Like riding a bike

Learning to ride a bike was pretty much a right of passage when I was growing up. In a time before there were SUVs transporting kids to school or sports events on Saturday, your bike was essential for getting you from A to B on a daily basis, so learning to ride well and safely at an early age was extremely important.

I can recall my mother spending time holding on to the carrier on the rear of my bike as I gradually got the ‘feel’ of holding my balance and then using the pedals. I can remember also the jubilation (for both of us) when, finally, I was able to pedal down our drive without her holding on, running to keep up!

The real turning point for me in becoming a more competent rider occurred just a few months after that, when a traffic officer visited our school and we were instructed to collect our bikes from the stands behind the school and bring them to the netball courts. Our whole class lined up, bikes of many different colours and types, some even had saddle bags strapped to the carriers which were the envy of the rest of us.

The traffic officer explained that he was going to see how well we could ride, and give us some tips on how we could become better riders. This started with the whole class mounting up and riding around the perimeter of the netball court. This provided some level of consternation for some and hilarity for others as 30 kids all jostled for position in the paloton (I didn’t know the meaning of that word then 🙂 and endeavoured to make their way around the perimeter without bumping into others or falling off at the turn.

On arriving back where the officer stood were were asked how we felt about that. Some felt OK, others said they felt ‘wobbly’ while yet others said it was difficult to avoid bumping into others and so on.

The officer then said he had his next challenge for us. He lined us up at one end of the court, and one-by-one, invited us to cycle to the other end of the court, following one of the lines painted on the court as a guide. He then emphasised that he’d be judging our performance by how well we kept our cycle on the line throughout the journey to the other end.

One-by-one we completed the task, with very few being able to keep their cycle on the line all the way – most of us simply veered from one side to the other for the whole journey – travelling so very slowly as we concentrated on the line in front of our wheel.

Assembled back again after that challenge we were again asked how we’d felt doing it. No-one felt confident, many argued it was too difficult.

This is when the office shared his ‘secret’ for doing it well. He told us we’d be doing the same thing again – but this time, instead of looking down at our front wheel as we tried to keep on the line, we were to fix our eyes on a spot in the distance beyond where the line stopped, and to keep cycling with our eyes on that spot. As each class member took their turn, the rest of us were asked to keep a close watch on the bike tyres to see how closely they stayed on the line (or not).

To begin we were clearly skeptical, with some of the class complaining that made it difficult for them to actually get started and know where the line ways. As each class member took their turn, however, the mood changed and we were amazed at how close to the line pretty much everyone was now able to travel.

The memory of that lesson has remained with me ever since – and I’ve used that strategy when teaching my own kids how to ride – and then my grand-kids. I’ve also used it as a metaphor in much of my work with school leaders to help explain the importance of having a vision and mission to guide you – the vision being the point beyond the end of the line, and the mission being to get there by staying on the line the whole way in the example of the cycling lesson.

Applying this to leadership

The key point to note in this story is that the office wasn’t trying to teach us how to ride a bike. Most of us know how to do that already. He was teaching us how to ride with direction and purpose.

There are some clear parallels in this story for how we approach leadership.

The line represents the pathway or mission that keeps us moving towards our destination, and the rider is the person or organisation making continual adjustments along the way. When we remain focused on the front wheel and the line we are concentrating on immediate performance. When we look to the horizon while riding we are more likely to maintain direction and purpose.

The important lesson we all learned that day, and the lesson for us as educators was looking at the line actually made it harder to stay on the line.

When organisations become so focused on what is immediately in front of them that they lose sight of where they’re actually going, and can so easily veer off course in terms of their vision and mission – just like we did as young riders. The ‘line’ we are being challenged to follow currently can be identified by listening to conversations we are having in staff-rooms and professional meetings – things like What do we need to implement? What does the Ministry require? Have we completed the documentation? Have our teachers been trained? Are we meeting the deadline? Have we ticked the box?

These are all legitimate concerns – but are all ‘front wheel’ questions. The more important question is; Is what we’re doing taking us towards the kind of learners – and the kind of society – we say we are preparing for?

Compliance with Direction

The problem isn’t about compliance – it’s about compliance without direction. In my cycling lesson metaphor above we were all asked to comply with a simple instruction – to follow the line, which we did, but without really focusing also on the direction we were headed. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the instruction – in fact, it is very helpful to be able to cycle in a straight line and avoid appearing unsteady on the road as it provides confidence for the other road users who we may pass or who may pass us!

