,” creating a mishmash that made national coordination nearly impossible. Principals focused heavily on property expansion and student competition rather than educational improvement. Meanwhile, the complexity of our classrooms grew – increasing cultural diversity, greater inclusion of students with additional learning needs, rising poverty and inequality – without corresponding increases in the collaborative structures and professional support teachers needed to respond effectively.
A 2016 report from what was then the State Services Commission examined the education system’s stewardship and found that “the adoption of good practice was almost always referred to as patchy. And the uptake of promising innovation is seen as slow to spread across the system.” As Bali noted, “You get a report in the paper saying such and such principal has turned around such and such a school – and almost inevitably, over a period of time that peters out and the system just carries on.”
Bali added; “We asked every school to solve increasingly complex challenges alone, as if 2,500 individual solutions could somehow add up to system success.”
This matters now more than ever. Current debates about curriculum and “back to basics” reflect genuine anxiety about student outcomes, but risk repeating the same mistake – imposing centralised solutions on isolated schools without building the collaborative infrastructure that makes sustainable improvement possible. As our society fragments and the future of work demands adaptability, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving, we need an education system that models these very capabilities.
If the last three decades have shown the limits of letting every school go it alone, the question now is: What kind of shared system do we need to support local strength?
Getting Clear About Where Decisions Belong
If we’re going to build a system that supports both local strength and collective improvement, we need to get much clearer about where decisions belong. Not every choice needs to be made at every level. In fact, the current model – where schools are expected to be expert in everything from pedagogical leadership to property management to strategic planning to community development – has spread leadership impossibly thin.
So here are the two questions that should guide our thinking:
- What decisions genuinely require local knowledge, trust, and relationships to be good decisions?
And conversely:
2. What decisions, if left only to individual schools, predictably produce unfair variation or wasted effort?
Getting this balance right isn’t about centralisation versus autonomy. It’s about clarity of purpose and intelligent distribution of responsibility.
Local Decisions: Close to the Learner
Some decisions can only be made well by people who know their students, their community, and their context intimately. These are the decisions that should stay firmly in the hands of school leaders, teachers, and their communities.
1. Learning Culture and Pedagogy
In my view, schools must lead on how learning actually happens in their classrooms. This means decisions about teaching approaches, assessment for learning practices, and how they bring the curriculum to life in ways that connect with their students’ worlds. No ministry official or distant advisor can tell a teacher when to slow down and dig deeper with a particular concept, or when a student needs a different entry point into the learning.
The solution isn’t more prescription from the centre – it’s investment in deep professional learning where teachers develop genuine pedagogical expertise. It’s creating time and structures for inquiry cycles where teachers can systematically examine their practice and its impact. It’s co-designing learning with students and whānau so that pedagogy is responsive, not just prescribed.
Reflection question: What is one decision about pedagogy or partnership you would never want taken away from your school – and how well are you currently equipped to make it well?
2. Community Identity and Partnerships
Schools shape how local histories, languages, and aspirations show up in everyday practice. The relationship between a school and its mana whenua, the ways it honours te reo Māori and tikanga, the partnerships it builds with local organisations – these emerge from genuine relationship, not compliance checklists. A school in South Auckland and a school in rural Southland will and should look very different in how they express their commitment to te Tiriti and their community’s identity.
The solution is giving schools the time and structural support for authentic partnership. This means resourcing engagement with mana whenua properly, creating space for community voices – including student voice – to genuinely shape decisions, and building partnerships with local organisations that can wrap support around whānau.
In addition, as we experience increasing cultural diversity in the New Zealand population, different communities will also require guidance and support for building effective learning partnerships with families arriving in New Zealand with their own expressions of culture.
Reflection question: Who in your community would say they feel genuinely heard and valued in how your school operates – and who would not?
3. Daily Organisation of People, Time, and Space
Schools need flexibility in how they organise timetables, group students, deploy staff, and use their spaces. A rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to school organisation makes little sense when schools serve such diverse communities and learners. Some schools might benefit from longer learning blocks, others from more integrated project time, still others from flexible groupings that change based on learning needs rather than age.
But here’s the catch: we shouldn’t expect every school to reinvent these wheels alone. The solution is to share prototypes and models across schools so that innovative organisational designs can be adapted rather than recreated from scratch each time. This is where networks and hubs become invaluable – not telling schools what to do, but enabling them to learn from each other’s experimental process.
Reflection question: What is one aspect of how you organise time, people, or space that you’re genuinely proud of – and have you shared it with other schools who might benefit?
Shared Decisions: Close to the System
But here’s where we need to be equally honest: there are decisions that individual schools cannot and should not have to make alone. These are areas where stronger central or network-level stewardship isn’t a threat to school autonomy – it’s a prerequisite for it to work well.
