This morning I sat down with A Vision for Education in Aotearoa New Zealand, the report Dr Claire Coleman has written on behalf of the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective, a group that has been relentlessly defending the work of the profession and our system for some time now. At the outset I want to say that this is thoughtful, generous work. Five well-evidenced ambitions (a bicultural curriculum, equity of outcomes, a broadened curriculum, a re-professionalised teaching workforce, a wider public understanding of education’s value) bound together by a genuine commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to education as a public good. It’s the kind of document a fractured, exhausted sector needs. Something to point to instead of the next policy swing.
After reading it through, however, I found myself ponder further on a question that had already been put to me a few hours earlier this morning in a conversation with the education lead of a mātauranga iwi leaders group. She’d been telling me how, in the conversations happening inside Māori education circles, they keep arriving back at the same place: not “how do we fix this part of the system” or “how do we support that one” – but what is school actually for? This is the question underneath every other question. And it’s the question that for me, begins the process of vision-building.
I’m not sure that question gets asked in this report. And I think its absence is worth sitting with, respectfully, because I suspect the writer of the report and those in the AEC already know it.
What the report says it is
Coleman is careful about what she’s offering. She describes taking “a system-wide view, exploring how these elements work together to support meaningful learning and improved outcomes for all learners,” and providing “a values base for our education system” that “draws a connection between values and practice.” That’s precise language, and I want to take it at face value rather than argue with a grander claim she never actually made.
Connecting values to practice is important and necessary work. But notice what it would seem to propose: that the values are settled, and what remains is to align practice to them. A vision, I’d argue, has to do something prior to that – it has to ask where the values came from, whose worldview shaped them, and whether the structures we’ve inherited can actually hold them. This report, by its own description, begins one step downstream of that question. It’s a strategic response to a settled set of commitments, beautifully executed – but not proposing a deeper examination of them.
I suspect part of what I’m circling is two different senses of the word “vision” itself. The report’s sense is a well-composed statement or picture of what needs to be addressed, and how the pieces fit together once addressed. When I think of vision I think of a point on the horizon – a north star, something that orients and pulls us forward rather than something that resolves the view we already have. A picture can be accurate and still be a picture of the present, rearranged. A horizon asks us to work out which direction we’re walking in before we start rearranging anything.
The report already told us where the gap is
Here’s what struck me most, and what makes this feel less like a criticism than a continuation. Coleman explicitly states that she is writing as tangata Tiriti. She also says, in a manner I respect, that meaningful partnership with tangata whenua “could not be achieved within the time frame allocated for producing this report” – that the findings here will likely be “built on, or refined, through those meaningful partnership conversations still to come.”
That’s an honest disclosure, not a hidden flaw. My point isn’t that she should have found more time. It’s that the report’s architecture treats that partnership conversation as what happens after the vision – a refinement to follow – when what my conversation this morning keeps suggesting is that it has to be what the vision stands on – not just for Māori but for tangata Tiriti as well. Until that conversation has happened, in full, what we have is a very well-made scaffold with the foundation still to be poured.
The last chapter falls short
When I came to the final section – “Building shared understanding of education” I was expecting it might be the piece that does this deeper work, simply located to the wrong place in the sequence. Reading it closely however, I don’t think that’s quite right either, and the distinction matters. That chapter is about growing public and community understanding of education’s value once its purpose is settled – communication, engagement, whānau and community voice shaping how a shared conception gets enacted. It’s good and necessary work. But it isn’t an interrogation of purpose itself. It assumes the “why” and builds outward from there.
So this isn’t simply a case of “move chapter six to the front.” Even moved first, chapter six wouldn’t yet ask the question that keeps surfacing in Māori education Kaupapa as well as non-Māori contexts. That question is not “how do we help people understand and support this vision of school?”, but whether the fundamental design of school, the beliefs that underpin this and the ideologies that have built it as we’ve inherited it is the right vessel for the purpose we’re claiming for it at all – and then, how do we create a vision of what school could or should be?
The report already knows how to ask this
What gives me confidence this isn’t an unreasonable ask is that the report does this kind of work already, in its equity chapter. It states outright that “addressing inequity therefore requires more than improving access to existing educational structures; it requires re-examining those structures themselves,” and it lists exactly the right questions: “whose knowledge is treated as valid, whose voices shape decisions, how success is defined, where responsibility for change is located.”
That’s the deeper conversation I’m asking for – applied, in this report, to outcomes within the system. My question is why that same rigour isn’t turned on the architecture of schooling itself, across all five ambitions, rather than reserved for the gaps it produces. If we ask who decided what counts as knowledge inside the curriculum, we should also be willing to ask who decided that a curriculum, delivered this way, in institutions built this way, is the right response at all. Otherwise we risk doing exactly what the equity chapter warns against elsewhere: improving access to a structure without re-examining the structure. Band-aids, however well-designed, on a wound whose cause we haven’t named.
Where this connects to a longer thread
I’ve been circling this from another angle in my series on why schools lose the capacity to learn and my most recent post on the competing ideologies shaping our classrooms. The pull between education as knowing (control, performance, compliance) and education as becoming (trust, purpose, possibility) is an example of what happens when there is lack of focus on the purpose of education. That post wasn’t meant as a binary choice, and neither is this one. But I think the two pieces are asking the same underlying question in different registers: before we can decide how to measure, structure, or resource learning, we have to be honest about which story of learning – and whose story of what school is for – we’re building from. You can’t align practice to values you haven’t yet dug deep enough to understand.
An invitation, not a verdict
And so I applaud the AEC for producing such a document and recommend it be read by educators across the motu. Coleman calls this report “a contribution to an ongoing conversation about the future of education in Aotearoa New Zealand.” I think this is exactly right – because it points to what comes next. The conversation she names as still to come, the one with tangata whenua that time didn’t allow, the one with numerous communities around the country and the one with system leaders and policy writers in central government. This conversation shouldn’t sit downstream of our vision for education and schooling as a later refinement. It has the better claim to being its foundation. I’m not intending this as a criticism of what’s been written here. It’s a recognition that this document, done with such care, has done us the service of showing us precisely where the next, harder work begins.
Read more:
From my blog:
- The ideologies shaping our classrooms
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.1 (The rise and fall of innovation)
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.2 (Leadership)
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.3 (Trust)
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.4 (Stewardship)