My point here is that externally mandated change mustn’t be thought of as inherently bad. Some mandated changes may be worthwhile and necessary. The danger comes from when we blindly implement the change. An organisation can become very good at responding to whatever appears immediately in front of it while gradually drifting away from its own purpose.

This is something that is concerning me a lot at the current time when schools are faced with so much mandated change, and I see a lot of ‘front wheel’ thinking and acting taking place in response.

The purpose of vision

This is where a school’s vision becomes so important. Even more important when it has been co-constructed with the community and is owned by staff and embraced within the culture of the school.

It’s important to emphasise here that a vision shouldn’t simply describe a desirable future. It should orient decisions in the present. So when something new comes along – new policy, curriculum requirements, assessment expectations, technology, accountability measures, initiatives etc. – the question isn’t simply “How do we implement this?” It is: “How does this help us get closer to where we say we’re going?” That changes the role of vision from something purely aspirational to something that connects genuinely with the operational life of the school.

Which brings me to the role of leadership. Leadership is about keeping eyes on the horizon – and helping others do the same. A leader can’t continually steer an organisation by making every decision personally. The organisation needs a culture in which people at every level understand the destination well enough to make good decisions about the next step. That means that everyone in the school community needs to know where are we going? Why are we going there? What matters most along the way? How will we know whether we’re still on course? What should we do when something pulls us away from that direction?

The leader’s job isn’t to keep everyone’s front wheel perfectly aligned. It’s to make sure everyone knows what they’re riding towards.

On reflecting on my cycling lesson I need to acknowledge, however, that the line painted on the netball court was unusually simple. Real organisational journeys aren’t. There will be obstacles. Detours. Unexpected events. Changing circumstances. Sometimes the path itself needs to change. And that’s precisely why you need the horizon. If circumstances require you to leave the original line, you can still make intelligent decisions because you know where you’re trying to go. This is particularly relevant to education leaders operating in uncertainty as we appear to be currently.

Back to purpose

If schools say their purpose is to prepare young people for a future that is uncertain, complex and changing, what happens when the adults in those schools become entirely preoccupied with responding to today’s requirements? There is an inherent irony here – we can become so busy preparing students for the future that we lose sight of the future we’re preparing them for.

The danger isn’t that we fail to keep up with change. The danger is that we become so focused on keeping up with change that we forget what we’re changing for.

When I think of my cycle lesson experience, the traffic officer didn’t tell us to stop looking at the road. He taught us to look beyond the road while still attending to it. This applies to the work we do in schools. We can’t ignore the front wheel. Leaders still have to deal with the policies, requirements, deadlines, resources and practicalities immediately in front of them. But we shouldn’t confuse paying attention to the front wheel with knowing where we’re going.

As school leaders it is important to keep your eyes on the horizon. Make the adjustments you need to make. Stay attentive to the road beneath you. But never let the demands of the journey cause you to forget the destination. Otherwise you’ll end up like so many of my classmates on that day, wobbling all over the place, some falling off and very few reaching the other end having stayed on the line at all.

What can you do?

The challenge I’ve outlined above isn’t new, and is something that I’ve worked with many schools, school leaders and boards of trustees to address. Here are some practical ideas you might consider to ensure you are focused on the horizon, and not simply the front wheel:

Revisit your vision – not just your wording.
When was the last time your leadership team, staff, board and wider community genuinely talked about what your vision means for the decisions you are making today? Is it still the destination you are collectively heading towards, or has it become something displayed on walls and websites rather than used to guide action?
Put every major change through the “horizon test”.
When a new mandate, policy or initiative arrives, don’t begin only with “What do we have to do?” Ask also: “How does this take us towards our vision?”
And, importantly, “What might we need to stop, adapt or challenge if it doesn’t?”
Turn your vision into an operational tool.
Use it in staff meetings, professional learning, strategic planning, appraisal, board discussions and conversations about resourcing. Make the vision part of the questions you routinely ask rather than something you refer to occasionally.
Talk with your people about the horizon.
Ask staff, students, whānau and trustees:
What are we trying to achieve for our learners?
What does our vision ask of us in the way we teach and lead?
Are the changes currently occupying our attention helping us get there?
Where might we be in danger of losing sight of the destination?
Give people permission to keep looking up.
Perhaps this is the most important leadership task of all. In times of rapid change, people can become so absorbed in implementing what is immediately required that there is little time or permission to step back and ask whether it is taking the organisation in the right direction.