1. Coherent, Stable System Purposes and Indicators
Individual schools can’t decide what counts as success for the whole system. When every school defines quality differently, we inevitably end up with wild variation – and it’s predictably our most vulnerable learners who lose out. We need central leadership to set and protect a small set of shared outcomes and measures that genuinely balance the basics with equity and broader competencies.
The solution isn’t more prescription – it’s less churn and more coherence. These indicators must be co-designed with the sector, not for the sector. We must make sure the data serves learning and improvement, not just compliance and punishment. And for goodness’ sake, stick with them long enough for schools to actually use them for genuine improvement rather than constantly pivoting to the next political priority.
Reflection question: If you could design one system-level indicator that would actually help your school improve, what would it measure – and how would it be different from what’s currently required?
2. Curriculum Spine and Assessment Progression
When every school is interpreting curriculum progressions slightly differently, creating their own assessment tools, and making independent judgments about standards, we get massive inconsistency. A Year 4 student moving from one school to another can find themselves either repeating content or facing unexpected gaps. Teachers waste countless hours creating resources that already exist elsewhere in slightly different forms.
The solution is providing clear, sequenced progressions and high-quality assessment resources that reduce duplication and guesswork. These should be national tools that are optional in method but clear in expectations, with built-in support for diverse learners. Think of it as providing the map and compass, not dictating the exact path every class must follow.
Reflection question: How many hours did your teachers spend this year creating or adapting curriculum and assessment resources that probably exist in similar forms in dozens of other schools – and what could they have done with that time instead?
3. Infrastructure for Collective Improvement
No individual school can build and maintain the depth of expertise needed across all areas of educational practice. We need funded, sustainable regional supports – subject networks, leadership development, cross-school improvement initiatives. We need schools to function as nodes in a learning network, not isolated units each solving the same problems independently.
Bali Haque emphasized this point strongly: “If I were going to pick one thing, I would say school leadership is key… we don’t do that very well. Schools as organisations have different cultures, different ways of operating, and the leadership of schools is critical. But I don’t think we do enough in terms of school leadership—and I mean not just school-based, but also regionally, so that the people who are working on a regional basis who know the schools, who understand what’s happening in every school, those people also have good leadership skills.”
The solution is fundamentally redesigning how support works. Not the old model of schools buying in external expertise when they can afford it, but permanent infrastructure that connects schools horizontally. This is where the concept of local hubs becomes so powerful – not another layer of bureaucracy, but genuine centres of collaborative learning with staff who bring deep curriculum knowledge, assessment expertise, and practical understanding of effective leadership. As both the original Tomorrow’s Schools review and subsequent research have shown, this connective infrastructure is what enables good practice to spread rather than remaining “patchy.”
Reflection question: Which of these decisions is your school currently carrying that would be better held and resourced at network or national level—and what would you gain by letting it go?
4. Equity Levers
Structural inequity is an endemic issue in our system, and schools cannot address this on their own. They can’t, for example, redistribute resources across the system. They can’t coordinate services across health, social welfare, and education. They can’t address the housing crisis or child poverty that walks through their gates every morning. Leaving equity to individual school effort guarantees that the schools serving our most vulnerable communities will remain overwhelmed while better-resourced schools sail ahead.
Bali Haque observed something crucial during the Tomorrow’s Schools review: “Generally speaking, the higher decile schools have much more clout and influence than the lower decile schools and influence the politicians massively.” This creates a particularly pernicious dynamic where schools with the most resources and political influence shape policy in ways that serve their interests, while schools serving our most vulnerable communities struggle to be heard. As Bali noted, the system “perpetuates the polarisation” rather than addressing it.
The solution requires central action on transparent, needs-based resourcing. It means genuinely joined-up services so that families aren’t navigating multiple disconnected agencies. It means accountability for actually closing gaps, not just publishing data about them. And it means acknowledging that some of the decisions about how to allocate resources for maximum equity impact simply cannot be made well at the individual school level.
Reflection question: What is one barrier to equity in your school that you cannot solve alone, no matter how hard you try – and what would it take for the system to address it?
Getting the Balance Right
Here’s what three decades of evidence tells us: radical autonomy without system coherence produces fragmentation and inequity and Centralised prescription without local responsiveness produces compliance and disengagement.
The path forward requires us to be more sophisticated than either extreme. We need to think carefully about distributed expertise, intelligent accountability, and what kind of infrastructure makes both local strength and collective improvement possible.
This isn’t about ideology – it’s about being clear on which decisions genuinely require local knowledge and relationships to be good decisions, and which decisions, if left only to individual schools, predictably produce unfair variation or wasted effort.
What Can We Do Right Now?
