Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.4

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.

Tags education leadership, educational change, educational transformation, school leadership

Why do schools lose their capacity to learn? pt.3

This is the third in a four-part series exploring why schools lose their capacity to learn. In the first post, I explored a pattern I’ve watched play out again and again over the two decades I’ve spent working alongside schools built to do things differently. However genuinely innovative their founding vision, so many gradually lose the capacity to keep learning, and drift back toward the very institutional patterns they set out to replace. It’s not a failure of nerve, and it’s rarely a failure of the original idea. Something else is going on. In the second post I examined the critical role leadership plays, both in getting these schools off the ground, and in determining whether they ever find a way of scaling and sustaining the innovation they began with. In this post I want to explore what I consider the ‘missing ingredient’ that will determine whether the change that was started will endure.

The Missing Ingredient: Trust

There’s a piece missing from everything I’ve written so far, and I think it’s the piece that actually matters most.

In some work I’ve been doing recently with my colleague Harry Mills, we’ve updated our Friction Free Transformation framework to add a new foundational element: trust. It wasn’t there originally, and looking back, I think that was an omission worth naming – because a great deal of writing about innovation in education talks confidently about what innovation looks like, and far less about the conditions that make it possible in the first place.

Trust takes time to build, but is broken quickly

Before going further, it’s worth being clear about what trust actually is. It isn’t automatic in any relationship – it has to be deliberately built, usually over a long period of time. But it’s asymmetric: while trust takes time to establish, it can be broken in a moment, and once broken, is far harder to restore than it was to build in the first place.

a. Building Trust

In Bryk and Schneider’s decade-long study of Chicago elementary schools undergoing reform they found that schools with high levels of relational trust among administrators, teachers, parents, and students were far more likely to improve student achievement, and defined that trust through four components: respect, competence, personal regard, and integrity. What should be noted here is that schools weak in trust had virtually no chance of showing improvement in either reading or mathematics, and the researchers described this as the first evidence directly linking the development of relational trust in a school community to long-term improvements in academic productivity.

The mechanism Bryk and Schneider describe is slow by nature – trust accrues through the ordinary, repeated, small-stakes exchanges of daily school life: a principal following through, a teacher being backed up in a difficult parent meeting, a promise kept about workload. Nobody builds relational trust with a single gesture. It is built over time and requires intentional effort and decision making throughout.

b. Destroying Trust

At the other end of the scale we can see what happens when trust is broken. Trust is fragile – typically created rather slowly, but destroyed in an instant by a single mishap or mistake – and once lost, it may take a long time to rebuild, or may never be regained. The classic source here is risk researcher Paul Slovic, whose 1993 paper on trust and risk management is the origin of what’s now called the “asymmetry principle.” Slovic offers a genuinely useful explanation for why, not just an observation that it happens. He notes that negative events are more visible than positive ones, and they carry more weight because they’re rarer and higher-consequence – one broken promise stands out against months of quiet reliability the way one flood stands out against years of ordinary weather. That gives you a mechanism, not just a metaphor, and it’s been replicated well beyond risk management: subsequent research across three decades confirms negative events affect trust more than equivalent positive events build it.

Consider the following examples that illustrate how these things can play out in the context of a school…

Built slowly – a board and principal spend two or three years earning staff trust through consistent, unglamorous means: workload commitments that are actually honoured, appraisal processes that feel developmental rather than punitive, consultation that visibly changes decisions rather than rubber-stamping them already made. None of it is dramatic. It shows up as staff willingness to take risks with new practice, to surface problems early rather than hide them – exactly the “experimenting with new practice” effect Bryk and Schneider found.
Destroyed quickly – a single non-consultative restructuring announcement, or a redundancy process handled by the letter of the law but not the spirit of it, can undo years of that work in a single staff meeting. It doesn’t matter that it’s one decision out of hundreds; it’s the one that gets remembered, retold, and treated as evidence of what the institution “really” values – precisely Slovic’s point about negative events being disproportionately weighted and disproportionately visible.

One non-consultative decision like the one above doesn’t just damage trust in the abstract – it teaches three groups three specific lessons simultaneously:

Teachers learn that visible failure has consequences, so the rational move is to stop attempting anything that could visibly fail – hence experimentation quietly becomes compliance with what’s already known to work.
Leaders, having just demonstrated (or witnessed) that uncertainty gets punished, learn to perform certainty even when they don’t have it – because admitting “I don’t know” now reads as weakness rather than honesty.
Students, watching the adults around them reward the safe answer over the interesting wrong one, learn the same lesson a generation earlier – that a mistake is a deduction, not data.

None of this shows up as a single dramatic event. It shows up as a staffroom where the same three or four people always put their hand up, while everyone else waits to see how it goes. It shows up as a leadership team that has an answer for everything, because admitting otherwise has never once gone well for anyone who tried it. And it shows up in classrooms, where the safest answer beats the interesting one, because a mistake is something you lose marks for, not something you learn from. Three different rooms, three different ages – and the same underlying condition.

It would be easy to treat these as three separate problems – a staffing issue here, a leadership style there, an assessment culture somewhere else – and hand each one its own fix. That’s certainly how most school improvement plans are written. But treating them separately misses what’s actually going on, because the teacher who won’t experiment, the leader who won’t admit uncertainty, and the student who won’t risk the wrong answer are all making the same calculation, just from different desks. Each of them has looked at what happens to people who expose themselves, and decided the safer move is not to.

That’s not a motivation problem, and it’s not a culture problem in the vague, unfixable sense the word usually gets used.

It’s a trust problem.

It’s the kind of problem Bryk and Schneider described above – respect, competence, personal regard, and integrity. Not a nicety, but the precondition for everything else in this piece.

Here’s the conditions problem in its simplest form. Experimentation requires trust. Teachers won’t experiment if failure is punished. Leaders won’t admit uncertainty if they’re expected to always have the answer. Students won’t take intellectual risks if a mistake is just going to reduce them to a grade. None of this is complicated, and yet it’s routinely overlooked in how we talk about building innovative schools. We talk as though innovation were a matter of permission, granted from above, rather than something that grows out of trust, cultivated over time. It involves the ordinary, unglamorous, repeated stuff of daily practice – a principal following through, a teacher backed up in a hard conversation, a promise kept about workload. None of it looks like reform. All of it is. The illustration below captures this:

Without trust, every one of the things I’ve been describing curdles into its own hollow imitation:

experimentation becomes compliance
inquiry becomes implementation
accountability becomes surveillance
innovation becomes performance

With trust, the same ingredients produce something else entirely:

experimentation flourishes
professional inquiry deepens
knowledge is shared
successful practice is scaled
improvement is sustained
and new cycles of learning begin

You could even describe trust as the renewable resource of a learning organisation.

Trust in the transformation cycle

Everything else I’ve written about – experimentation, adaptation, the capacity to keep asking “what if” – draws on it. And unlike most resources, trust doesn’t get used up by being drawn on. It gets used up by being withheld.

This is where the transformation cycle I’ve been circling throughout this piece finds its natural home, as illustrated below:

Every loop through that cycle creates new organisational capability. But it’s trust that keeps the loop turning. Take it away, and the cycle doesn’t just slow down – it seizes. People stop experimenting because experimenting without trust is just exposure. And a school that’s stopped experimenting, as I’ve already said, rarely announces the moment it happened. It just quietly stops asking the question.

