This is the fourth and final post in a four-part series exploring why schools lose their capacity to learn. In the first post in this series, I asked why schools that start out genuinely innovative so often drift back toward the very institutional patterns they set out to replace. In the second, I looked at leadership – and noted that the founding principals who get these schools off the ground are, almost by design, gone before the second decade begins. In the third, I named trust as the missing ingredient that determines whether what they started endures. This final post is about what has to exist underneath leadership and trust, holding them in place once the people who built them have moved on. I want to call that stewardship.
Stewarding Innovation
Think about this for a moment. Somewhere, right now, a founding principal who is five or six years into a school they built from nothing, is starting to wonder who’s going to carry it once they’re gone. Somewhere else, a Minister is signing off on a new school’s establishment plan, satisfied that the hard part – the commissioning – is done. Neither of them is wrong about what’s in front of them. But both of them are working to a clock that has nothing to do with how long the thing they’re building actually needs to survive.
That’s the mismatch I want to end this series on. An establishment principal’s tenure may run for five or six years. A government’s runs three, if it’s lucky. A board’s runs in three-year cycles as well, and turns over one-third of itself most years. An ERO review cycle can be shorter still. And the culture of a school – the thing that actually determines whether an innovation is still recognisably itself twenty years on – takes a generation to either take root or rot. Nothing in that list is built on the same timescale as the thing it’s meant to be protecting.
Schools, obviously, are not civilisations, in the sense that was the focus of Toynbee’s work introduced in my first post. I’m not suggesting they are. But they are social systems, built by people, sustained by culture, and shaped by the stories they tell themselves about why they exist. And social systems, it seems, are susceptible to a version of the same dynamic.
And here’s where I think Toynbee has something to offer beyond the metaphor. His argument, stripped to its essentials, is this: civilisations rise because they respond creatively to the challenges they face. And they begin to decline not when the challenges become too great, but when they stop generating new responses – when they fall back, instead, on whatever worked last time. He has a phrase for this that I came across while reading his work: “the tendency of a society to start worshipping its former self, mistaking the response that once succeeded for a truth that will always succeed.”
History suggests that simply designing and establishing innovative new schools isn’t enough. Every generation seems to rediscover this for itself, convinced it has finally found the model that will solve schooling once and for all. Progressive schools. Open-plan schools. MLEs and ILEs. Charter schools. Online schools. Each wave has produced genuinely valuable innovation – I don’t want to be cynical about that. But none of them remained innovative simply by virtue of the design itself. What determined whether the innovation lasted was whether the school ever developed the capacity to keep adapting – whether it built a culture that could go on responding creatively, long after the founders had moved on.
Which is, of course, where Toynbee’s work on civilisations and the work of Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, and Edgar Schein on organisations start to converge on the same conclusion, arrived at from entirely different centuries: resilience was never really about the brilliance of the original response. It was about whether the system retained the capacity to remain responsive.
The real challenge isn’t innovation
Innovation isn’t a destination you arrive at and then occupy. It’s better understood as an expression of something deeper: organisational learning, sustained over time. Which means the graphic (below) I introduced earlier in this series is worth returning to – not as a sequence of phases a school passes through and leaves behind, but as two modes a mature organisation learns to hold at once.
Understanding how to hold these two things in tension and ensure they are being given attention through the life cycle of the organisation is, perhaps, one of the greatest challenges for leaders – and boards – as they seek to establish and sustain an organisation that remains true to its vision. This is what I mean by stewardship.
The timescale problem
It’s worth being precise about what stewardship is answering, because it isn’t really a leadership virtue. Leadership is a question about capability – does this person have what it takes to keep the innovation alive? Stewardship is a question about time – what happens when the person who has what it takes is no longer there?
Every structure (e.g. leadership, governance, evaluation etc.) we currently use to support new schools is scaled to the term of whoever is in charge of it. A startup principal is given roughly half a decade to build something before the natural churn of the profession moves them on. A government invests political capital in a new school’s founding for as long as it remains politically useful to do so – which is rarely longer than an electoral cycle. A board governs in three-year terms, and each new intake inherits a vision it did not build and may not fully understand. None of these are failures of commitment. They’re simply timescales borrowed from elsewhere – from careers, from elections, from governance conventions – and none of them was designed with a generation in mind.