The risk with this kind of analysis is that it feels too big, too systemic, too far beyond what any individual can influence. But that’s not true. There are concrete moves each of us can make – moves that, collectively, start building the kind of system we need.
These actions are specifically about decision-making and governance. (For actions around advocacy and investment, see Post 2 in this series.)
1. For School, Cluster and Kāhui Ako Leaders
You’re working in an impossible system, and I know that. But you also have more agency than you might think to shift how decisions get made and where your energy goes.
- Map your current decision-making. Take an honest look at which decisions you’re carrying that you’re genuinely under-resourced to make well. Where are you reinventing wheels? Where are you making calls that would benefit from wider expertise or shared infrastructure? Write them down. Name them. That clarity alone is powerful.
- Pick your battles strategically. Identify one area where you will lean into local autonomy – where you’ll invest in building your school’s capacity to make excellent decisions because they genuinely require local knowledge and relationships. Maybe it’s learning culture, maybe it’s community partnerships, maybe it’s how you organise learning time. Then identify one area where you will actively seek shared solutions – where you’ll join or create networks to develop common tools, share specialist support, or pool resources. Maybe it’s assessment tools, maybe it’s specialist teaching expertise, maybe it’s IT infrastructure.
- Make your progress framework explicit. How will you actually know your learners and staff are better off in three years? Not better test scores – though sure, include those if you must – but genuinely better off. More confident? More connected to their community? More equipped to navigate complexity? More engaged in their learning? Write it down. Share it with your staff, your board, your community. Use it to filter the endless stream of initiatives and decide what actually matters.
- And here’s the crucial bit: share what you’re learning. When you try something that works, tell other schools. When something fails, share that too – along with your analysis of why. Some of the most game-changing results in schools I’ve been working in have come from being more intentional about how they share success – from regular newsletter slots to ‘celebration’ events attended by parents and whānau to sharing learning with others in cluster meetings or PLGs for example. That’s how we build collective knowledge instead of isolated pockets of excellence.
2. For System Leaders and Policy Makers
If you’re in a position to shape policy or allocate resources, you have enormous power to either perpetuate the current dysfunction or help build something better.
- Commit to a moratorium on major structural changes. Just stop. Please. We’ve had enough restructuring to last a generation. Instead, focus your energy on the two things we established in Posts 1 and 2: co-designing stable measures of success that balance skills with broader capabilities, and resourcing the conditions that make those outcomes achievable. Then stick with them long enough for schools to actually use them for improvement rather than constantly adapting to the next flavour of the month.
- Refocus central effort on building connective tissue. The system is fragmented because we’ve systematically defunded and dismantled the infrastructure that connects schools. Rebuild it. Invest in data infrastructure that makes it easy for schools to learn from system-wide patterns without drowning in compliance. Fund regional support properly – not as a nice-to-have when budgets allow, but as core infrastructure. Create high-quality shared resources – curriculum materials, assessment tools, professional learning – that save schools from duplicating effort. And most importantly, protect time for collaboration. Stop loading more and more onto schools and then wondering why they can’t find time to work together.
- Involve practitioners early and genuinely in decisions about curriculum, assessment, and accountability. Not token consultation after decisions are already made, but genuine involvement from the beginning. Bring experienced teachers and principals into the design process. Listen to their expertise about what will and won’t work in real classrooms with real kids. Trust that they want what’s best for learners just as much as you do – and that they know things you don’t about how to get there.
- Be explicit about your decision-making framework. When new policies are announced, when initiatives are launched, when reforms are proposed – clearly articulate which decisions you’re centralising, which you’re devolving, and why. What’s the theory of action? How does this distribution of decision-making serve the broader capabilities we want to develop (from Post 1)? How does it connect to the investment commitments needed (from Post 2)? This transparency builds trust and enables productive critique.
3. For the Wider Profession and Community
Even if you’re not in a formal leadership role, you can help shift the conversation and build pressure for better approaches.
- Start conversations using the two guiding questions (see above). In your staff room, in your professional networks, in your board meetings, in community forums – ask: What decisions genuinely require local knowledge to be good decisions? And what decisions, if left only to individual schools, predictably produce unfair variation or wasted effort? Watch how quickly the conversation moves from ideology to practicality.
- Share your stories. Tell people about times when local autonomy led to genuinely better outcomes for learners – and be specific about what made the difference. But also share honestly about where lack of shared supports has held you back. Where you’ve wasted time because you didn’t know what other schools had already figured out. Where you’ve struggled because you were trying to solve a problem that no individual school should have to solve alone. As Bali noted, one Auckland principal asked during the Tomorrow’s Schools review: “What will I have to give up if this is implemented?” This question, he reflected, “encapsulated the whole problem” – schools thinking only about protecting their autonomy rather than what could be gained through connection. These stories are powerful evidence for what needs to change.