So, perhaps the challenge for school leaders right now isn’t simply to manage the changes coming at us. It is to keep our eyes on the horizon while doing so. Know what you’re being asked to do. Understand why it matters. Make the necessary adjustments. But continually ask: Is this taking us where we say we want to go? Because the purpose of leadership isn’t to keep everyone’s front wheel perfectly aligned. It’s to ensure that, together, we know where we’re heading.

Tags education purpose, strategic planning

An education for each

It’s not often I come across an education leader who is working in two different parts of the education system – but my guest in the latest episode of my series on Conversations on the Future of Education is one who does. For the past eight years he’s been Superintendent of the Eastern Hancock Schools District in Indiana , and for the past two years has also been CEO of the Indiana Micro-schools Collaborative, an initiative that he helped to found that is working across the state.

I first came to know Dr George Philhower eight years ago when I was working alongside a group of schools on a transformation project in North West Arkansas. George was also working alongside them as the project researcher, and was able to travel to New Zealand with many of the leaders from these schools when I hosted them on a tour of schools here. Since then we’ve kept in touch and I’ve had the privilege of visiting him in Indiana and spending time in the schools he’s responsible for, observing first hand the impact of his leadership approach and the things he shares in this podcast.

The overarching theme in our conversation focused on the need to shift from schools designed for the system to schools designed for the learner. As George said of his own approach as a district superintendent, he’s committed to ensuring “each kid gets to go to a school that feels like it was designed just for them.” The most provocative idea in the podcast came when George highlighted to the difference between a focus on ‘each‘ versus the focus on ‘all‘. We often talk about all learners succeeding, all learners achieving, all students getting the same opportunities. But perhaps the language of each forces us to confront individual experience, identity, strengths, interests, aspirations and needs.

George explained the ‘four promises’ that underpin the work of his teachers in the Eastern Hancock schools as an illustration of this principle. These are; Joy, Connection, Growth and Academic proficiency – you can hear him explain more of these in the podcast, but I was particularly interested in the first of these and his explanation of what that looks and feels like in the daily life of teachers and students at EH schools. I’ve actually had the opportunity to observe this first hand, so can vouch for what he’s discussing here. Put simply, George explained the focus on joy as focusing on providing students (and staff) with the emotional experiences that help anchor memory – giving this more depth than simply saying “learning should be fun.” When I challenged him on this he explicitly rejected the idea that joy means “play way” without learning. Joy becomes an anchor for memorable learning, while growth and academic proficiency provide the necessary rigour.

I was also very encouraged by his explanation of how he and his team are active in involving parents and the community in what happens at EHS. His CAFÉ strategy deliberately brings community partners into the educational work. The reason isn’t merely engagement with parents or community goodwill: it’s because the application and meaning of much of what students learn exists beyond the classroom. This is something I’m personally passionate about and have been helping a number of schools to work on in recent years as part of their strategic planning. For me it’s important that instead of simply asking “how can we involve the community more?’, we consider; “What happens when we stop thinking of community as something schools engage with and start thinking of community as part of where learning happens?“

When it came to discussing his involvement with the Indiana Micro-schools network, I was interested to understand his motivation for starting this up – and whether he saw this as something that could eventually replace the traditional state school. George acknowledged the tension between improving today’s schools and creating radically different ones. His conclusion isn’t “tear down the existing system.” Instead, he talks about the possibility of operating schools within schools – creating new models within existing structures and allowing them to develop and spread. His advice is “don’t try to transform the whole system at once. Create somewhere in the system where the future can be rehearsed.“

One of the issues with our current system that George raised is how excessive reliance on standardised measures, prescribed materials and predictable processes can actually de-professionalise teaching. He pointed to the numbers of good teachers who are leaving the profession in the US as an indicator of this. By contrast, the teachers in his micro-school model need to:

know learners deeply
assess where they are
determine what they need next
design learning experiences
monitor progress
adapt continually.

In other words, professional judgement comes back to the centre of teaching. This is certainly something that was reinforced for me in my own teacher training and during my time as a teacher and teacher educator, however, I agree with George, that the whole issue of teacher professional judgement appears to be under attack in the current education mileu.

As I reflect on this post I wonder if perhaps the future of schooling isn’t about finding a better version of the system we have, but creating the conditions for something more responsive to emerge – something that puts learners at the centre, restores teaching as a deeply professional endeavour, and allows different models to develop, learn and spread. That means improving the schools we have while simultaneously creating the schools we might need. And, above all, it means shifting our ambition from designing education for all to designing it for each. “All” is a system aspiration. “Each” is a human commitment.

