The Seeds We Sowed: Reflections on Culture, Leadership, and What Endures

Over the weekend I found myself in a room full of people I hadn’t seen in years – some for a decade or more. We had gathered to celebrate and reconnect, former staff and colleagues from Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education, the organisation I co-founded in 2003 with Nick Billowes and the late Vince Ham (and joined later by Ali Hughes). And yet, despite the years and the distance, it felt like no time had passed at all.

That’s not nothing. In fact, I’d argue it’s everything.

When more than eighty people travel from over all parts of New Zealand and Australia to be with colleagues they worked alongside ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago – and when the energy in the room is genuinely warm, genuinely joyful – you’re witnessing the residue of something real. Culture doesn’t just evaporate when people leave an organisation. If it was authentic, it travels with them. It shapes who they become. As one of our speakers put it: “You didn’t just shape our work – you shaped us.”

So what was it that made Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education such a formative place? And what might school leaders take from our reflections?

The Mission Was a Compass, Not a Slogan

Our mission statement – “pushing the boundaries of educational possibility” – wasn’t something we put on a website and forgot about. It was, as I described in my speech on the evening, a compass. And yes, it was a little scary. Which is exactly how it should be.

The best missions create productive discomfort. They ask more of you than you thought you could give. They make you stretch. I told the story of when Nick first failed a course I was running back in 1995 because he submitted his assignment as a series of linked HTML pages rather than a printable essay. He didn’t fail because he was being difficult – he was being exactly who he was: someone who couldn’t help but push at the edges of the possible. That instinct, multiplied across a team of people who shared it, became the culture of Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education.

For school leaders, your mission statement is either alive in the daily decisions people make, or it’s decoration. Ask yourself honestly – does your school’s mission genuinely shape what gets prioritised, what gets celebrated, and what gets challenged? If not, it’s worth revisiting not just the words, but how they’re kept visible and real.

Flat Management Means Everyone Has a Seat at the Table

One theme that surfaced again and again across the weekend was the sense of genuine inclusion – that people’s ideas mattered, that they had agency, that their professional confidence was built rather than managed.

Our early years team spoke movingly about this. Coming from a sector with a history of being “invisible, patronised and positioned on the margins,” they might easily have found themselves sidelined in a school-sector-focused organisation. Instead, as they described it, they found themselves in “an organisational culture that stretched our thinking, gave us a seat at the table of ideas and innovation, and built a professional confidence that still resonates in our lives today.”

Flat management is often misunderstood as the absence of leadership. It isn’t. It’s a form of leadership that trusts people, distributes decision-making, and creates the conditions for others to grow. It requires a particular kind of confidence from those at the top – a willingness to not be the smartest person in the room, but instead to fill the room with the smartest people you can find, and then believe in them until they believe in themselves.

As a school leader you might think about who in your organisation genuinely feels heard. Who is invited to the table? Whose ideas shape direction? The answers tell you a great deal about the culture you’ve actually built, as opposed to the one you intend.

Permission-Giving is an Act of Leadership

Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education was known as a risk-taking organisation. We made mistakes. We threw facilitators in at the deep end. We tried things that hadn’t been done before, and some of them didn’t work. But the culture was one in which people felt permission to try – and crucially, to fail – without it defining them. And through that we did, arguably, achieve considerable success!

This is harder to achieve than it sounds. Permission-giving leadership requires explicit signals from those with positional authority: it’s okay to experiment here, it’s okay to bring ideas that might not work, it’s okay to challenge how we’ve always done things. Without those signals, people default to caution. And cautious organisations don’t push boundaries.

Nick was a maestro of this. He had an extraordinary ability to make people feel that what they were attempting was not only possible but important – and then to quietly ensure they had what they needed to succeed.

As a school leader you might think about what permissions have you explicitly given your team? Have you named them out loud? Have you backed them up when something didn’t go to plan? Culture is shaped less by what leaders say and more by how they respond when things get difficult.

Cultural Responsiveness Is Not Optional

One of the things I’m most proud of in Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education’s journey is how seriously we took our obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi – and how that evolved from an intention into something genuinely embedded in who we were.

It didn’t start perfectly. From the day we started the organisation we were fortunate to have Hemi, Daph and Kathe on our team, enabling us to interface meaningfully with Kura Kaupapa and Māori educators. But they did more than that – they brought their influence into the way we worked as an organisation, sowing the seeds for the strong cultural foundation we established. This led to the appointment of De and Whare and the broader Te Ao Māori team, allowing Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education to move from being an organisation with good intentions to one that was genuinely walked the talk.

The principle of partnership as defined in Te Tiriti o Waitangi – of working alongside rather than doing to – turned out to be deeply aligned with the rest of our culture. Genuine partnership means shared power. It means different voices shaping direction. It means being willing to be changed by the relationship, not just to manage it. I feel very proud of the way in which Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education embraced that principle and the way it was exhibited in the way we worked. I was moved on the night to hear one of our senior Māori staff say in her speech that “CORE is the first organisation that she’d ever joined where she didn’t feel like she had to apologise for being Māori.”

From this experience I’ve learned that cultural responsiveness isn’t a programme you implement. It’s a journey you commit to, and it requires honesty about where you are now. The communities your school serves deserve to see themselves reflected in your leadership, your curriculum, and your culture. Where are you on that journey, and who are you walking alongside?

Organisations Don’t Always Endure – But Their Seeds Do

Towards the end of the evening, one of our former board members offered a reflection that has stayed with me. She noted that Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education, in its current form, might look smaller than it once was. But she reframed this beautifully: it hadn’t downsized – it had seeded. The people who passed through Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education carried something with them when they left. They became leaders, innovators, advisors, researchers. They took the values of the organisation and planted them elsewhere.

That, I think, is the real measure of a culture. Not whether the organisation itself persists in its original form, but whether what it stood for continues to live in the people it shaped.

Looking around the room on Saturday – the laughter, the stories, the genuine warmth between people who had shared something real – I felt that evidence vividly.

What I Take from the Weekend

I didn’t return from this reunion feeling nostalgic. I returned feeling renewed – and a little challenged.

Because the truth is, the world needs the kind of educational leadership that Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education stood for more urgently now than it did in 2003. The temptation in education at the moment is to retreat to what’s easily measurable, to comply rather than to lead, to follow the path rather than create a new one.

But the people in that room on Saturday are living proof that it’s possible to build organisations where people are genuinely trusted, where mission guides decision-making, where risk is embraced, where partnership is real, and where the goal is not efficiency but transformation.

These principles don’t belong to Tātai Aho Rau/CORE Education. They belong to anyone willing to put them into practice.

The question for each of us – as leaders, as educators, as people who care about what happens to children in schools – is whether we’re willing to push the boundaries of educational possibility in our own context, in our own time.

I believe we are.

Ngā mihi nui, Derek