What is education for – and who gets to shape its future? That question sat beneath much of last week’s AEC webinar, where Tony Mackay and I were invited to discuss how we might build a shared understanding of education.
I shared some initial thoughts in my post titled Whose futures are we building? Since then, I’ve revisited my notes from the conversation, and what follows is my recollection and reflection on the ideas that stayed with me: the purpose of education, why systems resist change, and the agency schools and communities still have.
(You can listen to the webinar on the AEC substack or embedded at the end of this post)
Start with the purpose
We began with a deceptively simple question: what is education for? Drawing on the first of the 12 issues in Beyond the Ballot Box, I argued that we need to revisit this question before we make further changes to curriculum, assessment or pedagogy. I don’t think we have seriously reconsidered the purpose of school and public education for decades – possibly a century.
Tony made the case for a purpose centred on human flourishing – caring for ourselves, one another and the planet. He contrasted this with a narrower view of education as preparation for economic productivity. We spoke about the aims politicians often name – prosperity, social cohesion, individual and collective wellbeing – and agreed that each of those aims depend on learning. You can’t achieve a political agenda without a learning agenda.
The difficulty, as I see it, is that our stated aims don’t always match the values and assumptions built into the structures and everyday practices of schooling. That gap matters. If we want education to serve a broader purpose, we need to examine not only what we teach, but how the system is organised and what it rewards.
Change depends on trust
Then we delved into why education systems are so difficult to change. Systems tend to preserve themselves, and people can resist change when it feels like a threat to what they know or value. But resistance isn’t inevitable. We can more willing to change when we understand the purpose and can see how it connects with our values.
That makes trust essential. It has to be built deliberately among the people leading change and those most affected by it. Trust can take years to establish and can be damaged by a single event.
New Zealand has experienced significant changes that have endured, including the 2007 curriculum and introduction of NCEA. But we haven’t always built in the ongoing review and improvement needed to respond to problems as they emerge. When concerns are left unresolved for years and then addressed through major disruption, confidence in the process suffers.
Tony also reminded us that “the system” isn’t only national policy, regulation and government. There’s a living local system in schools and communities – people making decisions, building relationships and adapting learning to their context. That local system can be in tension with the national one, but it is still an important source of knowledge and possibility.
Finding agency in the places we work
The discussion then turned to the issue of power, and who holds it. Many educators feel that top-down mandates leave schools with little voice in decisions that shape their work. Tony offered a different way to look at this. He argues that educators, families and young people still have considerable influence over what happens in places of learning. A national mandate doesn’t determine every local curriculum decision.
Governments have a democratic role in setting policy. Tony’s argument was that they could act more as brokers and enablers of change, with governance supporting local action, rather than relying mainly on legislation and regulation.
For school leaders, that means engaging with politics without allowing every disagreement to become a battle. It also means being willing to hold ideas together that are often presented as opposites – knowledge-rich learning and project-based learning, for example, or explicit teaching and inquiry. Treating these as either-or choices can limit the conversation. A both-and approach may give schools more room to respond to the needs of their learners.
Tony encouraged schools to articulate a shared purpose with their communities, build partnerships, listen to young people, tell stories about what is working and reconsider the measures used to define success. I’ve seen the value of this kind of work in schools over several years. When students, staff, families and the wider community collectively develop and own a shared set of beliefs and values, those ideas can shape decisions in lasting ways. It also matters to talk with students about what they are learning, how they are learning it and why it matters.
I’ve written before about finding the right levers of change, using a micro, meso and macro lens. School leaders often work in the middle – supporting teachers, students and communities while also trying to influence policy. That position can feel demanding, but it gives leaders a useful view across the different parts of the system.
Many overseas I’ve spoken with, particularly in the United States, envy the autonomy New Zealand schools have. Sadly, we don’t always recognise the opportunities that autonomy gives us – or use them as fully as we could.
Staying true to principles
Claire raised the question of whether educators should ever take part in organised resistance. I said that the language of resistance can put us into a combative mindset. I prefer the idea of “principled resistance” with a small r: the daily work of staying committed to a vision and its values, even when circumstances make that difficult.
Tony agreed that framing our actions as resistance can imply a contest with winners and losers. Collaboration and partnership around a shared agenda may be a more productive way to build change. That doesn’t mean avoiding hard questions. It means being clear about what we stand for and looking for ways to work with others toward it.
Rethinking what counts as success
We applied these questions to changes in assessment and qualifications. Claire raised modelling suggesting that NCEA Level 2 pass rates for students facing the greatest barriers could fall from around 70% to 30–40% under the proposed changes. That is a serious concern, and the figures deserve careful attention as the reforms develop.
I also reflected on how many schools may have been caught short in their thinking about assessment. Community engagement can become little more than a formality, while other voices tell a clear story to parents. Our influence may be strongest locally, so schools need to work with their communities and explain what they believe assessment should achieve.
Tony pointed to changes in qualifications and credentials in other places, and to the role tertiary providers and employers can play. He suggested that career education should become “career connect with learn”. Technical qualifications, credit transfer and learning on the job are among the pathways people are exploring.
Learning portfolios and records may also help recognise achievement beyond formal qualifications. Tony referred to work by the Mastery Consortium in the United States, the New Metrics team in Australia and the Stonefields Collaborative in New Zealand. These approaches may open up new ways to show what learners know and can do. But they also carry a risk. If only well-resourced families and schools know how to navigate them, inequity could deepen. We need to work on expanding options while ensuring that all learners can benefit.
What teachers can carry into the new year
As the webinar closed, Claire asked what advice we would offer teachers as they prepared for 2027. I suggested starting with the beliefs and values that anchor you as an educator. Writing them down can help make them clearer and give you something to return to when the work gets difficult. I also recommended The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson as a prompt for reflecting on how we engage young people.
Tony encouraged teachers to trust their professional expertise, strengthen their agency and avoid working alone. Strong relationships among teachers, students and families – the “holy trinity”, as he put it – are central to learning.
Claire reminded us of the privilege of helping young people develop a love of learning. She encouraged teachers to think about the person who inspired them, and to “go be an interesting human with interests outside school”.
Tony’s closing message was to encourage educators to be optimistic. In a world shaped by AI, he argued, educators remain central to human development and nation building – to how we care for ourselves, one another and the planet. My own closing reinforced what he said, with the addition of an even simpler thought – take time to breathe deeply, look after yourself and collaborate. Today’s adults, including parents, teachers and politicians, are all products of a schooling system. What happens in classrooms helps shape what comes next.
That feels like the thread running through the conversation – the future of education won’t be shaped by policy alone. It will also be shaped by the purpose we share, the trust we build, and the choices people make together in schools and communities.
Listen to our conversation below