Why not listen to the conversation yourself and hear more of what George has to say:

Access all of the episodes here

When the Technology Is Everywhere

The purpose of education isn’t to create young people who can behave well when the technology is removed. It is to develop young people who can behave wisely when the technology is everywhere.

That thought was prompted by a fascinating longitudinal study out of Finland I read about earlier in the week. Researchers followed 260 children for eight years, expecting to find evidence of the cognitive harm associated with rising screen use. What they found was rather different. Their research revealed children who reported greater cumulative screen time went on to show better cognitive processing as teenagers.

The researchers’ own explanation is the part that matters most, I think. Their best guess wasn’t that screens themselves are somehow beneficial – it was that the question “how many hours?” was the wrong one all along. What seems to count is what fills those hours. A child solving puzzles, building something in a game, or editing video is doing something very different with their attention and memory than one passively watching an autoplay feed – even though both would be logged, identically, as “screen time.”

However, that finding doesn’t prove screen time is good for children. The study is observational and relatively small, so it can’t establish that screen use caused the difference, and it doesn’t overturn the much larger – and genuinely mixed – body of research linking heavy or problematic screen use with poor sleep, low mood and reduced physical activity. The researchers themselves are careful about that.

But I think the study is valuable for another reason: it complicates a conversation that has become dangerously binary.

We have become accustomed to treating “screen time” as something inherently problematic – to be minimised, restricted, or eliminated. The Finnish research raises a deceptively simple question: what if screen time is a dangerously blunt measure?

Consider the difference between an hour spent:

scrolling social media
watching a stream of short-form video
playing a collaborative strategy game
researching a question
creating a digital story
analysing and representing data
collaborating with others
using AI to challenge and refine thinking

All of that sits in the same column labelled screen time. Educationally and developmentally, it’s worlds apart. The more useful question isn’t how much screen time, but what is happening during it. What’s the purpose? Who has agency? Is the technology enhancing the experience, or capturing attention? Is the young person creating, or consuming?

The urgency is real

None of this is an argument for complacency. This week the Government introduced its Online Safety Bill, proposing to ban under-16s from high-risk social media platforms – one expression of just how urgent this issue has become. Roughly one in three teenagers is reportedly spending five or more hours a day on social media. Concerns about sleep, wellbeing, bullying, body image and manipulative design aren’t moral panic; they’re well-founded, and they deserve a serious, urgent response – from government, from platforms, and from us as parents and educators. My recent podcast interview with Ray Finch confirms the reality of these risks in the lives of so many young people.

But there’s a difference between an age-verification law aimed at social media companies and a philosophy of digital education for schools. The first restricts access to a specific, high-risk category of platform, at a particular age. The second is about what we do, every day, with the eleven or twelve years young people already spend in our classrooms – before and after that threshold. We need both. But they answer different questions, and it would be a mistake to let the urgency of the first substitute for the harder, slower work of the second.

New Zealand’s restrictions on phones in schools are one sensible expression of that urgency. Increasingly, though, there are calls for schools to go further and eliminate digital devices from classrooms altogether. That’s where I think we need to slow down and ask a harder question:

What if, in our understandable desire to protect young people from the harms of technology, we inadvertently remove the opportunities they need to understand how this technology works, and learn how to use it well?

Prosper, prepare, protect

That tension – real urgency, but a different kind of work – is exactly what the Brookings Institution’s global task force on AI in education set out to resolve. Its Prosper, Prepare, Protect framework was built for AI specifically, but I think it holds for our whole approach to young people and technology.

Protect is the pillar most visible in the public conversation right now – age-verification laws, platform regulation, restrictions on phones in schools. It matters, and in many respects it’s overdue.

But Protect on its own isn’t enough. Prosper asks us to harness the genuine opportunities technology creates for learning – the Finnish study’s uncomfortable finding, that some kinds of screen time build rather than erode cognitive capacity, is a Prosper-shaped result. Prepare asks us to build capability – in students, teachers and families – so that protection doesn’t have to do all the work, forever.

A response built on Protect alone raises a generation that has been shielded from technology until the day the shielding stops. A response that holds all three together – protecting where protection is genuinely needed, preparing young people with the judgement to self-regulate, and harnessing technology where it can enrich learning – gives us something far more durable.

That’s the frame behind everything that follows.