Which is why the question worth asking about any school isn’t whether it has stayed faithful to its founding vision. Visions age. Contexts change. Holding onto the original idea too tightly can be its own kind of failure. The better question – the one that actually tells you whether a school is still alive to its own purpose – is simpler than that: is it still learning? In the final post in this series, I want to turn to what it takes to keep answering that question well, over years and even decades, long after the founding energy has faded and the people who asked “what if” at the start have moved on. I’m calling it stewarding innovation – because sustaining trust, and the learning it makes possible, turns out to be a different kind of work from creating it in the first place.

Call to action: Where trust actually gets built

The following ideas give school leaders some actionable ways of building trust that is enduring. Each one draws on a different part of what Bryk and Schneider found trust is actually made of – respect, competence, personal regard, integrity – so think of them less as a checklist and more as four levers a leader has available, worth pulling deliberately rather than leaving to chance.

Make uncertainty sayable. Leaders modelling “I don’t know, let’s find out” in staff meetings – not as a rhetorical device but as a genuine, repeated practice – does more to license teacher risk-taking than any innovation policy. This is the integrity lever: consistency between what’s said and what’s rewarded.
Redesign what gets noticed. If appraisal, moderation, and staff meetings only ever surface what worked, failure stays hidden and unexamined. Building in regular, low-stakes space to talk about what didn’t work – normalised, not confessional – is the personal regard lever: it signals people are valued for the attempt, not just the result.
Protect the first followers. The teacher who tries something new and has it not quite work needs to be visibly backed, not quietly steered back to compliance next term. This is where trust is actually spent or protected – the competence and respect levers together.
Separate assessment of risk-taking from assessment of outcome, for students as much as staff – feedback on the attempt, not just the grade on the result. This is the respect lever again: treating someone as more than the result they just produced.

In the fourth and final post in this series I will be discussing the idea of ‘stewarding’ innovation…

Tags building buy-in, trust

Keeping Our Kids Safe Online

The Conversation We’re Not Having: Why Every Educator Needs to Hear This One

Here’s the latest episode in the podcast series: Conversations on the Future of Education. This one features a conversation with Ray Finch who I met recently at a conference we both happened to speak at. His message is one I believe every educator and parent needs to hear, so I invited him to join me to record this episode.

Most guests on this podcast come from inside education. Ray Finch doesn’t. He’s the chief executive of the Laura Ferguson Trust, and his background is in the disability sector – not classrooms, not curriculum, not pedagogy.

But over the course of our conversation, it became clear why his voice belongs here anyway. Ray has spent the past few years working alongside New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service, Internal Affairs, the FBI, and an international coalition called the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, tracking a threat that is reaching directly into the lives of our young people – often through platforms they use every single day.

This isn’t another episode about screen time or phone bans. It’s about something happening underneath all of that, and it’s happening faster than most of us realise.

WARNING: some people may find some of the themes in this podcast disturbing. Discretion advised.

Beyond bullying

We’ve all seen the headlines about online bullying, and many will recognise the picture painted in Netflix’s Adolescence. Ray told me, plainly, that this only scratches the surface.

He described a global phenomenon – organised, deliberate, and growing at an exponential rate – in which young people are targeted, “love-bombed,” and then coerced through blackmail into acts of self-harm and violence. It starts, more often than not, not on social media but inside the gaming platforms our kids consider the safest, most ordinary part of their online world.

It’s the kind of thing that, once you’ve heard it described, changes the way you think about a child closing their bedroom door with a device in hand.

Why banning isn’t the answer we think it is

New Zealand schools are moving toward restricting devices. Australia has gone further, banning under-16s from major social media platforms. Ray doesn’t dismiss these moves – but he raises a concern that reframes the whole debate: bans that don’t work 100% of the time don’t just fail to protect kids. They can actively silence them.

He draws a comparison with conversations parents have about sex with their children. Often, he points out, they won’t come to you when something happens. The same logic, he argues, applies here. If a platform is banned outright, a child who stumbles into something frightening on it has one more reason to keep it to themselves for fear of being exposed for being on the banned platform.

The kids most at risk – and the tool that’s helping teachers spot them

Ray named this new phenomenon as nihilistic violent extremism – coercion and radicalisation for no ideological purpose at all, “just because they can.” He explained who is most vulnerable to it, why isolation and loneliness are the biggest predictors of risk, and a simple profiling tool some schools are already using to help teachers notice changes in a student over time, before things escalate.

He also shared a story from his own advocacy work that illustrates, more powerfully than any statistic could, how quickly this can spiral – and how ordinary the warning signs can look from the outside.

Where this leaves teachers, principals and parents

What struck me most was that Ray’s message isn’t one of fear for its own sake. He’s careful, deliberate, and – perhaps because he’s outside education looking in – offers a genuinely useful reframe for school leaders wrestling with the tension between preparing students for a tech-driven future and keeping them safe within it.

His answer isn’t “ban it.” It’s something closer to: treat online safety the way we’ve learned to treat financial safety – with the same everyday vigilance, the same normalised conversations, and the same refusal to be embarrassed into silence.

Listen to the full conversation

This episode goes into detail I haven’t touched on here – including the specific platforms of greatest concern, what schools are already doing well, and Ray’s own hopes for how we get this right. It’s a conversation I’d encourage every principal, teacher and parent to make time for.

Access the episode on youtube

Resources from Ray

Ray has generously shared the following resources for those who are interested in pursuing these issues more – included here are links to go to to report on content or behaviour you become aware of, background research, handouts and docs useful for sharing with students, staff and parents…

Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) – Positive Online Interventions – This suite of eLearning modules empowers frontline professionals to reduce the risk of radicalisation through early, safe, and effective engagement.
Reporting a national security concern – Report any concern for online coercion and radicalization here
Digital Violent Extremism Form – If you come across content that is of concern to you, the best route to report it on this site. Department of Internal Team will respond and take appropriate action.
HeadspaceInvaders – an engaging online activity for kids – excellent for raising awareness
Viewing Harmful Content – Information on how to respond if a student has viewed harmful content
Safe responses to behaviours of concern – new de-escalation and dis-engagement training from MySkill
Information guide: The Com Network – an online movement targeting students (useful for sharing with staff/parents/community)
Information for young people – two page handout designed specifically to share with young people to raise awareness of the issues
Understanding Cyberslang – a ready to print poster for your classroom wall
Emojis explained – a ready to print poster for your classroom wall
What’s happening on TikTok – a ready to print poster for your classroom wall
Know the Signs – a useful 2-pager with information on what to look for when young people are being subject to this sort of behaviour
This is me and Risk Matrix – useful handouts for use with students
Weaponised loneliness – A research paper on “weaponized loneliness” and its role in online exploitation
A toolkit for engaging with those affected by psychological manipulation and coercive control
Empathy questionnaire – For helping your loved ones under the Influence of psychological manipulation or coercive control
Red flags for psychological manipulation
Toolkit for helping youth
Toolkit for recovery from psychological manipulation & coercive control
Online abuse and harassment – a page of resources and links from NetSafe
Video: Exposing 764 – “764” is a global cult of online predators – many are teenagers targeting vulnerable children
Video: Know the signs – the video below may be useful for sharing with staff and parents… really good awareness raising starter.
Paid Content: Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) – Developed by Explore Hāpainga Ora, this suite of eLearning modules empowers frontline professionals to reduce the risk of radicalisation through early, safe, and effective engagement.

Tags cyber-bullying, cybersafety, eradicate hate

Taking the pulse of DE in New Zealand Schools

I’m pleased to announce the release of Tuia Te Hononga Tāngata, Tuia Te Hononga Ao: Taking the Pulse of Distance Learning in Aotearoa New Zealand – 2025 Abbreviated Edition that I have been involved with developing with my colleague Michael Barbour from Touro University in San Francisco.

This report provides a comprehensive national study that examines the regulation, governance, and scope of activity of distance learning providers in New Zealand’s schools sector. Data was collected through surveys distributed to leaders of distance learning schools and programmes nationwide. Drawing on survey data collected from identified distance learning providers, the study seeks to understand both the scope of activity and any developments affecting the sector. While the report is an abbreviated edition due to limited project funding, it continues a long-term effort to provide evidence for policy development and sector growth.

There continues to be a diverse landscape of distance learning providers in New Zealand, which can be categorised into two main types. The first type of provider includes schools defined under the Education and Training Act 2020, encompassing various public and private schools offering distance learning. The second type of provider, referred to as “programmes,” includes providers not specifically referenced in the legislation and further categorised into non-profit programmes (i.e., charitable trusts) and for-profit programmes (i.e., private enterprises). The study identified 17 distance learning providers operating during 2024 school year. Data were obtained from 11 providers, representing all public and non-profit providers but only a minority of private providers. Low participation among private distance providers has been a consistent challenge throughout the project’s history. This ongoing lack of participation from many private schools limits the ability to draw comprehensive conclusions about that segment of the sector.

From a regulatory perspective, no major changes affected existing distance learning providers during 2024. However, the reintroduction of charter schools through the Education and Training Amendment Act 2024 may significantly influence the future landscape. Interest from existing online education organizations suggests that charter schools could emerge as a new form of distance learning provider in the coming years.

Distance learning activity remained substantial and stable. Approximately 39,109 students participated in one or more distance learning courses during 2024, representing about 4.6% of New Zealand’s total school population. Although this proportion is similar to recent years, participation patterns continue to evolve. Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu remains the dominant provider in the sector, consistently accounting for over 90% of all distance learning enrolments. Overall, full-time distance learning has experienced consistent growth over the past six years, while supplemental enrolment has largely stabilized after growth associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2024, full-time participation was nearly twice as large as supplemental participation. The instructional approaches vary significantly across the landscape. Te Kura relies primarily on asynchronous delivery, public and non-profit programmes mostly utilize synchronous learning, and private providers largely operate via independent study models.

While this an abbreviated version of this national study, this report and accompanying website continue to provide a benchmark for educators, offering background, guidance, and ideas for the improvement of policy and practice in distance, online, and blended learning into the future.

The full report can be accessed at https://flanz.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2025-dl-pulse.pdf

Previous reports and papers are available at https://flanz.org.nz/dl-pulse/

The authors would like to thank the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand for their continued hosting and support of the project website.

Why do schools lose their capacity to learn? pt.2

This is the second in a four-part series exploring why schools lose their capacity to learn. In the first post, I explored a pattern I’ve watched play out again and again over the two decades I’ve spent working alongside schools built to do things differently. However genuinely innovative their founding vision, so many gradually lose the capacity to keep learning, and drift back toward the very institutional patterns they set out to replace. It’s not a failure of nerve, and it’s rarely a failure of the original idea. Something else is going on. In this post, I want to look closely at one part of that story – the critical role leadership plays, both in getting these schools off the ground, and in determining whether they ever find a way of scaling and sustaining the innovation they began with.

The importance of leadership

So why do organisations that were created to challenge established ways of thinking so often find themselves becoming established institutions themselves? It’s a question that’s followed me through every school I’ve helped establish over the years, and while I don’t think there’s a single answer, I’ve come to believe leadership sits close to the heart of it.

The leadership challenge isn’t simply starting something innovative; it’s knowing how to lead differently as the organisation evolves without losing its capacity to experiment and learn.

I’ve started to think about the schools I’ve helped establish in terms of phases – not as a rigid model, but as a rough map of the terrain I’ve watched schools travel through. Reflecting on this (and using the inspiration from Toynbee’s work as introduced in my previous post) I’ve created an image to try and illustrate shown below. In this diagram the phases are named across the top of each section and the associated leadership style at the bottom.

The more I’ve reflected on this, the more I’ve come to understand that the issue isn’t simply whether a leader is “innovative”. Different phases of a school’s development call for different leadership dispositions. In the illustration above I’ve identified six different approaches to leadership that are matched to the six phases of the development life-cycle.

It takes a visionary leader to get things started – to keep an eye on the big picture and bring others on board with that vision, but as the work of establishing the school begins, the leadership style must shift more to an entrepreneurial one as the focus must move to the execution of the vision that has been created.

I’d note here that these aren’t necessarily roles occupied by different people – or by the principal alone. Consider, for example, where do you see visionary leadership among your teachers? Who are the entrepreneurs in your staff?

As the school continues to grow and the underpinning processes and supports have been successfully put in place, the challenge becomes how to respond to the pressures of roll growth and new staff – so the leadership needs to be more adaptive as some of the things put in place to work with the original (often small) group of students, staff and community need to be expanded and to accommodate needs that may not have been previously considered.

This transition can be difficult for some, and may explain why, in so many cases, the establishment principals of many of these new schools move on after 5-6 years in the role. It isn’t because they are poor leaders – it’s simply that their core strengths as visionaries and/or entrepreneurs, while valuable in the start-up phase, will no longer serve them well as the organisation grows and matures.

Once things have settled into what may be considered as ‘normal’ for the new organisation, the leadership must become focused on scaling and sustaining the innovation that was started, and ensuring the school operates effectively as a learning organisation. The key to this is a collaborative leadership style, that recognises the strengths of the team and power of networks to help shape practice. Any form of ‘hero’ or ‘iconic’ leadership at this stage will result in the leader becoming overwhelmed and burned out, and members of the organisation feeling disempowered and lacking opportunity to contribute or participate in the changes taking place.

For me, this is the critical phase of leadership. Collaborative leaders are able to manage their role effectively by the agency they provide their staff, with various forms of distributed leadership evident in the way things operate. Collaborative leaders also recognise the importance of networks. They are active in professional learning groups and encourage staff to do the same – whether in person or virtual. They (and their teams) are constantly scanning the environment, subscribing to various forums and newsletters to remain informed about where innovation is occurring in the sector.

Consider where this happens in your context, for example. Who notices that something isn’t working and experiments with another approach? Who connects the school to ideas and practice beyond its walls?

Crucially, this doesn’t mean the visionary and entrepreneurial impulses get retired once collaborative leadership takes hold. The best collaborative leaders I’ve observed make a point of keeping those impulses alive somewhere in the organisation – sometimes in themselves, more often by deliberately creating space for others to hold them. It’s less a changing of the guard than a redistribution.

What happens when leaders & teachers become the custodians of “the way we do things here”?

At this point things can change markedly. If an organisation can maintain people within it who are the visionaries, entrepreneurs, adaptors and collaborators, it is more likely to succeed as a learning organisation and successfully navigate the complexities of change that will inevitably be encountered.

Sadly, this is also where I’ve seen some schools default to what I’ve labelled a managerial mindset. At this point I need to emphasise that I’m not suggesting we don’t need good managers. Good management is essential to embedding and sustaining innovation. The problem isn’t management; it’s when management becomes the dominant leadership response to a changing environment. Where this is the case maintaining established systems and structures dominates any open-ness to change.

This is what I referred to as the ‘decision point’ in the illustration in my previous post. This is the point at which a school can either continue to treat itself as a learning organisation, or begin to protect what it has established.

What becomes important for some at this point is the preservation of what has been put in place. The idea of establishing and maintaining ‘traditions’ can appeal as a way of building loyalty and a sense of belonging (which, one could argue, has its place) – but often these traditions can also act as a hinderance or roadblock to change that may be important to pursue. (Consider here the challenges face by some single sex schools when the idea of becoming co-ed is introduced, or when a suggestion is made to abolish long-established ‘departments’, for example, in favour of some other staffing structure that is better suited to the needs of the students and/or curriculum).

The longer the manager-leadership style continues, the more likely then that we see the emergence of the defensive leader – whose priority is to defend the status quo, and to actively resist change. In fact, change is often used as the reason to excuse poor performance. Often, a defensive leader will feel they are ‘trapped’ with few options as the relentlessness of change cascades upon them, and they lack the network of support and understanding that the collaborative leader encourages for example.

This has particularly important implications at a time where we see a plethora of leadership development programmes emerging – the question I’d be asking is “Are we preparing leaders to lead schools at different stages of development – or simply preparing people to occupy leadership positions?”

To summarise how these approaches differ I’ve created the table below:

The six leadership dispositions across the life of a school

Disposition	Core Focus	Risk Profile	Relationship to Change	Working Style
The Visionary	Imagining big, new concepts and long-term changes	Intellectual risk: Risks being misunderstood	Future-focused: Driven by what could be	Big-picture thinker: Ignores small details for the ultimate goal
The Entrepreneur	Turning ideas into real, working businesses	Risk-taker: Puts personal time and money on the line	Problem-solver: Adapts fast when things go wrong	Action-driven: Focuses entirely on tangible execution
The Adaptive	Continuous improvement and fluid execution	Calculated risk: Experiments with new workflows	Highly responsive: Constantly reacts to internal/external shifts	Flexible: Refuses to get locked into a set way of working
The Collaborative	Collective intelligence and horizontal networks	Shared risk: Relies on group buy-in	Network-driven: Uses shared learning to navigate transitions	Involving: Scans external practice and involves others to learn
The Manager	Rules, plans, and steady daily work	Risk-averse: Works to keep things safe and avoid losses	Stability-focused: Preserves current functional systems	Organiser: Directs people and tasks to make systems run well
The Defensive	Status quo preservation and personal comfort	Risk-phobic: Minimises personal exposure	Resistant: Looks for ways to avoid or stop change happening	Obstructive: Uses top-down, imposed change as an excuse

In my representation of the phases I see the first four phases of development and leadership as being a ‘healthy’ development and one we should be intentionally seeking to encourage and nurture through the leadership programmes available in our sector. Sadly, I don’t see this being the case – there’s too much simply left to chance at a system level and many school leaders (i.e. principals already in the role and senior leaders who may be aspiring to those roles) left to navigate their own way through this maze of decision making etc.

The fortunate ones may have been mentored by effective leaders in the past and experienced the sorts of collaborative and responsive approaches that are necessary. But there are those who have missed this experience and suddenly find themselves in a position of leadership without the broad range of knowledge and skills required to make them effective in any of the first four approaches outlined above – and in worst case scenario, start their role by adopting a managerial approach.

The education half-life of schools

The tragedy, as I see it, is that so many schools get stuck in that fifth phase – managing and protecting what was built rather than continuing to build. Every educational innovation, I’ve come to believe, has a half-life. Not because the original idea was wrong, but because the problem it was designed to solve doesn’t stay still. Schools don’t become less innovative because their founding vision was flawed. They become less innovative when a vision that once answered a real question keeps being applied to questions it was never designed for. That is, new questions – not the original question.

As I worked to develop this table it occurred to me that what I’ve seen happening in these new schools as they grow and respond to change is that one of two things occurs. Either the original visionary or entrepreneurial leader moves on to another ‘startup’ challenge, handing the reins to another leader chosen because of their ability to advance things to the next level of organisational maturity. Or, the original leader continues in the role but is able to change the way in which they lead. These leaders are the ones that succeed in scaling and sustaining the innovative practices that were there in the beginning, but are agile in their approach to establishing the organisational systems and processes to avoid them becoming locked into something that can’t be changed.

Before I am accused of making too broad a generalisation here I need to acknowledge that there are schools I’m aware of that haven’t followed this pattern. In these schools I’ve observed the principal and senior leadership demonstrate the ability to shift their leadership focus and approach to successfully navigate the next phase of the school’s development. It’s this recurring pattern that intrigues me most: leading a well-established school is a genuinely different challenge to leading a new one. One isn’t better than the other – they simply require different strengths.

The Real Challenge Isn’t Innovation

Innovations don’t necessarily fail. Sometimes they simply outlive the question they were designed to answer.

The challenge then isn’t building an innovative school. I’ve shown, throughout this piece, that a visionary and an entrepreneur can do that. Give a group of committed educators a clear philosophy, a blank site, and a bit of room to move, and something genuinely new will emerge. That part is the easy part.

The harder challenge – the one that actually determines whether any of it lasts – is leadership that keeps learning long after the founding vision has been realised. Innovation isn’t a destination a leader arrives at and then occupies. Transformation isn’t a programme a leader runs once and rolls out. Both are better understood as an ongoing leadership discipline – keeping the organisation’s capacity to learn alive, deliberately, over time.

Pathways, not a sequence

At this point it’s worth returning to the table from earlier, because I think it points somewhere different when you read it a second time – not as a sequence of phases a leader passes through and leaves behind, but as two modes of leadership a mature leader learns to hold at once. I’ve attempted to illustrate this below:

And here’s the point I think matters most – this isn’t a sequence. It’s not that a leader runs the left-hand column for a few years and then graduates to the right, retiring the visionary and the entrepreneur along the way. It’s a constant weave, and what distinguishes the leaders who sustain it is that they’ve learned to hold both columns at once – they don’t stop experimenting once they start embedding and scaling, they get better at experimenting, precisely because they’ve learned how to learn from what they try.

That’s really what a culture of experimentation means, in practice. It’s an ongoing willingness to take risks, to treat failure as information rather than embarrassment, and to keep asking “what if” even once the systems and processes that made the school work are firmly in place. The danger isn’t that a school stops innovating on some identifiable date. It’s quieter than that – it’s that the systems built to embed and scale the early innovations gradually harden into the very things that make asking “what if” feel risky, or irrelevant, or someone else’s job.

There’s a really important distinction to be made here between embedding innovation (i.e. making successful practice easier, more sustainable and less dependent on individuals), and institutionalising innovation (i.e.turning something that once solved a problem into a fixed way of doing things.)

A school that’s stopped experimenting rarely notices the moment it happened. It just notices, years later, that no one’s asking the question anymore. Which is, in the end, a leadership choice as much as a cultural one – and perhaps the clearest marker of the leaders who make the whole arc, from dreaming through to a mature, sustaining organisation, actually work.

A final thought

Having presented my thoughts based on the observations I’ve made over the past couple of decades, I want to suggest a revision to the original illustration of the six phases I introduced earlier.

The six phases remain useful for describing the different leadership dispositions I’ve observed, but presented as a sequence they can imply an inevitability to the journey – that schools move from vision and innovation towards management and, ultimately, defending the status quo. But that needn’t be the case.

As I’ve argued in the previous section, effective leadership must hold the tension between the dispositions that are important in the early stages of a school’s development and those that become increasingly important as the organisation matures. The challenge is not to move from one set of dispositions to another, but to find ways of keeping them alive and in productive tension.

Again I argue that the key lies in creating a culture of experimentation – one where established practices are continually examined rather than simply protected; where reflection leads to adjustment; and where there is an ongoing willingness to try, learn and adopt new approaches when circumstances demand it. In other words, the goal is not simply to sustain the organisation we have built, but to sustain the school’s capacity to learn.

The illustration below is therefore not intended to replace the six phases, but to offer another way of seeing them. I’ve condensed the six into three overarching themes: the start-up phase (starting something); the growth phase (growing something); and the sustaining phase (keeping something alive). Each brings together two of the leadership dispositions identified in the earlier illustration.

Importantly, I don’t see these as three steps that a school simply moves through. Rather, they represent three ongoing leadership challenges that need to be held together if a school is to remain capable of learning, adapting and renewing itself.

Seen this way, the sustaining phase takes on a rather different meaning. It is not the point at which innovation gives way to management, and ultimately to defending the status quo. It is the point at which the real leadership challenge begins: how do we sustain what we have built while continuing to question whether it is still what our learners and our community need?

This requires holding a productive tension between two impulses. One is the need to manage well – to establish systems, embed effective practice, provide consistency and ensure that the organisation functions effectively. The other is the need to keep experimenting – to remain curious, to notice when something is no longer working as well as it once did, and to be willing to try something different.

The danger comes when the first impulse overwhelms the second. What was established to support innovation can gradually become something that is protected from challenge. Practices that were once experimental become “the way we do things here”; systems designed to make things work become reasons for not changing them; and the organisation’s capacity to learn begins to diminish.

The alternative is not perpetual change for its own sake. It is a culture in which embedding and experimenting coexist – where we are prepared to hold on to what works while remaining willing to ask whether it could work better, or whether changing circumstances call for something different.

That, for me, is the real meaning of sustaining. We aren’t simply sustaining the school we have built. We are sustaining its capacity to learn, adapt and renew itself.

Perhaps this is what distinguishes schools that remain learning organisations from those that become institutionalised. The former don’t abandon stability, systems or established practice. They simply refuse to let those things become the end of the story.

The question for leadership is therefore not, “How do we stop things changing?” or even, “How do we keep innovating?” It is: “How do we create the conditions in which a school can be both well established and continually learning?”

Reflect

If there’s one thing this piece has tried to argue, it’s that leadership itself needs to keep learning. That the skills which get a school off the ground aren’t the ones that sustain it, and that the leaders who last are the ones who never quite retire the visionary and the entrepreneur, even as they grow into something more collaborative.

So before moving to the next part of this series – where I want to look at what schools themselves can do to guard against decline – it’s worth pausing on your own leadership, wherever you sit in an organisation. Use the following questions as a starting point:

What are we protecting that was originally created to help us learn?”
What are we doing today because it still serves our learners – and what are we doing simply because it has become the way we do things?
Is there a “what if” question your school has quietly stopped asking? Who would need to ask it again?
What needs to change so that we hold ‘both columns at once’ in the leadership in our school?

None of these have comfortable answers. But that discomfort is probably the point – it’s the same “keeping learning” this whole piece has been arguing for, just aimed inward instead of at the organisation.

[Confession time: the illustrations in this post were created with the help of AI after experimenting with several prompts and further work in CANVA]

Tags education leadership, educational change, educational transformation

Why Do Schools Lose Their Capacity to Learn?

This is the first of a four-part series exploring why a number of the innovative schools I’ve worked alongside or observed over the past two decades gradually drift back toward the very institutional patterns they set out to replace. Over the coming weeks I’ll unpack more of the patterns I’ve observed, why this happens, what leadership looks like when it’s resisted, and what might be done differently. This post lays the groundwork: what I’ve observed, and the historical lens that helped me finally make sense of it.

Introduction

During the past twenty years I have had the privilege of working alongside a number of communities establishing new schools across Aotearoa New Zealand. The excitement among these early innovators is infectious. Freed from inherited routines, these schools begin with bold aspirations, innovative learning environments, and a determination to create something different.

Yet I have also noticed a recurring pattern. Five or six years later, many of those same schools begin to look remarkably like the schools they were designed to replace. The language of innovation remains, but the habits become increasingly familiar. It isn’t because the leaders lacked courage or the ideas lacked merit. Something deeper is happening.

I need to emphasise, not every school follows this trajectory. I’ve worked with some schools that have managed to keep returning to each new challenge with the same experimental mindset that drove their founding – refreshing rather than settling. What distinguishes them isn’t luck, or the calibre of their original idea. It’s something about how they’ve chosen to keep responding, year after year, as the challenges facing them changed. That difference is worth naming now, because it’s the thread I’ll be pulling on through the rest of this series.

What the rise and fall of civilisations can teach us about educational transformation

Let me begin with sharing what prompted me to start thinking about this. A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast when the host mentioned the historian Arnold Toynbee. I’d heard the name before but knew very little about his work, so, as often happens, I disappeared down one of those wonderful rabbit holes of curiosity.

Toynbee’s monumental A Study of History (1934–1961) explores why some civilisations flourish while others stagnate or decline. At the heart of his thinking is a deceptively simple idea: societies grow by responding creatively to the challenges they face. When they stop responding creatively, decline begins.

It seems a very timely idea given the state of political upheaval we’re experiencing here in NZ and around the world at the moment, but the more I read, I became distracted from thinking about civilisations and instead thinking about my experiences with these new schools I had experience with. As I reflected on those experiences, I realised that Toynbee’s ideas offered a helpful lens for understanding the pattern I’d been noticing for years, but had never quite been able to explain.

What I’ve observed and learned

My experience in working alongside communities establishing new schools in Aotearoa began initially in regions where new schools were being planned and built in response to population growth, green-fields building in the true sense of the word. Then came the re-build of many schools following the earthquakes in Christchurch, including the green-field building of schools in areas of the city where new suburbs were being developed.

The process with new school builds follows a familiar path. Once the demographic need for a new school is justified and a site is identified and purchased by the Ministry of Education, an establishment board is created to work on behalf of the community to develop a shared set of beliefs that will guide the vision, mission and values for this new school. These things are described in a project brief, and are intended to provide the foundation for a school culture and ways of working that reflect the needs and aspirations of the community.

The process to this point can be straight forward enough when working with the community of an existing school that is undergoing a re-build, or groups looking to establish a new charter school for example. In these cases there is an existing community to work with and consult. But it can be problematic for a green-fields school where there is no established community as the housing developments surrounding the school site are yet to be completed. Identifying whose feedback should inform the strategic vision for the school can be problematic, with the final decisions left to just a small group of people appointed to the establishment board.

Once the project brief has been written, the next phase in a green-fields build is to engage architects who will use information about the physical site, the vision for the educational approach that has been developed and the guidelines supplied by the Ministry of Education to first come up with a master plan for what might be developed, and then, through a period of consultation on this, formulate a final plan that can be used to go to tender to find a building company to complete the work.

While the building programme is underway, the establishment board engage in the process of recruiting an establishment principal. This is a part of the process that seems a little ‘out of synch’ for me – the employing of the principal after all of the visioning work has been done. Generally the requirements for the role include previous experience in leading a school (either as principal or deputy principal) and a personal philosophy and vision for education that aligns with what the establishment board have developed.

Being a part of this process has been one of the most rewarding opportunities of my career. It’s the dream of someone who has devoted much of his career to asking questions about the purpose of education and what will serve us best into the future. Most schools inherit their culture. These schools had the opportunity to create one.

As I’ve been reflecting on these experiences and looking back over more than two decades of this work, I see some really exciting things that have been achieved. But I have also observed that despite being given such an innovative start, many of these new schools have gradually begun to look remarkably like the schools they were designed to be different from. Not failures. Not poor schools. Simply… familiar.

The Pattern I’ve Come to Recognise

Over time I’ve noticed a pattern emerging. It wasn’t confined to one school or one community. Nor was it the result of poor leadership or a lack of commitment. If anything, many of these schools were led by some of the most capable and visionary educators I’ve worked alongside.

The pattern seemed to emerge almost regardless. I’ve tried to capture it in the diagram here which is described in more detail below:

The development of a new school generally begins with a challenge. A new community. A blank piece of land. An opportunity to think differently about what schooling could become. That challenge releases enormous creative energy.

Next comes the design phase resulting in a creative response. The founding members question long-held assumptions. They visit innovative schools. They debate the purpose of education. They imagine new ways of organising learning, designing spaces, building relationships with whānau, and supporting learner agency. The conversations are exciting because almost nothing was taken for granted.

Those innovative ideas are then put into practice. The early years or these schools were characterised by experimentation. Staff worked collaboratively, adapting as they learned. New routines emerged. Fresh approaches were tested and refined. There was a strong sense that everyone was building something together. Through this phase most of these schools experienced early success and flourished.

But as enrolments grew a different set of challenges emerged. As the roll grew so did the number of new staff being employed. Systems needed to be documented. Expectations become clearer. Successful practices are embedded so that new staff can learn them quickly. Consistency and coherence become increasingly important. And so the focus gradually shifted from creating something new to making sure what had been created could be sustained – the focus shifts to building the institution.

None of this was wrong. In fact, much of it was necessary. Growing organisations need reliable systems. Families value predictability. Teachers need clarity. Students benefit from stability. Yet alongside these strengths, something else often began to happen.

Over time the questions became fewer. Experimentation became less common. Practices that had once been innovative slowly became “the way we do things here,” and it became expected that these ways of working would suffice as new challenges were experienced. The energy that had driven invention was increasingly directed towards protecting what had already been built.

This is the point where school leaders and their communities reach a decision point – to focus on the project of sustaining the school as an institution – or to embark on a process of refresh, to keep things responsive to the new challenges they are presented with. These challenges might be new knowledge about learning, different student needs, developments in technology (AI), changing community priorities etc. All of these things require a school to be ‘responsive‘ not merely sustaining.

The refresh route repeats the cycle, returning to the identification of new creative responses to the challenges experienced through innovative approaches marked by the preparedness to experiment, permission to take risks, persevere with promising results, and to learn from failure. These lead to new forms of success which, in turn are adopted into the way the school is organised and operates. And so that cycle continues.

The institutionalisation route occurs when the school remains focused on sustaining what has been established, and over time, the school begins operating very much like the ones the original visionaries of the school were trying to ‘break free’ from.

Why this matters

None of this is academic. Every establishment board that opens a new school is, in effect, making a bet – that this time, the bold aspirations in the founding documents will hold. Toynbee’s insight is that civilisations don’t usually fall because they run out of ideas. They fall because the people responsible for responding creatively stop doing so, often without noticing, and the old patterns quietly reassert themselves under new language.

The same appears to be true of schools. So as you read this, it’s worth pausing on a few questions about your own context:

Where in your school’s story would you place yourselves right now – still in the “creative response” phase, or drifting toward institutionalised habit?
What language has stayed the same in your school even as the practice behind it has quietly changed?
Who, in your setting, is currently playing the role Toynbee would call the “creative minority” – and are they still being backed, or increasingly worn down?

I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about the slide from innovative to institutional. But avoiding it seems to depend heavily on the people carrying it – which is where I’ll turn next. In the second post in this series, I’ll look more closely at the particular qualities of leadership I’ve seen distinguish the schools that hold their edge from those that don’t.

Where do you even begin with an AI policy for your school?

Where do you start when your Board asks for an AI policy?

Do you begin by banning certain tools?
By writing rules about student use?
By deciding which AI platform teachers should or shouldn’t use?
Or do you start somewhere entirely different?

These are conversations I’m having more regularly now with school leaders across Aotearoa. There is a growing recognition that artificial intelligence will change almost every aspect of schooling – from teaching and learning to assessment, administration and community engagement. Yet many Boards of Trustees and leadership teams are understandably asking, “Where do we even begin?”

The challenge is that AI is moving so quickly that any policy focused solely on today’s technologies risks becoming obsolete almost as soon as it is written. That led me to a different question.

Perhaps the issue isn’t really “What should our AI policy say?”

Perhaps it is “How do we lead our school through a period of profound change?”

That shift in thinking became the foundation for the paper I’ve recently completed titled Leading like a wayfinder towards an AI-enabled future – available on the FutureMakers website in the Thought Pieces tab.

Rather than treating AI as simply another piece of technology to manage, the paper frames it as a leadership and governance challenge. AI is the catalyst – but it isn’t the story. The real work of governance is helping a school navigate uncertainty while remaining anchored in its purpose, values and aspirations for learners.

To explore this, I draw on three ideas that have shaped my own thinking.

The first is the metaphor of the waka. Good governance isn’t about trying to control every wave or predict every change in the weather. It’s about knowing where you’re heading, reading the conditions, and navigating together.
The second is the Prosper – Prepare – Protect framework (taken from a recent Brookings Institute report). Rather than seeing opportunity, capability building and risk management as competing priorities, this framework encourages Boards to hold all three together in balance.
The third is a Three Horizons model, helping schools distinguish between what requires immediate action, what capabilities need to be developed over time, and what kind of future they ultimately want to create for their learners.

Running through the paper is another conviction that I believe is essential. AI must become a force for greater equity, not greater inequality. Every governance decision should ask how emerging technologies can strengthen opportunities and outcomes for all learners, particularly Māori and Pasifika, rather than unintentionally widening existing disparities.

This isn’t a technical guide to AI tools, and it deliberately avoids chasing the latest product announcements or platform updates. Instead, it’s a resource for Boards, principals and senior leadership teams that aims to support thoughtful conversations, informed decision-making and governance that will remain relevant long after today’s AI models have been replaced by tomorrow’s.

If your Board or leadership team has been wondering where to begin, my hope is that this paper provides a practical and enduring place to start. Because the future won’t be shaped by the schools with the best AI policy. It will be shaped by the schools with the clearest sense of purpose, the strongest capacity to learn, and the courage to navigate change together.

ACCESS The document

I am available to provide support for school leaders and board of trustees in developing an AI strategy for their school. Please contact me to discuss what might be appropriate in your setting. Email me – derek@futuremakers.nz

Why child-centred learning isn’t the ‘soft’ option

In my latest podcast conversation with Dr Sarah Aiono she describes taking a teacher by the arm and asking them to “melt into the wall” of their own classroom, inviting them to “stand back, watch, tell me what you see”. The teacher struggles. So Sarah starts pointing out the curriculum happening in front of her, and the teacher’s face changes. “It’s like I’ve given them my glasses,” she says, “and they can see differently.”

It’s a small anecdote, but it’s really the whole conversation in miniature – the difference between believing in something and having the ability to see it, support it, and defend it under pressure.

Sarah’s spent two decades in that space – training as a primary teacher, working with trauma-impacted kids in South Auckland, and completing doctoral research into play and child-led learning alongside her mother, who left mainstream teaching to found a forest school. So when she pushes back on the current framing of child-centred learning versus direct instruction, it’s not an abstract position. It’s a frustration with how a genuinely complex craft keeps getting flattened into a lazy binary – either you “let them work it out for themselves,” or you drill them in rows.

Instead, Sarah uses the metaphor of a toolbox. Knowing which tool to reach for and use when a moment calls is the actual skill, and it’s a harder, not easier, thing to do well. Teachers choosing the integrated path, she told me, aren’t choosing the soft option – they’re choosing the most demanding one, and most aren’t given the support to sustain it.

That’s the thread I keep coming back to. Because underneath the pedagogy debate is a structural one. Sarah’s doctoral research kept surfacing a “knowledge to practice gap” – teachers who believe in this approach but hit a room of 25 diverse learners and genuinely don’t know how to translate belief into what happens on a Tuesday afternoon. Her answer isn’t simply to hold another PD day, it’s granular and sustained – change built from the ground up, teacher by teacher, not mandated from above.

We touched on AI too, and her framing cut through a lot of the noise for me – her concern isn’t AI replacing the teacher as content-deliverer, it’s whether we’re building children who can interrogate what AI tells them rather than accept it at face value, the way a worksheet answer gets accepted. A thinking partner that gets challenged back, not a tutor that hands over knowledge.

It’s Sarah’s closing image, though, that gives the episode its title. She describes this whole moment in education – here and internationally – as a chrysalis: messy, mucky, full of push and pull, because that’s what real transformation looks like from the inside. Not comfortable. Not resolved. But moving.

Watch the full conversation with Dr Sarah Aiono below:

Check out the other episodes in this podcast series:

Conversations on the future of education

Evidence is no match for ideology

What happens when 44 years of hard-won educational wisdom collides with the current moment? You get one of the most provocative, refreshing, and urgently necessary conversations I’ve had in a long time.

A number of years ago now I first met Gary Stager when he was a keynote speaker at one of our annual ULearn conferences. Gary is based in the US, and is an educator, author, maker, provocateur, and one of the longest-standing advocates for learner-centred, project-based education in the world. He joined me earlier this week to record another podcast interview in my ‘Conversations about the future of education series”. Knowing a bit about Gary’s work and his views on education I wasn’t expecting a quiet conversation. I wasn’t disappointed.

Gary has been working in education for 44 years. He co-authored Invent to Learn, worked alongside the late Seymour Papert (one of the founding fathers of both AI and educational computing), taught everyone from preschoolers to doctoral students, and built a project-based learning environment inside a prison for teenagers. He’s also currently using AI tools to preserve Papert’s legacy for scholars and practitioners – and the stories he tells about what’s possible are nothing short of extraordinary.

But what struck me most in our conversation wasn’t the future-gazing. It was the clarity of his diagnosis about right now.

“Evidence Is No Match for Ideology”

If there’s a through-line in our conversation, it’s this sentence: “evidence is no match for ideology”. Gary offered it almost in passing, but it really grabbed my attention and has been playing on my mind ever since.

In New Zealand, as in the United States and many parts of the world, we are witnessing what Gary describes as a rise of pedagogical authoritarianism – a doubling down on explicit direct instruction, scripted curricula, phonics sequences, and a deficit model of children that treats them as empty vessels requiring filling. In our conversation he was characteristically blunt, saying; “Explicit direct instruction is a delusionary form of cruelty that fails at first contact with an actual child.”

This maps directly onto something I’ve been tracking in the Education Environment Scan 2026: the tension between evidence-based, relational, future-focused pedagogy and the ideologically-driven policy settings that are currently dominating the conversation in Aotearoa. It’s not a pedagogical debate, it’s a political one. The structured literacy push, the direct instruction drift, the narrowing of the curriculum – Gary’s critique names what many teachers and school leaders are experiencing but struggling to articulate in the face of policy pressure.

His point isn’t that literacy doesn’t matter. It’s that the policy recommendations never seem to start with “get kids books, love them, and surround them with people who love reading.” Instead, we get mandated sequences, scripted lessons, and a level of distrust toward both children and teachers that is, as Gary claims, “mean-spirited.”

The Amnesia Problem

One of Gary’s most compelling observations is what he calls the cure for amnesia problem. He explained how Papert predicted – in much detail – exactly how educational systems would reject innovation, no matter how beneficial it may be to children. And yet, decade after decade, we keep rediscovering the same things, losing the same insights, and repeating the same policy mistakes.

Gary has spent years maintaining The Daily Papert, an archive of Papert’s written, audio, and video work, precisely because he believes powerful ideas are alarmingly temporal. “If you want to improve education,” he says, “the first thing you can do is find a cure for amnesia.”

This resonates deeply with what I’ve been arguing in the scan’s closing section about the need for long-term, cross-party commitment to education – something more like the NZ Superannuation Fund model than the current short-cycle policy environment. We keep starting over. We keep losing the thread. And in the meantime, as Jonathan Kozol (whom Gary quotes with great affection) reminds us: you’re only seven once.

Technology, Phones, and the Equity Blindspot

Gary’s position on technology is more nuanced than his reputation as a tech advocate might suggest. He acknowledges freely that 99.6% of what’s done with computers in schools is “garbage.” But he’s emphatic that the other 0.4% is “absolutely vital.”

His critique of phone bans cuts to something I’ve also been circling in the scan’s equity thread. When we ban devices from schools – particularly in lower-decile communities – we’re not levelling the playing field. We’re taxing the children who have nothing else. As Gary puts it: “This phone, this thing, might be the only thing of value society has granted them, has trusted them with. How dare you yank it out of their hands.”

Rich independent schools, he notes wryly, can afford to market phone bans as an educational philosophy precisely because their students already have laptops, tablets, and home environments saturated with knowledge resources. The ban becomes branding. For everyone else, Gary maintains, it’s deprivation.

The answer to problematic phone use in classrooms isn’t a ban, he argues – it’s the same social sanction we apply in concert halls and aeroplanes. Ask them to put it away. Then give them something worth being present for.

AI: Not for Instruction. For Making.

Gary’s take on AI in education is one of the more refreshing I’ve heard – not because it’s optimistic, but because it’s specific.

He is not interested in AI as a content delivery system, a tutor, or an administrative chore-eliminator. He’s interested in AI as a making tool – something that allows learners and teachers to create things that would have been impossible without it.

He tells the story of his friend Brett Moller, a teacher who used AI to build a custom app for a school excursion to Melbourne – one that tracked students, managed dietary restrictions, ran a scavenger hunt, created parent newsletters, and drew geofenced boundaries on the fly. “This was billions of dollars of programming that no one needs – no one needs but him.”

This (and other anecdotes he uses in the podcast) connects directly to the AI and assessment thread in my environment scan – the growing recognition that the question isn’t whether students use AI, but what kind of learning we’re actually trying to make visible and why.

The Monday/Someday Conundrum

At the end of our conversation I asked Gary for his advice to educators in New Zealand (and elsewhere) as they look to cope with the present but with an eye on the future. He responded by quoting something that Seymour Papert used to say, and it’s the piece of advice I’d most want every school leader in New Zealand to sit with:

“It’s okay to worry about what you’re going to do Monday, as long as it points in the direction of what you hope to do someday.”

That requires, he says, an informed, consistent, coherent vision of what kind of world you want to live in. Not a strategic plan. A vision. Something that orients every small decision toward a larger possibility.

Why You Should Listen

This is a conversation about the current moment in education – but it’s also a conversation about 44 years of pattern recognition, and what happens when someone who’s seen it all before refuses to pretend the emperor has clothes.

Gary Stager is funny, fierce, fiercely kind toward children, and entirely without patience for what he calls “scientific cosplay” dressed up as policy. He is also one of the most serious thinkers I know about what learning is actually for.

If you’re a school leader trying to hold the line between what you know works and what the system is currently demanding, this conversation will feel like oxygen.

For more, read:

About Gary – https://professorgarystager.com/collaborate
Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom – https://amzn.to/2CRw4AY
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work – https://amzn.to/3DawajE
The Learner’s Apprentice: AI and the Amplification of Human Creativity – https://amzn.to/3XaeSiT
Papert Archives – https://dailypapert.com
2026 Education Environment Scan – https://futuremakers.nz/thought-pieces/environment-scan-2026/
Conversations on the Future of Education Podcast series – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR0qV31usqmVzWfOHk_MSkyLXm9hAitY8

View the podcast:

When the urgent drowns out the important

I’ve just been reading through the newly released findings from NZCER’s 2025 National Survey of Secondary Schools – a survey of 106 secondary principals across Aotearoa conducted between October 2025 and March 2026. It’s the kind of document that rewards careful reading, not because it contains many surprises, but because it puts hard numbers around things that many of us have been sensing for some time. And it prompted me to write this.

What emerges for me from the survey is a portrait of a profession stretched to its limits – a similar finding to what I found in my own Roadblocks and Drivers thought piece from 2023. Most principals are working at least 56 hours a week – with 12% exceeding 70 hours. A third now agree that their workload is so high they are unable to do justice to their school. That figure was 22% just three years ago. The leading issue principals identified? “Keeping up with the pace and volume of educational change” – followed closely by “too much being asked of schools.”

This is what a burning platform looks like from the inside.

What concerns me most about that picture is when people are working at this intensity, simply surviving the week, the capacity for strategic thinking – for lifting one’s gaze to the horizon – is the first casualty.

We see this in one quietly concerning data point from the survey where only one-third of principals said they had information about their school’s carbon footprint. This, despite clear policy signals from the Ministry of Education about the need to reduce climate emissions across the sector.

I don’t read that finding as indifference to climate. I read it as a workforce so consumed by the immediate that the important – including preparing young people for a climate-altered future – is being structurally crowded out. The issue isn’t awareness. It’s capacity.

This is a thread I’ve been tracking closely in the Education Environment Scan 2026 – the idea that we are facing not a series of separate challenges, but a convergence of pressures arriving simultaneously. Climate disruption, workforce depletion, AI-driven change to learning and assessment, equity gaps that refuse to close, and a policy environment characterised by short cycles and shifting priorities. Each of these is significant on its own. Together, they create something qualitatively different: a system that is structurally incapable of looking up from the urgent long enough to prepare for what’s coming.

The NZCER data adds texture to that argument. Recruiting teachers remains an issue for nearly two-thirds of principals. Demand for external support – mental health services, social workers, youth workers – consistently outstrips supply. The disestablishment of Kāhui Ako has left 41% of principals thinking they will collaborate less with neighbouring schools. These aren’t isolated data points. They describe a workforce that is narrowing, not expanding – that is being pulled inward by demand rather than freed to think outward about the future.

What would it take to change that? I don’t think the answer is simply more professional learning, more resourcing, or even a slower pace of reform – though all of those would help. The deeper issue is that we haven’t yet designed an education system that takes seriously its own need to think strategically about the future while simultaneously serving the present. That requires protected time, distributed leadership, genuine cross-sector collaboration, and – critically – a policy environment that provides stability and coherence over the long term rather than perpetual reinvention.

The principals in this survey aren’t asking for less. They’re asking for something harder to provide – the conditions in which their professional judgement, experience, and vision can actually be brought to bear on what matters most.

The NZCER survey is a snapshot of a moment. But it’s also a signal. And if we’re serious about future-focused education in Aotearoa, we need to start asking who is going to be left standing to lead it – and what kind of thinking they’ll have the capacity to do.

Download the document

Download the documents by clicking on the image below:

Stewarding Innovation

The real challenge isn’t innovation

The timescale problem

From commissioning to stewarding

Looking ahead

Futuremakers Newsletter

The Missing Ingredient: Trust

Trust takes time to build, but is broken quickly

a. Building Trust

b. Destroying Trust

It’s a trust problem.

Trust in the transformation cycle

Call to action: Where trust actually gets built

Futuremakers Newsletter

Beyond bullying

Why banning isn’t the answer we think it is

The kids most at risk – and the tool that’s helping teachers spot them

Where this leaves teachers, principals and parents

Listen to the full conversation

Resources from Ray

Futuremakers Newsletter

Futuremakers Newsletter

The importance of leadership

What happens when leaders & teachers become the custodians of “the way we do things here”?

The six leadership dispositions across the life of a school

The education half-life of schools

The Real Challenge Isn’t Innovation

Pathways, not a sequence

A final thought

Reflect

Futuremakers Newsletter

Introduction

What the rise and fall of civilisations can teach us about educational transformation

What I’ve observed and learned

The Pattern I’ve Come to Recognise

Why this matters

Futuremakers Newsletter

Futuremakers Newsletter

Futuremakers Newsletter

“Evidence Is No Match for Ideology”

The Amnesia Problem

Technology, Phones, and the Equity Blindspot

AI: Not for Instruction. For Making.

The Monday/Someday Conundrum

Why You Should Listen

For more, read:

View the podcast:

Futuremakers Newsletter

Download the document

Futuremakers Newsletter

What others say

Resources

Services