Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with one of the most globally-connected thinkers in education I know – Tony Mackay. (See the full conversation at the end of this post below).
Tony has spent decades at the intersection of policy, practice, and purpose in education: as immediate past CEO and current Co-Chair of the Washington DC-based National Centre on Education and the Economy; as Inaugural Chair of AITSL; Inaugural Deputy Chair of ACARA; past Chair of ACER; and past Deputy Chair of the Education Council New Zealand.
I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Tony and his work through my membership of the Global Education Leaders Partnership (GELP) which Tony co-founded and remains active in. If anyone has earned the right to be both honest about where we’ve failed and optimistic about where we’re heading, it’s Tony.
What struck me most in our conversation wasn’t any single idea – it was the sense that we are genuinely in a moment of reckoning. The old debates about whether education needs to transform are fading. The real question now is whether we have the courage and collective will to actually make it happen.
Education is for Human Flourishing – Full Stop
Tony was unequivocal on this: the purpose of education is human flourishing. Not human capital. Not economic productivity. Not test scores. While those things aren’t irrelevant, they’re not the point. The point is developing young people who can care for themselves, care for others, and care for the planet – who can solve complex problems, make ethical decisions, and thrive in a world of hyper-change.
This reframing matters enormously, because it shifts the whole conversation about what counts as “success.” Tony talks about a broader set of metrics – cognitive, social, and emotional development together – and argues that when we narrow our measures to literacy and numeracy alone (as we are currently doing in New Zealand), we risk “sucking the oxygen out of the system” for the deeper work that education is really for.
I find myself both agreeing and feeling the tension. We can’t dismiss foundational literacies – but Tony’s point is that it doesn’t have to be either/or. Building from foundational literacies toward deep learning and full human development is the goal. The battle lines being drawn right now are not helpful for young people.
Teaching Has to Become a Collective Game
One of the most challenging things Tony said (and I think he’s completely right) is that we need to fundamentally reinvent the nature of teaching as a profession. Not tweak it. Reinvent it.
The model of one teacher, one classroom, managing up to five years of cognitive difference among students, largely in isolation – is simply not fit for purpose. Tony paints a vision of a genuinely collaborative profession: team-based, research-engaged, connected to allied professionals, partnering with parents and community, and turbocharged (his word) by technology and AI.
This isn’t about occasional team-teaching or having a teacher aide in the room. It’s about teaching being as much a collective endeavour as surgery or engineering – where decision-making about each young person’s progress is shared, expertise is pooled, and the whole community is involved.
I find this compelling and challenging in equal measure. For many of our schools, this requires not just a culture shift but a structural one – in how time and space are used, how schools relate to their communities, and how we think about the learning ecosystem beyond the school gate.
Governance: Power Has to Be Shared
Tony drew on the work of Charlie Leadbeater to describe what system change actually requires: clarity of purpose, genuine partnerships, and critically, the sharing of power. When power stays centralised, local innovation stalls. When governance is about brokerage and enabling rather than legislation and compliance, communities can lead.
This resonates deeply with my own experience. New Zealand has, in theory, one of the most decentralised education systems in the world. And yet, in practice, the real power often remains frustratingly distant from where the learning actually happens. We are still designing a system around structures, when we need to be designing it around learners.
Tony’s vision of “schools as learning hubs” – not just schools as social centres, but as genuine nexuses of community, technology, formal and informal learning – is one I find deeply compelling. It’s also deeply hard to pull off without system-level support. It aligns strongly with the think piece I wrote for the Teaching Council some years ago when they were preparing to establish an educational leadership strategy.
Signs of Hope
Here’s what I enjoy about my interactions with Tony: he’s been in this space for fifty years, and he’s still optimistic. Not naively so – he’s seen the cycles, the false dawns, the reforms that changed the language but not the practice. But he genuinely believes that what’s happening now is different.
He describes a movement from “System 1” (the schooling we have) to “System 2” (the learning system we need), with the messy “through space” in between generating more genuine innovation, more prototypes, more minimum viable systems than he’s ever seen before. And critically: this isn’t just a thousand flowers blooming. It’s intentional.
That gives me hope too.
A Challenge to Principals and Educational Leaders
If Tony’s vision resonates with you – and I hope it does – then sitting with it isn’t enough. Here are some specific challenges I’d offer to principals and educational leaders, individually and collectively:
Individually:
- Revisit your own language around purpose. When you talk publicly about what school is for, are you reaching for human flourishing – or are you defaulting to achievement data? The language leaders use sets the culture.
- Find one structure to challenge. What is one way time, space, or the composition of your teaching teams could be used differently to move toward a more collaborative model? Don’t wait for permission – prototype it.
- Listen differently to your young people. Tony’s call to genuinely put learners at the centre means more than student voice surveys. It means designing learning environments that respond to what young people say matters to them.
- Build your understanding of the global conversation. Tony referenced Estonia, Finland, British Columbia, Korea – and the Global South. What are you reading? Who are you connected to beyond your own system?
Collectively:
- Create the conditions for early career teachers to stay. Tony’s point about induction, mentoring and coaching being inadequate is one we hear everywhere and act on too rarely. If we’re losing our most energetic educators in the first five years, that’s a system failure – and leaders can change it.
- Push on governance. Advocate loudly for the power to actually reside where the learning happens. Support structures that enable local decision-making rather than constrain it.
- Network intentionally across sectors. The learning ecosystem Tony describes doesn’t build itself. Principals who are actively brokering connections with community organisations, employers, iwi, and other learning providers are already building the future.
- Be vocal about the broader purpose. In a political environment that reduces education to test scores, educational leaders have a responsibility to hold the line – and make the case – for a fuller vision of what education is for.
Tony ended our conversation with quiet confidence: “We are seriously on our way, and we’re doing more now than I’ve seen before.”
I believe him. The question is whether you and I – and the systems we lead – will be part of that movement, or watch it happen from a distance.