A phone-free classroom isn’t a digitally-free classroom

There’s good reason for schools to want classrooms where students can concentrate, talk to one another, and learn without the constant pull of notifications. A phone-free classroom may be entirely sensible. But a digitally-free classroom is a very different proposition. Digital technologies aren’t simply another form of entertainment competing for attention – they are increasingly part of the cognitive, cultural and professional environment in which today’s young people will live and work.

If we respond to digital technology mainly by removing it, we may get calmer classrooms. That’s worthwhile. But we may also fail to develop young people who can regulate their own use, distinguish signal from noise, sustain attention in environments designed to capture it, use digital tools to create rather than merely consume, use AI critically, and know when to put the device down. These aren’t peripheral skills – they are increasingly fundamental capabilities for the world our young people are entering.

The goal shouldn’t be less technology. It should be better understanding and better technology use. That doesn’t mean a device in every lesson, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries. It means becoming far more intentional about when, why and how technology is used for learning – moving from treating it as something to be managed towards something that needs to be understood and learned.

The big issue here for me is responsibility. Personal responsibility of users, collective responsibility of the communities we are a part of and society as a whole to put in place the measures (educative and preventative) required to promote better use, and corporate responsibility of the creators and providers of these technologies (the platforms and environments) to ensure they are safe and have measures in place to reduce the harms associated with their use.

So what might that actually look like in a school?

1. Teach the difference between consuming and creating

Rather than asking whether students are using a device, ask what they’re doing with it. One useful test for teachers: if I removed the device, what learning would disappear? If the answer is “not much,” the device probably shouldn’t be there. If students couldn’t do the investigating, collaborating, creating or representing without it, its use is likely justified. The device isn’t the pedagogy – the learning intention is.

2. Teach attention – don’t simply protect students from distraction

If students never have to manage distraction because adults have removed every source of it, when do they learn to manage it? A teacher might build simple routines – device down for explanation, device up for research, two minutes device-free to think and discuss – and teach students why notifications, infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms are so effective at capturing attention. The goal isn’t pretending distraction doesn’t exist; it’s helping young people recognise it and develop strategies to manage it. That’s a more important form of digital literacy than simply knowing how to operate a tool.

3. Teach when technology enhances thinking – and when it replaces it

This matters especially in the age of AI. Give students the same task three ways – without technology, with technology, with AI – then ask not which was fastest or easiest, but which helped you think better? A useful principle: use technology when it amplifies human thinking, not when it substitutes for it. That’s a far more powerful lesson than simply telling students whether they’re allowed to use ChatGPT.

4. Build digital judgement into everyday learning

This doesn’t need to be a standalone “digital citizenship” programme. When students encounter information online, we can ask: Who created this, and why? What evidence supports it? What has the algorithm chosen to show me – and what hasn’t it shown me? Whose voice is missing? Is this an appropriate use of AI? What happens to the information I enter? When should I stop? These are fundamentally questions of critical thinking, ethical judgement and agency. Digital technology simply provides the context in which they matter more than ever.

5. Teach students how to put the technology down

Perhaps the most important lesson of all. The mature response to technology isn’t “I can use this whenever I want.” It is: “I can decide when using this is helpful – and when it isn’t.” Schools can build device-free moments alongside purposeful digital ones: read without a screen, think before searching, talk before typing, write before asking AI, go outside, make something with your hands. These aren’t anti-technology practices. They are technology self-management.

But teachers need to learn this too

We cannot expect teachers to teach what they have never had the opportunity to learn themselves. This isn’t about blaming teachers for their own technology habits, or reviving the tired idea of “digital natives” teaching “digital immigrants”. The real question is whether we have built the professional capability to understand how digital technologies affect learning, attention and behaviour – and to design learning that uses technology deliberately rather than habitually. There’s an important difference between digital competence and digital pedagogy: a teacher can be highly competent with a Chromebook, Google Classroom or an AI tool without understanding when it improves learning and when it gets in the way.

Schools need to create space for teachers to experiment, inquire and learn together – contrasting digital and non-digital approaches, gathering student feedback, sharing what they discover. That shifts the conversation from “should we allow devices?” to “under what conditions does technology improve learning?” – a much richer professional question.

And schools can’t do this alone

School is only one environment in which young people learn their relationship with technology. They’re learning it at home, with friends, through gaming, social media and increasingly through AI. Parents are navigating the same challenges as teachers, often without the professional knowledge, collective support or time that schools have.