This is precisely the gap that te ao Māori has a word for that English doesn’t: kaitiakitanga. Not ownership, and not management in the neutral, administrative sense – but the obligation to care for something on behalf of those who come after you, knowing you may never see it reach maturity yourself. A kaitiaki doesn’t ask “will this still be here on my watch?” They ask “will this still be here for the grandchildren of the people who aren’t born yet?” That’s a genuinely different question, and it’s the one our current structures for supporting school innovation don’t know how to ask.
Which is why I don’t think the answer to the timescale problem is simply better leaders, or even more trust, though the last two posts in this series argued both matter enormously. The answer has to be structural. If the person accountable for whether an innovation survives is always someone whose own tenure will end well before the answer is known, then survival can never be anyone’s actual responsibility – it will always be the next person’s problem, and the person after that, until eventually no one is holding it at all. Stewardship is what you build when you stop pretending any one leader, any one government, any one board term, can be trusted to carry something this slow on their own.
From commissioning to stewarding
Whether it’s a greenfields school or an approved charter, governments and ministries invest heavily in getting a new school open – legislative frameworks, proposal assessment, governance appointments, funding, facilities. This commissioning role matters. It’s what creates the conditions for a distinctive vision to exist at all. I’m very concerned about where we’re at in NZ with this part of the process at the moment, where efficiency and short-termism seems to be the drivers for the way new schools are commissioned.
But once a school is open, it largely disappears into the mainstream system. The initial advantage of starting with small class sizes, large space, access to ‘start-up’ funding and specialist support give way to operating within the same funding mechanisms, same accountability frameworks, same review processes as every other school. The implicit assumption is that having been launched well, it will go on fulfilling its original promise unassisted. Nothing in the system is actually watching for whether it does.
That’s the gap stewardship has to fill. Commissioning has processes, budgets, and named roles. Stewardship, in most systems I’ve seen, has none of these – it survives only for as long as an individual champion happens to care. I’ve been involved in enough of these new school startups to have experienced this first hand.
Recall the two clocks from the timescale problem above – the political and professional one, and the generational one a school’s culture actually runs on. Closing that gap means action on both fronts:
If you’re a system leader:
- Plan succession for vision, not just for personnel – treat the loss of institutional memory when a founding principal leaves as a system-level risk, not a school’s private misfortune.
- Build the cross-school networks that let learning travel sideways, so it doesn’t depend on any one person carrying it forward.
- Review these schools by a different question than the one you use for everyone else: not “has it stayed faithful to its founding model,” but “is it still generating knowledge, still experimenting, still capable of a new response to a new challenge.”
If you’re a school or board leader:
- Put stewardship on the board’s calendar. Make it a standing agenda item, not a crisis response.
- Find one practice your school has been defending rather than examining, and reopen it.
- Name – now, not when the founding principal announces they’re leaving – who is responsible for keeping the imagine if question alive.
Both lists are really the same instruction, aimed at the two clocks named above. Both argue to stop treating stewardship as something that will happen if the right person stays long enough, and start building it as something that survives whoever’s currently in the room.
Looking ahead
Over the years I’ve become convinced that the ultimate measure of an innovative school is not the originality of its founding vision, nor the attractiveness of its buildings, nor even the success of its first few years.
It is whether, twenty years later, it still possesses the confidence, curiosity and collective capability to respond creatively to the challenges of its own time.
In a world where educational policy, technology and community expectations continue to evolve, perhaps the question for every school leader is no longer:
“How do we build an innovative school?”
but rather:
“How do we cultivate a school that never loses its capacity to learn?”
So here is what I would ask of educators, whether you are a board member, a principal, or someone shaping education policy. Don’t wait for the five- or six-year mark to ask the question I have been circling throughout this piece. Ask it now, whatever phase your school is in.
If you are still dreaming or designing, build the capacity for renewal into the foundations. Write it into your vision documents not as an aspiration but as a discipline, and name, now, who will be responsible for keeping the question what if alive once the building is finished and the roll is full.
If you suspect your school has settled into protecting what it built, take the phase table back to your next board or leadership meeting and ask, honestly: are we still experimenting, or are we simply managing what we already made? Name one practice, routine or policy the school has been defending rather than examining, and put it up for genuine reconsideration.
And wherever you lead, go looking this week for one place where trust has quietly narrowed into compliance, one place where “we’ve always done it this way” has become the answer rather than the beginning of a question. Then ask what it would take to reopen it.
Challenge creates innovation. Success creates stability. Stability can become institutionalisation. Renewal restores the capacity to respond creatively. Learning organisations are organisations that make renewal a permanent capability.