- Ask for transparency from politicians and officials. When new policies are announced, when initiatives are launched, when reforms are proposed – ask the straightforward questions: Which decisions are you centralising or devolving, and why? What’s the theory of action here? How will this distribution of decision-making actually help develop the capabilities we identified in Post 1? How does it connect to the investments discussed in Post 2? Hold them accountable not just for what they do, but for their reasoning about where decisions belong and whether they’re resourcing what they’re asking for.
Coming Full Circle: Governance in Service of Success
This three-part series began with a fundamental question: How do we measure system success in education?
I argued in Post 1 that we’ve been too narrowly focused in what we are measuring – fixating on test scores while ignoring the capabilities young people actually need to navigate an uncertain future. We established that success must include ecological thinking, cultural fluency, digital wisdom, creative problem-solving, collective leadership, and adaptive resilience alongside foundational literacy and numeracy.
Post 2 confronted the hard truth that you cannot measure these outcomes without investing in the conditions that make them achievable – sustained investment in teacher professional learning, leadership development, learning support, and cultural responsiveness.
And this post has argued that even with the right measures and adequate investment, we’ll fail unless we get governance right – clarifying which decisions belong close to learners and which require system-level coherence.
But here’s what ties all three together: The question of who decides what is ultimately about ensuring that what we measure as success can actually be achieved across the whole system, not just in pockets of excellence.
When we say success means developing ecological thinking or cultural fluency, we’re saying these capabilities matter for every learner, not just those fortunate enough to attend well-resourced schools with innovative teachers. That requires system-level decisions about curriculum progression, assessment tools, and support infrastructure. Individual schools alone cannot create the conditions for all students to develop these capabilities.
When we say success means equity – genuinely closing gaps rather than just documenting them – we’re saying this requires coordinated action that no individual school can take. That requires central decisions about resource allocation, joined-up services, and accountability for outcomes.
When we say success means student agency and wellbeing, we’re saying teachers need the professional learning, time, and support to develop these in their students. That requires investment decisions and collaborative infrastructure that connect schools rather than leaving them isolated.
The distribution of decision-making authority must serve the vision of success we’ve articulated.
If we agree that ecological thinking matters, who decides how it’s developed and how we know students have it? If cultural fluency is essential, who ensures all schools have the resources and expertise to develop it? If equity is non-negotiable, who has the authority to redistribute resources and coordinate services to make it possible?
My conversations with Cathy Wylie and Bali Haque reminded me that we’ve been here before – wrestling with these same tensions, making similar mistakes, occasionally getting glimpses of what works better. The difference now is that we have decades of evidence about what happens when we get the balance wrong.
Both emphasised a crucial point: we can’t achieve system-wide success if principals and schools are only thinking about protecting their individual autonomy rather than building collective capacity. As Bali observed, we need leaders “who understand what’s happening in every school” and who think beyond their own island. We need to move, as he put it, “to a system where schools, teachers, leaders trust the system” rather than operating in constant defensive mode.
The path forward requires being more sophisticated than the extremes of either full centralisation or radical autonomy. It requires asking for every decision: Does this serve the broader definition of success we’ve established? Does it help develop the capabilities we’ve identified? Does it work toward equity or perpetuate fragmentation?
So I return to the core question: What do we agree system success should be and how do we measure it?
We measure it by whether all our young people – not just the privileged few – are developing the capabilities they need for the future we’re handing them. We measure it by whether the gaps between our highest and lowest achieving students are narrowing, not widening. We measure it by whether our governance structures enable or obstruct the achievement of these outcomes.
And we hold ourselves accountable – as educators, leaders, policymakers, and communities – for ensuring that the decisions we make, the investments we commit to, and the measures we track all serve that broader, richer vision of educational success.
I’m keen to hear: Where would you draw the line between local and system decisions in service of the success we’ve defined? What would need to change in your context to make that broader vision of success achievable for all learners, not just some?
The comment section below is open. The conversation continues. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us start thinking and talking this way, we can build the kind of system our learners actually deserve – one that serves all children, not just the ones who succeed despite its limitations.
This is the final post in a three-part series on rethinking system success in education:
- Post 1: Measuring What Matters – What should we measure and why?
- Post 2: What Investment Does Success Require? – Resourcing the system we need
- Post 3: Who Should Decide What? (this post) – Getting the governance balance right
These posts draw on conversations with Cathy Wylie and Bali Haque, two of New Zealand’s most experienced educational researchers. Cathy has been tracking our education system since 1987, and Bali chaired the Tomorrow’s Schools review taskforce. You can listen to the full podcast conversations here:
