Engagement types and social cohesion

In this blog post I explore the intersection of Winthrop & Anderson’s engagement framework and the Helen Clark Foundation’s Social Cohesion in New Zealand report.

Imagine this common classroom setting. There’s this one student who sits usually at the front of the class. She completes every task on time. Her hand goes up every time a question is asked. Her parents are at every meeting, asking sharp questions about assessment grades and university pathways. Her teacher would describe her as one of the best in the class.

Then there’s another student sitting near the window. He’s not disruptive, exactly, but he’s somewhere else – present in body, absent in spirit. His parents haven’t responded to the last three messages home. Nobody’s quite sure why.

And then there’s a third student at the back. Capable – everyone can see it – but resistant. Not rude, just… elsewhere. School, for him, seems to be something that is happening at him rather than for him.

We have names for all three of these students in the staffroom. We have strategies, too. But I want to suggest that most of those strategies share a common blind spot. They treat engagement as if it is a property of the individual student, something to be coaxed or coached into being, rather than something that is deeply shaped by the world the student comes home to.

Two recent pieces of research – one from the United States, one from right here in Aotearoa – have helped me see this more clearly. Together, they offer a framework not just for understanding learners, but for understanding why some learners are so hard to reach, and what it would actually take to reach them.

Four Modes of Engagement

In their book The Disengaged Teen, researchers Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson identify four distinct modes of student engagement. Their framework emerges from the intersection of two dimensions: engagement (the extent to which learning holds relevance and meaning – what students think, feel and do) and agency (the degree to which students are empowered to make choices about their learning).

The result is four recognisable types as illustrated below:

The Passenger is behaviourally engaged but cognitively disengaged. They turn up. They comply. They do enough. But they are not really there. School is something to be endured, navigated, or simply survived. Passengers are often invisible – they don’t cause problems, so we don’t look too closely.

The Resister is emotionally engaged but behaviourally disengaged. This sounds paradoxical until you realise that resistance is rarely indifference – it’s usually a response, and often a coherent one. Something about the experience of school has provoked a refusal. Resisters often care deeply; they just don’t care about what school is asking them to care about.

The Achiever is cognitively engaged but emotionally disengaged. These are the students who tick all the boxes, collect the gold stars, and seem to thrive on success. Teachers love them. Parents are proud of them. But beneath the surface, many of these learners are fragile. Driven not by curiosity but by a need to “get it right,” many Achievers avoid risk, shy away from failure, and – as we’ll come to – often experience the worst mental health outcomes of all the groups.

The Explorer is engaged across all three dimensions – cognitively, behaviourally, and emotionally. They are curious, agentic, willing to fail and try again. They find meaning in learning, not just marks. They are the students we are trying to produce, and the mode we are least successful at cultivating at scale.

I find this an enormously useful framework. Walk through any school and you will recognise these students immediately. You may even recognise yourself, in one mode or another, at different points in your own education.

But here’s what the framework doesn’t ask: “what made these students this way?”

Winthrop and Anderson offer insights into how schools might shift students between modes. But I kept finding myself wondering about something that sits upstream of the classroom – the social and economic world students inhabit before they arrive at the school gate.

Three Groups and a Fracturing Society

Last month, the Helen Clark Foundation published its Social Cohesion in New Zealand report – a sobering piece of research that maps the state of belonging, trust, and connection in our society. Its findings are striking, not least because of what they tell us about the conditions in which a significant proportion of New Zealand children are growing up.

The report identifies three distinct groups within the population, distinguished primarily by their sense of connection to others and to institutions:

The Connected (30%) feel a strong sense of belonging and trust – in their communities, in public institutions, in the systems that are supposed to work for them. They tend to be financially stable, socially supported, and institutionally engaged.

The Ambivalent Middle (41%) are comfortable but less connected. They are not in crisis, but they are not deeply rooted either. Their relationship with institutions is transactional rather than trusting. They participate when it suits them, withdraw when it doesn’t.

The Alienated (28%) are disconnected – from communities, from institutions, from any felt sense that the system is fair or that their voice matters. The report is clear that this alienation is not a personality trait or a cultural inevitability. It is driven, heavily, by financial stress. These are people for whom the gap between what society promises and what it delivers has become unbridgeable.

Twenty-eight percent. More than one in four New Zealanders. And their children are in our classrooms.

When Two Frameworks Meet

Here is where the two pieces of research begin to speak to each other in ways I find both illuminating and troubling.

Winthrop and Anderson’s engagement modes describe how students show up. The Social Cohesion report describes what they’re carrying when they do. Put them together and a different picture emerges – one in which the engagement mode a student occupies is not simply a function of pedagogy, curriculum design, or teacher relationships, but is also shaped, profoundly, by the social world outside the school gates.

Consider the Connected student. They come from families where institutions – including schools – are experienced as trustworthy, even empowering. Home is stable enough that risk-taking feels possible. Adults in their lives model purposeful engagement. They have the psychological safety to follow curiosity, to fail without catastrophe, to develop the agency that exploration requires. These students are most likely to arrive at – or recover into – Explorer mode.

Consider the Ambivalent Middle. These students have enough stability to comply, but lack deep investment in why any of it matters. They do the work because that’s what you do – not because it connects to anything urgent or meaningful in their lives. They are well-positioned to become Passengers or Achievers: present in form, but not fully alive in their learning. They’re the students schools tend to overlook, precisely because they’re not presenting as problems.

And consider the Alienated. For these students – and, just as importantly, for their parents – institutions have not been benign. The school may represent a system that has repeatedly failed their family. To engage wholeheartedly with that system can feel, at some level, like a betrayal of everything their experience has taught them. Resistance, in this light, is not obstruction. It is a rational response to an institution whose promises haven’t been kept. The Resister at the back of the room may be the most perceptive person in it.

In creating this alignment I need to be clear – this mapping is speculative, not deterministic. These are tendencies, not destinies. A student from an Alienated household could well be an Achiever – driven by circumstance, family pressure, or sheer force of will to use school as a ladder out. An Explorer can emerge from the most fractured of contexts, sometimes because of it. What the alignment suggests is not that social cohesion predicts engagement mode with any certainty, but that it shapes the probability – and, crucially, the effort required to move between modes.

This reframing changes what we think the work is.

The Achiever Problem – and the Over-Connected Parent

Before moving on, I want to linger on the Achiever mode, because I think it is the one our schools are most poorly equipped to see clearly.

Achievers are the students for whom our system is, in many ways, designed. They respond well to grades, rankings, gold stars, and external validation. They produce the outcomes that feature in league tables and prize-giving speeches. In a school culture that measures success through academic performance, the Achiever is the gold standard.

But look more closely at where many Achievers come from, and something uncomfortable emerges.

The parents of Achievers are often deeply engaged with their child’s schooling – sometimes intensely so. They attend every meeting. They follow up on every grade. They create home environments that are educationally rich and academically ambitious. In the language of the social cohesion framework, they are the most Connected – trusting in the system, invested in its mechanisms, fluent in its language.

But connection, at its extreme, becomes something else. When parental engagement tips into over-protectiveness, when every failure is intercepted before it can be felt, when success becomes the only acceptable outcome, the student learns a particular lesson: that their worth is conditional. Not on who they are, but on what they achieve. The gold stars are no longer a delight. They become a necessity.

This is where Achiever mode, unchecked, tilts into perfectionism – and where perfectionism becomes a mental health crisis waiting to happen. Research consistently shows that high-achieving students report some of the poorest wellbeing outcomes: anxiety, fear of failure, identity fragility, and a deep inability to tolerate uncertainty. These are not the symptoms of students who are thriving. They are the symptoms of students who have learned to perform thriving while quietly drowning.

The cruelest irony is that we celebrate them for it.

The Families We Can’t Reach

Teachers and school leaders across New Zealand will recognise, painfully, a recurring frustration: the families who are hardest to connect with are often the ones whose children need connection most urgently.

The parents of Resisters and disengaged Passengers – those most likely to come from Alienated households – often don’t come to interviews, don’t respond to messages, don’t show up to events. Schools sometimes interpret this as indifference. The social cohesion research suggests something quite different: distrust. Not of the teacher personally, but of the institution. Of a system that has, in their experience, not worked for people like them.

Meanwhile, the parents who fill the front rows at every event, who respond to emails within the hour, who advocate strenuously for their child’s placement, timetable, and grade – these parents can consume enormous amounts of school energy and attention. Their engagement is real and often well-intentioned. But it can crowd out attention for the students whose families are absent, and it can model for their children a relationship with learning that is fundamentally anxious and acquisitive rather than curious and joyful.

This is not an argument that parental engagement is bad. It is an argument that the quality and character of connection matters – for students and their families alike

What This Means for Schools

If the argument holds – that engagement modes are not simply individual characteristics but are shaped by the social contexts students inhabit – then what follows for schools?

A few things seem clear to me.

Individual engagement interventions are necessary but not sufficient. A brilliant teacher can create conditions in which a Resister begins to lean in, or a Passenger begins to find genuine curiosity. But if that student goes home to financial stress, institutional distrust, and a felt sense that the system is not for people like them, the work is incomplete. Schools need to be honest with themselves about what they can and cannot do within their four walls.

Schools (and our system) have a particular responsibility to the Alienated. Not because these students are more deserving than others, but because schools are one of the few institutions with both the mandate and the regular contact to build something different. A school that is genuinely responsive, trustworthy, and culturally connected can be – for some students – a counterweight to the disconnection they experience everywhere else. But this requires intentional design, not goodwill alone.

The Achiever mode deserves more critical scrutiny. Schools that primarily celebrate academic performance as the marker of success are, in effect, optimising for a mode that is emotionally fragile and narrowly motivated. The shift from Achiever to Explorer is not just pedagogically desirable – it is a wellbeing imperative. This means creating cultures where curiosity is valued above correctness, where failure is a feature rather than a flaw, and where the measure of a good student is not compliance with expectations but authentic engagement with ideas.

Connection is the common thread running through both frameworks. The social cohesion research is, at its heart, about belonging – about the felt sense that you matter to the people and institutions around you. This is also, ultimately, what the best engagement research points toward. Students who explore are students who feel safe enough to try, connected enough to care, and trusted enough to lead. You cannot engineer that from a curriculum document. You build it through relationships – sustained, honest, and genuinely mutual ones.

A Closing Thought

The student at the front of the class, the one near the window, and the one at the back – they are not three different problems to be solved with three different interventions. They are three expressions of the same underlying question: does this place – this school, this system, this society – have a place for me?

For the Explorer, the answer is yes, and the evidence surrounds them. For the Achiever, the answer is yes, but only conditionally. For the Passenger, the answer is uncertain – and uncertainty is easier to survive by going through the motions. For the Resister, the answer has, too often, been no – and resistance is the most honest response available.

Our work, if we take it seriously, is not just to improve our teaching strategies or redesign our learning spaces. It is to become the kind of institution that answers that question – for every student, from every background – with an unambiguous, well-evidenced, and deeply felt yes.

That is a bigger project than any one classroom. But it begins there, every day, in every interaction between a teacher and a child who is asking, in their own way, whether they belong.

This post draws on Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson’s The Disengaged Teen (2024) and the Helen Clark Foundation’s Social Cohesion in New Zealand report (2025). The frameworks are theirs; the synthesis and any errors in interpretation are my own.

Check out some of my other blog posts that deal with similar themes:

We need a new plan – Rebecca Winthrop exploring how we deal with kids in the age of AI
The rising tide of perfectionism – more thoughts on how Achiever mode can tip into perfectionism
Student agency and engagement – exploring why decline in student engagement is such an issue
AI, education and the futures we choose – what does the rise of generative AI mean for our young people?
Connectedness, hope and the role of schools in a fractured world – explores the challenge of disconnection

Rethinking assessment through a split-screen lens

Yesterday I had the privilege of hosting a webinar with Bill Lucas, Professor of Learning and Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning in the UK. Bill is also a co-founder of Rethinking Assessment, a movement advocating for significant reform of England’s assessment system. (NB this webinar was organised by the Stonefields Collaborative Trust – more details may be found on their website).

Over the two days before hosting this webinar, I was in a primary school in the North Island working alongside teachers as they implemented the structured literacy, mathematics, and writing initiatives currently being promoted through the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

What struck me most wasn’t simply the teaching approaches being used, but the assessment capability I observed being demonstrated by the students themselves. As I moved between classrooms, I saw learners confidently referring to progression statements, explaining where they believed they were on the learning pathway, and pointing to examples of their work as evidence. There was a shared language about progress that many educators have been striving for over many years.

It was impressive to see. But as I reflected on those experiences on the flight home, another thought began to surface. What I had seen felt necessary – but not sufficient. The progressions helped make learning visible in important ways. But I struggled to see the same level of intentional focus on the capabilities and dispositions that shape how learners apply their knowledge – things like curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and the confidence to tackle unfamiliar problems.

Then today’s conversation with Bill Lucas provided an interesting lens for thinking about this. Bill often talks about the importance of looking at education through a “split screen.”

On one screen sits the development of knowledge and foundational skills – the kinds of things curriculum progressions and structured approaches are designed to strengthen.

On the other screen sits the development of capabilities and dispositions – the habits of mind and ways of engaging with the world that influence how knowledge is used.

Both matter. But if our assessment systems focus primarily on one screen, the other can easily fade into the background.

From “assessment” to “evidencing progress”

The conversation with Bill ranged widely – from the purpose of education to the practical realities of assessment in schools – but one idea kept resurfacing: we need to shift from assessing learning to evidencing progress. This was certainly consistent with what I had observed in the school in the days prior.

Bill began by reflecting on how deeply embedded the language of assessment is in our education systems. Much of it was designed in an era when the dominant priorities were efficiency, standardisation, and comparability. Those priorities produced the familiar architecture of grades, tests, and examinations – tools that are useful for accountability, but often struggle to capture the full richness of learning.

Instead, Bill suggests reframing assessment as “evidencing progress.” The difference may sound subtle, but it represents a profound shift in emphasis. Rather than asking What grade did a student achieve?, the question becomes What evidence shows how this learner is developing over time? That shift moves assessment closer to the learning process itself – something that informs learners, motivates them, and helps teachers adapt their practice.

Reconnecting curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment

Another theme Bill returned to repeatedly was the interdependence of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Too often these elements are treated as separate policy levers. A curriculum is written. Pedagogies are promoted. And assessment systems are designed afterwards. But in reality they form a single ecosystem.

If a curriculum values creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking – but assessment measures only what can be easily graded in a test – then it is the assessment system that ultimately shapes classroom practice.

This is certainly the ‘tail wagging the dog’ scenario that I feel we’ve seen a lot of in our education system here in NZ – particularly in our secondary schools. Bill’s argument is that each of these elements (curriculum, pedagogy, assessment) must be given space to exist alongside each other – in the way all of the elements in a forest ecosystem co-exist, and so often support and complement each other.

The capabilities question

A large part of Bill’s work focuses on what he calls dispositions – the habits of mind that influence how people use their knowledge. He prefers this term to “competencies” because it emphasises the tendency to behave in certain ways, not simply the ability to perform a task once. Curiosity, perseverance, collaboration, creativity – these are the qualities that shape how learners approach unfamiliar challenges.

This perspective aligns closely with thinking emerging from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which emphasises that effective education systems develop not only knowledge and skills, but also the attitudes and values that enable learners to apply them in complex situations.

Yet as Bill pointed out, these broader capabilities often appear prominently in curriculum aspirations while remaining largely invisible in assessment systems. And what isn’t assessed rarely receives sustained attention.

What the evidence suggests

Bill also shared insights from his involvement in the development of the PISA Creative Thinking Assessment. One common concern raised by critics is that emphasising creativity or broader capabilities might undermine performance in core academic subjects such as mathematics. But the evidence suggests something different. Students who perform strongly in creative thinking often perform just as well in mathematics and other academic domains – and sometimes better.

One factor appears to be self-efficacy: the belief that you are capable of tackling unfamiliar problems. In other words, developing creativity and confidence doesn’t dilute academic learning. It can actually strengthen it.

A useful moment for New Zealand

Listening to Bill during the webinar, I couldn’t help reflecting on how these ideas sit alongside the reforms currently underway in New Zealand.

On one screen, there is a strong policy focus on strengthening foundational learning. The refresh of the New Zealand Curriculum, the introduction of structured approaches to literacy and mathematics, and changes to the achievement standards within the National Certificate of Educational Achievement all reflect a clear intention to bring greater clarity and consistency to how learning is taught and assessed. These initiatives respond to legitimate concerns about equity and achievement. Ensuring that every learner develops strong foundations in reading, writing, and mathematics is essential.

But on the other screen sits something equally important. For decades, the New Zealand curriculum vision has emphasised developing confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners – young people who are creative, curious, collaborative, and able to apply their knowledge in new situations. Those capabilities remain central to how many educators think about the purpose of education. Which raises an interesting question. How do we ensure our systems of assessment recognise both?

Holding the split screen

If assessment focuses primarily on what is easiest to measure, it may strengthen attention to foundational knowledge – but risk narrowing the broader capabilities we say we value. But if assessment expands to recognise richer forms of learning, it must still remain credible, equitable, and manageable for teachers and schools.

This is not a simple either-or choice. It’s more like learning to hold two truths at the same time. Strong foundations matter. So do the dispositions and capabilities that determine how those foundations are used.

A question worth sitting with

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Bill Lucas’s work is not that it provides a neat solution to the assessment challenge. Instead, it invites us to look more closely at the systems we have built – and to ask what they make possible. Assessment systems shape what teachers prioritise, how students understand success, and ultimately what kinds of learning flourish in classrooms.

So here’s the question I’ve been left with after today’s conversation:

If our assessment systems continue to evolve around what is easiest to measure, will they still recognise the kinds of learning young people will need most in the future?

Or put another way:

How might we design assessment systems that strengthen foundational knowledge while also making visible the curiosity, creativity, resilience, and collaboration that define capable learners?

For educators in New Zealand right now, that may be a useful split-screen question to keep in view. Because the future of learning will almost certainly require us to pay attention to both.

Everything sounds worthwhile – that’s the problem

A conversation with Scottish educator and NoTosh founder Ewan McIntosh

Here’s a provocation to open with: the most important thing we can teach young people right now has nothing to do with AI, nothing to do with digital literacy, and nothing to do with the jobs of tomorrow. It’s an ancient skill. And most schools aren’t teaching it deliberately at all. What might that be?

That’s just one of the threads that emerged when I connected recently with my good friend and colleague, Ewan McIntosh – founder of NoTosh (Scots for “no nonsense”). Ewan is an educator, design thinker, and one of the sharper minds I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for nearly two decades. Ewan works with schools and governments across more than 70 countries, and right now he’s deep in a project trying to change how government itself operates in Scotland – not just education, but health, justice, children and families. The education lens, it turns out, is a lens for everything.

“School Is Child-Minding for the Intellectual”

Ewan’s central argument is one that policy-makers routinely sidestep: the most challenged learners in our systems aren’t struggling because of an education problem. They’re struggling because of a life problem – and we keep trying to fix it with curriculum.

The student who’s late to school? Mum left at 5am for her cleaning shift. The one who hasn’t done their homework? They were feeding their younger siblings the night before because dad was on his second job. School, Ewan points out bluntly, is designed for families who work nine to five. For everyone else, it compounds the disadvantage. “The most challenged learners end up doubly challenged and doubly penalised,” Ewan says. “They’re acting as pseudo-parents, essentially, for siblings – as well as trying to do school.”

The solution isn’t more literacy intervention. It might be universal income. It might be affordable childcare. It’s almost certainly something that crosses the artificial boundaries between government departments. And that’s the whole point: when you start with the human, the problem rarely respects the budget lines we’ve drawn around it.

The Real Barrier to Learner Agency Isn’t Students – It’s Teacher Confidence

One of the most honest things Ewan said in our conversation was; “the greatest barrier to giving students more ownership of their learning is often the teacher’s own uncertainty about whether students can handle it.“

This isn’t a criticism. It’s a diagnosis. When we talk about learner agency, educators often hear “individualise 180 lessons a week” – which is both exhausting and missing the point entirely. Agency isn’t about personalisation at that scale. It’s about students understanding why they’re learning, having some say in how, and being trusted with genuine responsibility for their own thinking.

The schools Ewan sees doing this well – many of them IB schools – have built a skills framework into the bedrock of daily practice. In Scotland, a framework of 12 “Metaskills” offers an evergreen framework across three domains: self-management, social intelligence, and innovation. Skills like focusing, adapting, showing integrity, curiosity, sense-making, creativity.

“These skills don’t go down with changes in the world around us,” Ewan says. “They need to be amplified.” The uncomfortable truth is that most curriculum frameworks already have these skills baked in somewhere. New Zealand’s key competencies have been there for two decades. The problem isn’t the framework. It’s that we never made the practice routine.

Why Your School Improvement Plan Is Probably Just a Catalogue

Ewan draws a sharp distinction between a catalogue of good intentions and an actual strategy. Most school plans, he argues, are the former: lists of activities, all of which feel worthwhile, none of which are fully resourced, and few of which ever become genuine institutional habit. Strategy, by contrast, requires choice. It requires saying: not this, not now.

“You’re not usually choosing between a good idea and a bad idea,” he says. “You’re choosing between lots of pretty good, all right ideas that can’t really all be done well at once.” His advice to school leaders navigating top-down mandates. Ewan advocates that you start by asking which of your current practices are actually embedded as habit, not just priority. Because a priority is something you’re still figuring out. A habit is something that happens whether or not the deputy principal is watching.

Most schools, he suggests, are overloaded with level-two thinking – ambitious new practices that require disproportionate effort – and underinvested in getting level-one right: the things that just are the way we do things here. The good news is that clarity doesn’t shrink creativity. It enables it.

AI Won’t Deskill Teachers.

Ewan is refreshingly un-anxious about AI in education – but he’s precise about why. The value of AI in curriculum planning, he argues, isn’t that it replaces teacher expertise. It’s that no one’s memory is good enough to hold all of what we know makes good teaching, and bring it to bear in the moment, every time. AI can be the thing that reminds you of the strategy you got bored with three years ago – the one that would be perfect for this class, who’ve never seen it.

He’s particularly interested in tools like Toddle, which allow schools to upload their learning frameworks – their values, their meta-skills, their pedagogical commitments – so that every lesson plan generated is quietly shaped by the school’s actual priorities, not just generic best practice. “Instead of a deputy head going around doing lesson observations and giving comments, the technology is doing that leading by reminding for you,” he says. “That’s a very good return on investment.”

But the warning is there too: if you take what the AI gives you without thinking, “it’ll feel flat.” The tool amplifies what the teacher brings. It can’t replace the bringing.

The Skill That Will Matter Most in the Next Five Years

And here’s where Ewan lands – with a word that surprised me by how much weight it carries.

Discernment.

Not digital literacy. Not critical thinking (though that’s in there). Not AI fluency. Discernment: the capacity to work out whether something is worth your attention. To hold something you dislike hearing long enough to ask whether it contains any truth. To filter the flood.

It matters for students navigating social media. It matters for teachers navigating research that masquerades as research. It matters for school leaders choosing between a thousand things that all sound worthwhile. “The biggest trap in schools,” he says, “is that almost everything sounds worthwhile. That’s exactly why focus is so hard.” In a world drowning in signal dressed as noise, and noise dressed as signal, discernment isn’t a soft skill. It’s survival infrastructure.

By the end of our conversation, I’d coined a new job title: Chief Discernment Officer. Ewan liked it. I think every school needs one.

Listen to the full conversation with Ewan McIntosh in this episode of Conversations on the Future of Education. And if you’re in Auckland – Ewan is appearing at a free event on Thursday 30 April at Stonefields School at an event organised by the Stonefields Collaborative Trust – see details here and book to attend

Are we educating our young people to become our peers?

A reflection prompted by Rhonda Broussard and One Good Question

“Are we educating our young people to become our peers?” That was the question I found most intriguing when Rhonda Broussard posed it during her recent talk with us. It’s deceptively simple – but sit with it for a moment and you start to feel its edges. Rhonda is the author of One Good Question: How countries prepare youth to lead, and the book is built around exactly that spirit: not answers, but questions worth asking.

My first instinct was to connect it to something I’ve been writing about for some time: learner agency, and the shift in ownership of learning that great teaching requires. When we talk about agency, we’re really talking about gradually shifting the ownership of learning – moving students from dependence toward independence, from being the recipients of learning to the architects of it. That’s not so different from what Rhonda is pointing at.

But her question goes somewhere deeper than pedagogy. It challenges the fundamental structure of how we think about young people. Our education systems – and if we’re honest, many of our homes too – are built on hierarchy. Adults know. Children learn. Teachers lead. Students follow. These aren’t malicious arrangements; they often serve genuine purposes. But they can quietly train young people in something we don’t intend: that their job is to comply, not to contribute.

When students internalise that lesson well enough, we sometimes mistake it for success.

I want to be careful here, because I suspect some readers will hear “educating students to become peers” and feel a familiar anxiety – the fear that taking this seriously means abdicating responsibility. That classrooms become rudderless. That homes lose structure. That if we treat children as future peers, we somehow stop being the adults in the room.

That’s not what this means. A surgeon mentoring a resident doesn’t stop being the more experienced practitioner. A journalist guiding a cadet doesn’t pretend expertise doesn’t matter. What shifts is the orientation – are we working toward a relationship of mutual respect and eventual equality, or are we simply maintaining hierarchy for its own sake?

In teaching, this changes things in practical ways. It asks us whether we’re building students’ capacity to question, to direct their own inquiry, to own their learning – or whether we’re building their capacity to perform compliance. It asks whether the power we hold in classrooms is being used to prepare students for independence, or to preserve our own authority.

The same question lands differently at home. Parents (and grand-parents!) who hold their role lightly – who can imagine their child as a future adult they’ll admire, argue with, learn from – tend to parent with that destination in mind. The hierarchy doesn’t disappear; it just has somewhere to go.

After all, our students will become our peers. They will sit on councils and boards, write policy, run organisations, raise children of their own. Some of them will one day make decisions that affect us. The only question is whether we prepared them for that – or just for the next assessment.

Rhonda’s book is a gift to anyone willing to ask the question honestly. I’d encourage you to read it, and to sit with the discomfort it stirs. That’s usually where the most important thinking begins.

If This Fails, Why? A Pre-Mortem for Education Change

What if we stopped pretending every new education initiative was automatically a good idea?

That may sound harsh, but it is a question schools increasingly need to ask. Across Aotearoa New Zealand, educators are being asked to implement a steady stream of change, including curriculum refreshes, stronger emphasis on explicit teaching, attendance plans and new reporting requirements, cell phone restrictions, and a renewed focus on the basics. While each of these may have merit, taken together, they create a serious risk – including change fatigue, implementation overload, and a widening gap between policy intent and classroom reality.

In my previous post I summarised my thoughts from a webinar I’d listened to on AI and the futures we create. In it there was reference made to the idea of conducting a pre-mortem as a way of understanding and planning for future change. This idea triggered a lot of feedback, so I thought I’d explore it a little further here, and apply the thinking specifically to what we are facing in the current NZ education system.

A pre-mortem is a strategic exercise where a team imagines a project has already failed, then works backward to identify why. The point is not negativity for its own sake. It is to surface the blind spots, assumptions, and risks that too often go unspoken when people are eager to get moving. Gary Klein developed the approach to help break groupthink and overconfidence. Atlassian describes it as a way to prepare for “every twist and turn” before a project begins.

That feels especially relevant in education right now.

In schools, we are often handed change before we have had enough time to understand the problem it is meant to solve. We are told to implement, align, adjust, monitor, and report. But are we always equally clear on the “why”? Are we asking what happens when this change lands in a staffroom already stretched by workload, relievers, behaviour, attendance pressures, and competing priorities? Are we asking who carries the implementation burden, and what gets displaced when the new initiative arrives?

A pre-mortem asks exactly those questions.

Why this matters now

Consider some of the current demands schools are living with. The Ministry of Education’s 2026 updates include Attendance Management Plans, stepped responses to absence thresholds, and more formal recording and reporting expectations. At the same time, schools are navigating curriculum change, stronger expectations around explicit teaching, and ongoing pressure to lift achievement and attendance. On top of that, cell phones are now meant to be away for the day, and ERO has reported that compliance is still uneven, particularly in secondary schools.

None of these changes exists in a vacuum. Each one competes for time, energy, communication, and trust. That is why the question is not simply whether a policy sounds sensible in theory. The real question is whether it will work in the lived reality of schools. Will staff understand it? Will whānau support it? Will students comply? Will it reduce complexity or add another layer to an already crowded system?

This is where many reforms stumble. Not because people are lazy or resistant by default, but because implementation is often treated as the easy part. The hard part is what happens after the announcement: the interpretation, the local adaptation, the communication with families, the extra workload, the unintended consequences, the confusion, the compliance gaps, and the slow erosion of goodwill when staff feel they are being asked to absorb one more thing. A pre-mortem forces us to name those risks before they become reality.

What a school pre-mortem could look like

Imagine a leadership team, department, or staff meeting where the group is told:

“It is six months from now and this initiative has failed. What happened?”

That simple prompt can shift the conversation in powerful ways.

Educators might identify things like:

The purpose was never clearly explained.
Staff were told what to do before they were consulted on how it would work.
The initiative added workload without removing anything else.
The language was clear at policy level but murky in practice.
Training was rushed or one-size-fits-all.
Whānau were not brought on the journey.
The change looked good in a document but collapsed in day-to-day reality.
There was no agreed evidence of success, so no one knew whether it was working.

Those are not complaints for their own sake. They are early warning signs. And once they are visible, they can be acted on. Clarifying the purpose, simplifying the process, reducing duplication, resourcing implementation properly, and deciding what will be stopped so the new work has room to succeed are all examples of the sorts of mitigations that may emerge. That is consistent with the pre-mortem method’s emphasis on identifying risks, prioritising them, and creating mitigation actions.

Questions worth asking

If you want this to be genuinely useful for educators, here are some starting questions they could use in any school-facing change process:

What problem is this actually meant to solve?
What assumptions are we making about staff, students, and whānau?
What will this require people to stop doing?
What does success look like in practice, not just on paper?
What unintended consequences should we expect?
What will this add to workload?
Where are the likely points of confusion or resistance?
What evidence will tell us whether this is working?
What support is missing?
What would failure look like six months from now?

These questions are deliberately uncomfortable. That is the point. The goal is not to block change, but to improve it before it hardens into another burden on schools.

A better standard for change

The challenge for education leaders and policymakers is not to avoid change. It is to stop assuming that announcement equals progress. Schools deserve reforms that are coherent, resourced, and shaped by the realities of implementation, not just the language of intent. If a change cannot survive a serious pre-mortem, then perhaps it is not ready to be imposed on teachers, students, and communities.

A pre-mortem does not promise certainty. What it does promise is honesty. And in a system under pressure, honesty may be the most valuable reform tool we have.

Is our lack of ambition limiting learning?

What if the biggest problem facing education today isn’t declining test scores, new technologies, or even curriculum reform?

What if the real problem is that we’ve stopped being ambitious enough for our young people?

That thought stayed with me long after finishing a recent podcast conversation with my friend and colleague, Professor Stephen Heppell.

Stephen has spent decades exploring the future of learning – as a teacher, researcher, and founder of Ultralab in the UK, one of the most influential learning technology research labs in Europe. Our paths first crossed more than twenty five years ago when I was involved in setting up CORE Education, and ever since then our conversations have had a habit of stretching my thinking in unexpected ways. This conversation was no exception.

We began the conversation by reminiscing about our shared history working in educational innovation, but it quickly turned into a wide-ranging exploration of how education systems respond to change – and why they so often struggle to do so.

What struck me most was where we eventually landed, the idea that, in many ways, schooling today reflects a profound lack of ambition for the capabilities of young people.

Education’s missed moment

Stephen began our conversation by reflecting on how education systems have historically shifted in response to big societal changes.

The rise of Sunday schools when the church wanted people to read the Bible.
Compulsory primary education during the Industrial Revolution.
Compulsory secondary schooling after World War II, when societies realised they needed a more educated population.

Each of these moments, he claims, represented a significant leap in how societies thought about learning.

But when the next transformative shift arrived – the digital age and the internet in the 1990s – Stephen argues education largely missed it. Instead of reimagining learning for a world where knowledge is abundant and connected, systems responded defensively. Curricula narrowed. Standardised testing expanded. Schools doubled down on control and compliance rather than curiosity and creativity.

It’s a pattern that feels strangely familiar today as we grapple with AI and rapid technological change.

Protecting the past rather than preparing for the future

Stephen made a point that resonated strongly with me. Much of our current policy debate in education seems driven by a desire to protect the system we already have, rather than asking how learning should evolve in a radically different world.

When knowledge is freely available and AI can generate explanations, examples, and assessments in seconds, the traditional model of schooling – where teachers distribute small pieces of knowledge to students sitting in rows – begins to feel increasingly out of step with reality.

And young people know it.

One of the most striking observations Stephen shared was the growing disengagement from schooling internationally. Students are “calling the bluff,” he suggested. They still show up – because they’re good people and want to do the right thing – but many are quietly voting with their feet.

The world outside school looks very different from the one they experience inside it.

The danger of lowering our ambition

Part of the problem lies in the way we measure success.

Too often our public conversations focus narrowly on test scores or international rankings. These metrics matter, of course, but they tell only a small part of the story. They don’t measure curiosity. They don’t measure agency. They don’t measure whether young people leave school believing they can shape the world.

And sometimes they tell a troubling story of students who perform well academically who often become less likely to pursue those subjects later in life.

In other words, we may be measuring success in ways that inadvertently extinguish the very passion we hope to cultivate.

When we trust young people

The most hopeful part of our conversation came when Stephen described examples of what happens when students are genuinely given agency.

In one project, students were asked to design their own “classroom of the future” using nothing more than cardboard. What they created – quiet learning spaces, collaborative areas, presentation walls – revealed a sophisticated understanding of how learning works.

But the most interesting result wasn’t the design. It was what happened to the students themselves.

They arrived earlier.
They stayed longer.
Their engagement increased.
And their learning improved.

When students imagined the future of learning, they weren’t just designing classrooms — they were rehearsing the future.

“There is no ‘they’”

Towards the end of our conversation I asked Stephen what message he would give policymakers thinking about the future of education.

His response was simple, and powerful – Be more ambitious for our children.

Again and again he has seen what happens when young people are trusted with big challenges. When we “terrify ourselves with the tasks we give them,” he said, they invariably astonish us with what they achieve.

But his final comment may have been the most important of all: Don’t wait for “them” to fix education.

There is no “they”, he says, “It’s us”.

For school leaders, teachers, parents and communities, the invitation is clear. The future of education won’t arrive through policy announcements alone. It will emerge through the countless decisions educators make every day about how learning happens in their classrooms and schools.

And perhaps the most important of those decisions is this: Will we design education around compliance – or around possibility?

Listen to our conversation below.

You can access all previous conversations on Youtube

AI, Education and the Futures We Choose

If you’ve been a subscriber to my FutureMakers newsletter or my blog posts for long you’ll know that two of the important issues I’ve been writing about more recently are the purpose of education and the role of AI in education into the future. This isn’t because these are simply that latest ‘buzz’ words or topics, but because I believe they do and will matter significantly in terms of the way we design learning and the systems that support it into the future.

At the end of last week I had the privilege of participating in a webinar hosted by a US-based organisation I’ve engaged with in the past called KnowledgeWorks. In the webinar two researchers – Rebecca Winthrop from the Brookings Institution and Katherine Prince from KnowledgeWorks – brought complementary lenses to what is genuinely one of the most important questions of our time: what does the rise of generative AI mean for how we educate young people, and what should we be doing about it right now?

If you work in education and haven’t yet had a serious, structured conversation about AI with your colleagues, this webinar is a good place to start. I’d encourage you to watch it in full (see link at the end of this post).

In this post I want to share what struck me most from this webinar, and then – because I think we’ve spent enough time just watching and listening – I want to challenge you to actually do something with it.

The Landscape: Exciting, Troubling, and Urgent

Katherine Prince opened by sketching a horizon that is both exhilarating and unsettling. Katherine suggests the next decade will likely bring AI that adapts in real time to students’ moods and learning needs, that mentors teacher candidates, that fluidly matches learners with people and places. It could mean extraordinary personalisation. It could also mean minimally viable public education held together by AGI teachers while human educators disappear from communities that need them most.

She emphasised that the future is not predetermined. But it is being shaped right now, by decisions – or non-decisions – that we are all making.

Rebecca Winthrop grounded us in the present. Her Brookings Global Task Force on AI and Education consulted over 500 students, teachers, caregivers, and technologists across 50 countries, and reviewed more than 400 studies. The findings are nuanced, but her headline is not: right now, the risks overshadow the benefits.

Her five key takeaways are worth considering further:

It’s genuinely confusing. The line between AI for learning, for communication, and for entertainment has dissolved. Students are using general-purpose chatbots – designed for adults, not for learning – in ways that are largely invisible to schools.
AI can genuinely help learning, but only in narrow, strategic conditions – mediated by skilled teachers, paired with vetted content, embedded in good pedagogy. That’s not what most student AI use looks like.
The risks are serious and distinct. This isn’t like the calculator. Cognitive stunting (Winthrop’s preferred term over “offloading”), reduced creativity, social development undermined by sycophantic AI companions, amplified bias, eroding trust between teachers and students – these aren’t hypothetical. There’s already research tracking them.
Motivation and engagement are at the heart of it. If 50% of middle and high school students are already in “passenger mode” – coasting, doing the bare minimum (a reference to her book, The Disengaged Teen) – AI that does the work for them won’t fix that. It will deepen it.
We can still bend the arc. It’s early days. The recommendations – she calls them Prosper, Prepare, Protect – are practical and actionable. But only if we act.

The Tensions That Confront Us

Katherine then introduced three tensions that I think deserve space in any educator’s thinking: innovation versus protection; systemic vision versus lagging implementation; and efficiency versus human development.

That third one is the one I keep coming back to, and it connects directly to the conversation that closed the webinar about the purpose of education.

Both researchers landed in the same place, independently: education is fundamentally about human development – developing the self, and learning to live with others. Rebecca framed it this way: school may be the only space in many communities where young people encounter people genuinely different from their family or neighbours. That social fabric, that citizenship function, that opportunity to rub shoulders with difference – AI cannot substitute for it, and we shouldn’t let it.

The Purpose Question: A Particular Challenge for NZ Educators

Here in Aotearoa, this tension has a particular sharpness to it. Our current system is heavily oriented toward preparing students for employment the future of work. The pedagogical framing that dominates is largely transactional – collect the credits, get the qualification, access the next thing. Rebecca named this directly, saying that students have learned to treat school as cashing in points to buy rewards. When AI can do the transaction faster and better than they can, why would they bother? That’s not a student problem. That’s a design problem. And it’s one that the current direction of our education system risks entrenching rather than solving.

This puts educators in an uncomfortable position. Government mandates set the frame – curriculum priorities, assessment structures, accountability measures. And those mandates, right now, skew heavily toward economic utility. Education as workforce preparation, learning as a means to employment. Many educators feel the pull to simply comply, to deliver what is required and leave the bigger questions to someone else.

But this is precisely the moment when professional knowledge matters most. Every educator in this country carries (or should carry) a deep understanding of what learning actually is, what child and adolescent development requires, and what schools are uniquely positioned to provide that no algorithm can replicate. That knowledge isn’t just personal conviction. It’s the thing that makes teaching a profession rather than a delivery service.

Rebecca Winthrop highlighted a insight that I think could really change how we (as educators) approach this. She is emphatic that parents and whānu are the missing piece of this conversation. They are desperate for guidance. They are worried about their children. And critically, as she points out, they are the voters who ultimately determine which politicians hold power and which policy directions get traction. If educators can bring parents and whānau – and the community – into a genuine, honest conversation about the purpose of education, about what their children actually need in an AI world, about the difference between a transactional model and one centred on human development, then something shifts. Parents and whānau who understand the stakes don’t just become allies in the classroom. They become a force in the wider conversation about what we want our system to be.

This is not about educators becoming political activists. It’s about recognising that the professional responsibility to advocate for children doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Sharing what you know – with parents, with your community, with anyone who will listen – is part of the job. And, as the panelists pointed out, the pre-mortem only works if the right people are in the room.

A Pre-Mortem, Not a Post-Mortem

One of the most powerful ideas in the webinar was the framing of Brookings’ research approach. Rather than wait five years for randomised control trials and then pick over what went wrong, they conducted a pre-mortem. This involves asks “What are the failure modes? What do we know now that we can act on before the damage is done?” We didn’t do that with social media. We can do it with AI.

Here are some questions worth pursuing further in your own context:

If you looked at the assignments you set this term, how many of them could be completed – and would be completed – by a student using AI with minimal cognitive engagement? What would you do differently?
Does your practice lean toward the transactional model that Rebecca described? If so, what would it look like to shift even one unit toward process, curiosity, and genuine engagement?
Are your students in explore mode – motivated by the learning journey itself – or predominantly in passenger or achiever mode? What’s your role in that?
What would an AI-aware, AI-assisted, and AI-resistant approach to your curriculum actually look like in practice?
Who is missing from your school’s conversation about AI? Students? Families? What would it mean to genuinely bring them in?

These aren’t comfortable questions. They’re also not rhetorical. I’d genuinely like to know what you’re thinking and what you’re doing. Leave a comment, or get in touch directly.

What I’m Taking Away

The recording of this webinar is worth your time. Share it with a colleague. Use it as the basis for a staff conversation. The researchers are generous with their resources – KnowledgeWorks have published a large number of AI-related resources on their site, plus there’s the Brookings tip sheets for families and Rebecca Winthrop’s LinkedIn newsletter are all freely available.

But more than any resource, what I’m taking from this is a sense of urgency about not waiting. The pre-mortem is only useful if we actually act on it. The future Katherine Prince described – vibrant, personalised, genuinely human-centred learning – doesn’t arrive automatically. It has to be built, deliberately, by people like us.

What are you going to do this term?

Watch the webinar recording

References

Charting a New Course for Education from KnowledgeWorks
A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect from the Brookings Institution
The Disengaged Teen, Winthrop and Anderson

If you enjoyed this conversation, you may be interested in the next Webinar event being hosted by KnowledgeWorks. On April 7, they’re partnering with Education Reimagined and a group of educators to explore educator roles within learner-centred education. Register here for “Educator Roles for Learner-Centered Transformation.”

When Measuring Schools Becomes Too Simple

Over the past week or so, the New Zealand Government has signalled its intention to introduce nationally consistent reporting to parents about student progress. The argument is a simple one: many parents find current school reporting confusing, and clearer information will help them better understand how their children are doing.

At one level, it’s hard to disagree with that aim. Parents should be able to understand how their children are progressing at school. Clear communication between schools and families is essential. But behind this seemingly straightforward change sits a much more complex question – one that has surfaced repeatedly in education systems around the world.

What is the real purpose of reporting on school performance?

Is it primarily to inform parents and communities?
Is it to ensure public accountability for the education system?
Or is it to support schools themselves in identifying where improvement is needed?

In reality, it has always been all three. And that’s where the tension begins.

Three perspectives shaping the debate

Much of the current debate about school performance is framed as a tension between policymakers and educators. But there is a third perspective that is just as important – the expectations of parents and communities.

Each of these groups is asking a slightly different question.

1. The policy perspective

Governments quite reasonably want to know: Is the system working?

From this viewpoint, nationally consistent measures allow policymakers to monitor trends in achievement, identify inequities, and determine whether investments in education are making a difference. Without some shared indicators, it becomes difficult to see the bigger picture when allocating resources or to intervene where support is needed.

2. The professional perspective

Educators tend to frame the issue differently. Their question is more likely to be: Are we meeting the needs of the learners in this community?

Schools operate in very different contexts. Teachers see every day that learning outcomes are shaped by factors such as culture, language, wellbeing, and opportunity. From this perspective, evaluating a school’s effectiveness requires rich evidence, professional interpretation, and attention to local priorities – not simply a narrow set of standardised metrics. (This point was well argued by Robyn Baker when she was director of NZCER in her paper presented at the International Forum on Education Reforms in the Asia-Pacific Region back in 2001!)

Importantly, much of the evaluative work that schools undertake is designed not for public comparison, but for internal improvement – helping teachers and leaders identify where their practice can be strengthened and where additional support may be needed.

3. The parent and community perspective

Parents are usually asking something more immediate and personal: Are the learning needs of my child being met, and is this school a good place for my child?

Families want information that is clear and understandable. They want to know their child is making progress. They want confidence that their child is being supported and challenged. And inevitably, they sometimes look for ways to compare schools when making decisions.

Interestingly, parents often want both simplicity and context – a clear indication of progress, but also the story behind it.

When one perspective dominates

The challenge arises when accountability systems attempt to serve all three purposes with one type of measurement.

When the policy perspective dominates, complex learning environments can be reduced to a small number of indicators that quickly become proxies for school quality. These measures can easily evolve into league tables comparing schools that operate in vastly different circumstances.

When the professional perspective dominates, reporting can sometimes become difficult for families to interpret. Rich narratives about learning may not always translate into clear signals about progress. And when reporting is designed primarily for parents as consumers of education, the risk is that systems begin to prioritise simplified comparisons over meaningful evaluation.

None of these outcomes serve the deeper purposes of education particularly well.

A uniquely New Zealand tension

New Zealand’s education system has long been regarded as one of the most devolved in the world. Schools have significant autonomy to respond to the aspirations and needs of their communities. This local responsiveness has been one of the strengths of the system. It allows schools to reflect the cultural, social, and economic contexts in which they operate. But autonomy also raises an enduring challenge:

how do we maintain coherence across the system while preserving local responsiveness?

Reasons to proceed carefully

New Zealand has been here before. The introduction of National Standards drew on similar reasoning – that clearer, more consistent information would help parents and lift achievement. The subsequent evidence was, at best, mixed. Research suggested that rather than sharpening professional focus, the standards tended to narrow it, reducing the richness of teacher judgement to a bureaucratic reporting requirement. That history deserves to sit near the centre of the current conversation, not at its margins.

There is also a deeper equity concern that standardised frameworks tend to obscure. Schools do not operate in the same or similar conditions. Research shows that when outcomes are shaped heavily by socio-economic circumstance a common framework risks measuring context as much as it measures quality. The school serving a community with significant material disadvantage may appear to perform poorly not because its teaching is weak, but because its challenges are greater. A framework that cannot distinguish between these things does not illuminate the system; it can mislead those trying to understand it. This concern is compounded in Māori-medium settings, where the values, priorities, and appropriate measures of success are genuinely different – and where a one-size approach can feel less like support and more like imposition.

Finally, we. must recognise the inherent tension between evaluation for accountability and evaluation for improvement. Reviews of previous ERO processes stress the importance of aligning external frameworks with schools’ internal evaluation focused on learners, suggesting that evaluation frameworks can, over time, pull schools’ attention toward satisfying the framework rather than responding to the genuine needs of their learners. Over time, where external accountability pressures dominate, evaluation indicators can become checklists to satisfy, pulling schools’ attention toward demonstrating compliance with the framework rather than responding to the specific needs of their learners.

Compliance and quality are not the same thing – and when the former begins to stand in for the latter, something important is lost. None of this means the Government’s intention is misguided. But it does mean that the design of what follows matters enormously, and that good intentions are not a sufficient substitute for a sound evidential basis.

A better question

Perhaps the real question is not whether school performance should be standardised or locally determined (an issue I raised earlier this year in my blog post on rethinking system success).

Instead we might ask: How do we design an accountability system that balances public assurance, professional judgement, and community understanding?

Or put another way: How do we achieve consistency without imposing uniformity?

Guided autonomy

One possible way forward is what might be described as guided autonomy.

In such a model, national frameworks provide a shared set of expectations about learning and progress, along with a small number of common indicators that allow the system as a whole to be monitored. Schools, however, retain responsibility for interpreting that evidence within their own context – identifying local priorities, gathering broader evidence of learner success, and explaining what progress looks like for the young people they serve. Communities, in turn, receive reporting that combines clear indicators of progress with the explanation and context needed to make sense of them.

In other words, a system that provides consistency without uniformity.

An invitation to think carefully

Education is ultimately about human growth – intellectual, social, emotional, and cultural. No single metric can capture that complexity. The challenge for policymakers, educators, and communities alike is to ensure that in our search for clarity we do not inadvertently reduce schooling to what is easiest to measure. Because when measurement becomes too simple, the picture it provides can quickly become misleading. And when that happens, the very trust that accountability systems are meant to strengthen can begin to erode.

The current debate about school reporting in New Zealand offers an important opportunity. Not simply to redesign how information is communicated to parents, but to reflect more deeply on what we expect reporting systems to achieve.

If we can hold together the three legitimate perspectives – public accountability, professional improvement, and community understanding – we may be able to design something far more powerful than a simplified reporting system.

We may be able to design a system that genuinely helps schools, communities, and policymakers work together in support of every learner.

And that is a goal worth taking the time to get right.

Previous posts…

Rethinking system success in education – prompting us to think beyond the economic argument as the rationale for system success.
Resourcing the system we need for measuring success – arguing that we cannot measure broader success without investing in the conditions that make it achievable.
Who should decide what? – explores who should decides what happens? How do we avoid either top-down prescription that ignores local context, or fragmented autonomy that produces inequity?”

Every Human, Everywhere

A conversation with Rhonda Broussard that challenged me – and will challenge you too.

I’ve had the privilege of hearing Rhonda Broussard speak several times in the States, and each time I walk away with my thinking gently but firmly rearranged. So when she joined me recently for a podcast conversation about the future of education, I knew it wasn’t going to be a comfortable chat. It wasn’t. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Rhonda is the founder and CEO of Beloved Community, a US-based not-for-profit doing remarkable work at the intersection of youth agency, equity, and civic engagement. She’s also the author of a book titled One Good Question, that has the tantalising by-line “How Countries Prepare Youth to Lead”. That tension between preparation and possibility sits right at the heart of everything Rhonda does.

Who gets to wonder?

One of the things Rhonda said early in our conversation has stayed with me. She described growing up in Louisiana, where she and her uncle – just three months apart in age – were educated in the same school building. She had access to self-directed learning, inquiry, chess, tinkering. He didn’t. Same building. Different world.

She put it plainly: both modes of education exist concurrently. The real interrogation is who gets access to them. Who do we think is worthy of that much agency in their own learning? And who are we – let’s be honest – simply preparing for compliance and production?

That hit hard. Especially as someone watching education policy in Aotearoa move in a direction that seems to prioritise the basics above all else. I raised this with Rhonda. Her response was measured but clear: the debate about “basics vs inquiry” is largely a debate about class and race, whether we name it that way or not.

Second graders, a locker key, and a bill of rights

I asked Rhonda to tell me what Beloved Community actually does – because she’s one of those rare people who doesn’t just theorise about education, she builds things. What followed was one of the best stories I’ve heard in a long time.

In a school network Rhonda was leading, grade two students learned about social justice movements – the usual content, leaders and change-makers and living museums. But then the teachers asked one more question: What is something in your own life you actually want to change?

She described how a group of eight-year-olds noticed their school building had lockers – left over from its days as a high school – that no one used. They decided this was unjust. They researched who had the power to change it, booked a meeting with the head of school, found out a locksmith’s quote was needed, spent the spring term selling lemonade at lunch, raised the money, walked back in with a bowl of coins, and then – because they weren’t in it for themselves – wrote a locker bill of rights for the whole school.

I’ve been in education long enough to know that this kind of story can sound nice but inconsequential. It wasn’t. Rhonda’s point was this: you don’t have to keep teaching children how to do this. Once they know they can, they just keep doing it. The seed, once planted, grows on its own.

Civic education isn’t just about knowing how government works

We also got into something I’ve thought about for years: the problem with civics education. Rhonda described how in the US, civics is often a half-year course that amounts to memorising how government is supposed to work – and implicitly, why that model is the best model. There’s little room to ask why things are organised this way, what other models exist, or what it would look like to design your own.

This resonated deeply. We had a similar debate here in Aotearoa about whether civics should be compulsory – and as Rhonda and I have discussed before, civics presented through a single cultural worldview isn’t civic education at all. It’s a different kind of compliance.

What Rhonda is pointing toward is education that prepares people not just to participate in democracy, but to interrogate it, improve it, and build it. That requires the kind of intellectual humility and curiosity that doesn’t come from memorisation.

Agency isn’t just for the young

One of the things I find most powerful about Beloved Community’s work is that it doesn’t stop with students. Rhonda described training early childhood educators in the same participatory research methodologies they use with teenagers. The results were striking: educators came back and said it hadn’t just changed how they led – their whole families had been transformed alongside them.

This is something I write about in my own work on agency: it isn’t ultimately about me. It’s about us. The ripple effect Rhonda describes – from student to family to community to policy – is what genuine collective efficacy looks like in practice.

“What I want for the future of education is this sense of agency, voice, and power to be extended, expected, afforded for every human everywhere on the planet.”

— Rhonda Broussard

Listen to the podcast episode

I encourage you to take the time to listen to the full podcast episode (see below). There’s a lot more in there – including Rhonda’s YPAR academies where teenagers conduct real research and push for real policy change, and a fascinating thread about whether education and the economy can (or should) be separated.

Her final words to me were simple: every human, everywhere. That’s the aspiration. The podcast is a good place to start thinking about how we get there.

Your chance to meet and hear from Rhonda in New Zealand

I’m excited to share that Rhonda will be visiting Aotearoa New Zealand next month, and will be hosting a ‘book talk’ where she’ll read excerpts from the book and discuss the implications of our questions on our professional growth and the young people we serve.

Date: Tuesday 7 April

Time: 2pm (cup of tea first with Rhonda speaking from 2.30-3.30)

Venue: Level 1 Raphoe House, 8 Gloucester Park Road, Onehunga, Auckland

Any learner, any where, any time…

New Zealand’s recent COVID‑19 inquiry and the increasing pressure on our schooling workforce are a fresh reminder that we can’t treat resilience in education as a “nice to have”. We need to design for disruption as a default – and hybrid models of teaching and learning should be central to that design.

Why resilience must be designed in

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID‑19 Lessons Learned is about much more than looking in the rear‑view mirror; its focus is on how Aotearoa can be better prepared for future pandemics, including keeping education going next time. International modelling suggests the probability of another COVID‑scale event in coming decades is not trivial, with some analyses putting the chance of a similar pandemic at around 2–3% in any given year – a risk that compounds over a decade. Add the emergence of further COVID waves as population immunity wanes, and it becomes harder to pretend that 2020–21 was a one‑off; episodic health disruption is now part of the landscape.

Pandemics are only one part of the picture. Climate‑fuelled weather events and natural disasters are already closing schools and cutting off communities in different parts of the motu. Global instability, including the current conflict in the Middle East, flows through into fuel prices and the viability of school transport, quietly undermining our assumption that “turn up to a building at 9am” is the only way schooling can work. Then there are the pressures generated from inside the system itself: Ministry forecasts now point to a shortfall of around 710 secondary teachers in 2026, with particular pinch points in certain subjects and regions. Without enough teachers, continuity of rich, high‑quality programmes quickly becomes a timetable challenge, not just a future hypothetical.

This is exactly the kind of context I’ve explored previously in my thinking on resilience planning and future‑focused schooling (see links to thought pieces at the end of this post)

We already have the backbone

The encouraging news is that we are not starting from a blank slate. Across Aotearoa we already have providers whose core business is to deliver high‑quality learning at a distance – accessible to learners regardless of geography or local circumstance. Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (Te Kura) has decades of experience in this space, supporting learners who are geographically isolated, medically unable to attend, or needing programmes their local school cannot provide. At secondary level, networks such as NetNZ and Kōtui Ako have shown that young people can successfully engage with senior programmes through well‑designed online courses, with local schools providing pastoral support while specialist e‑teachers work with students across the country.

Alongside this, the rapid uptake of learning management systems and video‑conferencing tools during and after COVID means that most schools now sit on a basic digital infrastructure that can be strengthened and used more intentionally, rather than built from scratch. This aligns closely with what I’ve argued for in earlier writing about hybrid learning and “anytime, anywhere” models of provision (see links below).

Too often, however, these capabilities are treated as peripheral – “alternative” options we turn to only when the conventional model falters. A resilience mindset flips that. Instead of viewing online providers as add‑ons, we can treat them as core infrastructure: a backbone of national provision that any school, cluster, or learner can plug into when (not if) local capacity is stretched. When we frame online and hybrid provision this way, the benefits extend well beyond coping with disruption. We also:

Create new career pathways and flexible roles for teachers (for example, specialist online teaching or cross‑school leadership roles).
Smooth spikes and troughs in demand across subjects and regions.
Make it viable to offer small‑roll or niche courses that would otherwise disappear.

In future disruptions, continuity of learning should not rest on every individual school scrambling to “go online” at short notice. It should rest on how well we have recognised, integrated, and normalised these existing strengths as part of the mainstream fabric of schooling in Aotearoa. The table I’ve created below is an attempt to summarise this:

Element	What we already have	How it supports resilience	Additional system benefits
National distance provision	Te Kura’s programmes, dual enrolment options	Provides continuity for learners when local schools not accessible or are disrupted.	Creates alternative career pathways for teachers, supports flexible workloads, and enables provision for hard‑to‑staff areas.
Online subject networks	NetNZ, Kōtui Ako, and similar collaboratives	Promotes regional collaboration and support. Keeps specialist subjects running despite local teacher shortages.	Smooths spikes and troughs in demand (by subject and region), enables national sharing of expertise, and supports small‑roll courses.
Digital platforms	Widespread LMS and video‑conferencing adoption post‑COVID	Enables rapid shift to remote or hybrid delivery when needed.	Builds system‑wide digital fluency, supports blended PLD models, and enables cross‑school collaboration and resource sharing.

Hybrid as the “normal”, not the backup

The key move here is to stop treating hybrid as an emergency workaround and instead see it as the way we do schooling in a complex world. The aim is for every learner to experience a blend of in‑person and online learning as part of the everyday pattern of school life. Hybrid does not mean abandoning kānohi‑ki‑te‑kānohi learning; it means deliberately weaving together:

Classroom‑based experiences grounded in relationships, hands‑on activity, and local place.
Online environments where resources, tasks, and interaction are available “any learner, anywhere, anytime”.
Assessment and feedback practices that work seamlessly across both spaces.

When every class, or at least every learning area, has a living online “home” – where current learning, explanations, and opportunities to connect are accessible – then short‑term closures, staff absences, transport interruptions, or individual attendance issues become “learn from where you are this week”, rather than “learning stops”. From a workforce perspective, hybrid approaches also allow schools and clusters to share scarce expertise: that specialist physics or te reo teacher can work with a small group of learners nationally via NetNZ, Kōtui Ako, or a locally organised online hub, while local staff provide mentoring and pastoral care. In an environment of worsening secondary teacher shortages, this kind of design directly supports breadth and equity of curriculum access for learners.

As I’ve argued before, the benefits are not limited to crises. Hybrid models can support learners with chronic health issues, part‑time work, or complex whānau responsibilities, enable deeper whānau involvement in learning, and build the digital capabilities we claim are essential for life and work in the future.

What schools and clusters can do now

There is clearly important work to be done at system level – in funding, policy, and in how we formally recognise and support Te Kura, NetNZ, Kōtui Ako and others as part of our core architecture of provision. But that doesn’t mean schools and Kāhui Ako have to wait. There is work within our immediate sphere of influence:

Build and normalise online “mirrors” of classroom learning. Ensure every learning area has an up‑to‑date online space where ākonga can find current work, resources, and ways to seek help. Start small: one team, one unit, one year level.
Plan explicitly for continuity scenarios. Ask, with staff and community, “If we had three weeks of closure, or a 30% staff absence, how would learning continue?” Map the role of Te Kura, NetNZ, Kotui Ako and other providers into those plans, rather than assuming we must do everything ourselves.
Collaborate on specialist provision. Within your region or Kāhui Ako, agree which school or provider will take the lead in online delivery of high‑risk subjects (senior sciences, languages, technology, arts) and how others will support learners locally. Use those arrangements now, not only in emergencies, so they are familiar and trusted.
Invest in capability for online pedagogy. Resilient hybrid practice is not about uploading worksheets. It’s about designing engaging online experiences, presence, and feedback. Prioritise PLD that helps teachers plan for learning that travels well across both physical and digital spaces.
Engage your community in the “why”. Frame hybrid shifts as a way to widen opportunity, personalise pathways, and equip young people for life in a digitally rich world – with resilience as a critical added benefit. When whānau see the broader purpose, they are more likely to support new ways of working.

These are practical, local moves that can sit alongside – and in many cases anticipate – any national changes that may flow from the Royal Commission’s recommendations.

A timely reminder – and an invitation

The COVID‑19 Royal Commission is asking us, as a nation, what we have learned and how we will act differently next time. The secondary teacher shortage is asking us, right now, how we will sustain breadth and quality of learning experiences with fewer specialists on the ground. The climate, the global economy, and geopolitics are reminding us that disruption is not a temporary anomaly, but a defining feature of the world our young people are growing up in.

We can respond to each of these pressures in isolation – another recruitment campaign here, another emergency plan there. Or we can see them as a combined invitation to re‑imagine schooling in ways I’ve been arguing for over a number of years now on the FutureMakers blog: as a connected learning ecosystem, underpinned by hybrid models that assume learning must be portable, flexible, and shareable across time and place (see links below).

The design challenge is real, and it won’t be solved overnight. But it aligns with the very best of what we already know about effective pedagogy, equity, and future‑focused learning. Most importantly, it honours our responsibility to ensure that, whatever the next decade brings, our tamariki and rangatahi can rely on the continuity of their learning – not because we were lucky, but because we chose to plan, design, and act accordingly.

For more read:

Resilience Planning – provides a framework for considering what options a school might consider to be adequately prepared for this eventuality, proposing the adoption of a hybrid model as a solution.
Being Resilient: Characteristics of Resilient Schools – provides guidance for school leaders as they seek to work with their staff and communities to design the systems, structures and processes required to ensure they are able to continue providing high quality learning experiences for their students in the wake of any disruption they experience
Empty Seats – identifies six key areas of strategic focus for schools striving for resilience in their day to day operation.
Hybrid Learning – a means to an end – a short paper outlining the case for taking a longer-term view about the work we’re doing on hybrid learning, and how our vision should be on building resilient schools and a resilient education system.
Getting Started With Hybrid – This guide contains a six-step framework that can be used to guide the development of hybrid approaches in schools
Tuia Te Hononga Tāngata, Tuia Te Hononga Ao: Taking the Pulse of Distance Learning in Aotearoa New Zealand – provides and analysis or the evolution of school-sector distance education in Aotearoa NZ
Taking the pulse of distance learning in Aotearoa New Zealand – This report examines the historical period from 2019-2022 to understand the pandemic’s impact on traditional distance education practices in the compulsory sector across Aotearoa NZ.
Hybrid Learning – this link takes you to where all of my hybrid learning thought pieces are collated for ease of access.

Four Modes of Engagement

Three Groups and a Fracturing Society

When Two Frameworks Meet

The Achiever Problem – and the Over-Connected Parent

The Families We Can’t Reach

What This Means for Schools

A Closing Thought

Futuremakers Newsletter

From “assessment” to “evidencing progress”

Reconnecting curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment

The capabilities question

What the evidence suggests

A useful moment for New Zealand

Holding the split screen

A question worth sitting with

Futuremakers Newsletter

“School Is Child-Minding for the Intellectual”

The Real Barrier to Learner Agency Isn’t Students – It’s Teacher Confidence

Why Your School Improvement Plan Is Probably Just a Catalogue

AI Won’t Deskill Teachers.

The Skill That Will Matter Most in the Next Five Years

Futuremakers Newsletter

Futuremakers Newsletter

Why this matters now

What a school pre-mortem could look like

Questions worth asking

A better standard for change

Futuremakers Newsletter

Education’s missed moment

Protecting the past rather than preparing for the future

The danger of lowering our ambition

When we trust young people

“There is no ‘they’”

Futuremakers Newsletter

The Landscape: Exciting, Troubling, and Urgent

The Tensions That Confront Us

The Purpose Question: A Particular Challenge for NZ Educators

A Pre-Mortem, Not a Post-Mortem

What I’m Taking Away

Watch the webinar recording

References

Futuremakers Newsletter

Three perspectives shaping the debate

1. The policy perspective

2. The professional perspective

3. The parent and community perspective

When one perspective dominates

A uniquely New Zealand tension

Reasons to proceed carefully

A better question

Guided autonomy

An invitation to think carefully

Previous posts…

Futuremakers Newsletter

Who gets to wonder?

Second graders, a locker key, and a bill of rights

Civic education isn’t just about knowing how government works

Agency isn’t just for the young

Listen to the podcast episode

Your chance to meet and hear from Rhonda in New Zealand

Futuremakers Newsletter

Why resilience must be designed in

We already have the backbone

Hybrid as the “normal”, not the backup

What schools and clusters can do now

A timely reminder – and an invitation

For more read:

Futuremakers Newsletter

What others say

Resources

Services