Telling parents “don’t worry, we’ve banned phones at school” doesn’t solve the problem. What happens before school, after school, during the holidays – and what happens when young people leave school and nobody is standing beside them saying, “put your phone away”?

Schools have an opportunity to work alongside parents on a shared understanding of healthy, purposeful technology use – device-free times and spaces, sleep and notifications, passive consumption versus active creation, social media and online relationships, AI and learning, setting boundaries without making technology a constant source of conflict, and – perhaps most importantly – modelling the behaviours we want young people to develop. Rather than telling parents how to manage technology, schools can become partners with families in navigating something none of us has completely figured out yet.

This is where personal and collective responsibility meet – and where Prosper, Prepare and Protect need each other. Government’s role leans toward Protect: age-verification law, platform accountability, urgent action for those most at risk. Schools’ role leans toward Prepare: building judgement, not just compliance. Families sit across all three – protecting, preparing, and helping young people prosper by modelling thoughtful use themselves. None of these substitutes for the others. A social media ban that isn’t matched by a generation of young people who have learned to regulate their own attention will simply push the same problem two years down the road, to the day the ban lifts.

From managing devices to developing digital agency

None of this diminishes the legitimate concerns about technology. There are times when the right answer is to put the device away. There are environments where access needs to be restricted, technologies and forms of use that are genuinely harmful, and children who need particular protection and support.

But prohibition cannot be the endpoint of digital education. Eventually, students leave school – and turn 16, and leave home. There will be nobody standing beside them regulating their notifications, filtering their feeds, or deciding whether they should use AI. They will have to do it themselves.

That is why I keep coming back to the distinction between removing technology and learning to live with technology. We cannot build a digitally healthy generation simply by removing digital devices from young people’s lives. Nor can we assume that unrestricted access will somehow teach them to use technology wisely. The work of education lies somewhere between the two: creating the knowledge, habits, judgement and agency that enable young people to flourish in a world where technology will only become more present, not less.

The purpose of education isn’t to create young people who can behave well when the technology is removed.

It is to develop young people who can behave wisely when the technology is everywhere.

If we remove every opportunity for young people to practise self-regulation, discernment and purposeful technology use while they are at school, when – and where – do we expect them to learn it?

The conversation yet to come

This morning I sat down with A Vision for Education in Aotearoa New Zealand, the report Dr Claire Coleman has written on behalf of the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective, a group that has been relentlessly defending the work of the profession and our system for some time now. At the outset I want to say that this is thoughtful, generous work. Five well-evidenced ambitions (a bicultural curriculum, equity of outcomes, a broadened curriculum, a re-professionalised teaching workforce, a wider public understanding of education’s value) bound together by a genuine commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to education as a public good. It’s the kind of document a fractured, exhausted sector needs. Something to point to instead of the next policy swing.

After reading it through, however, I found myself ponder further on a question that had already been put to me a few hours earlier this morning in a conversation with the education lead of a mātauranga iwi leaders group. She’d been telling me how, in the conversations happening inside Māori education circles, they keep arriving back at the same place: not “how do we fix this part of the system” or “how do we support that one” – but what is school actually for? This is the question underneath every other question. And it’s the question that for me, begins the process of vision-building.

I’m not sure that question gets asked in this report. And I think its absence is worth sitting with, respectfully, because I suspect the writer of the report and those in the AEC already know it.

What the report says it is

Coleman is careful about what she’s offering. She describes taking “a system-wide view, exploring how these elements work together to support meaningful learning and improved outcomes for all learners,” and providing “a values base for our education system” that “draws a connection between values and practice.” That’s precise language, and I want to take it at face value rather than argue with a grander claim she never actually made.

Connecting values to practice is important and necessary work. But notice what it would seem to propose: that the values are settled, and what remains is to align practice to them. A vision, I’d argue, has to do something prior to that – it has to ask where the values came from, whose worldview shaped them, and whether the structures we’ve inherited can actually hold them. This report, by its own description, begins one step downstream of that question. It’s a strategic response to a settled set of commitments, beautifully executed – but not proposing a deeper examination of them.

I suspect part of what I’m circling is two different senses of the word “vision” itself. The report’s sense is a well-composed statement or picture of what needs to be addressed, and how the pieces fit together once addressed. When I think of vision I think of a point on the horizon – a north star, something that orients and pulls us forward rather than something that resolves the view we already have. A picture can be accurate and still be a picture of the present, rearranged. A horizon asks us to work out which direction we’re walking in before we start rearranging anything.

The report already told us where the gap is

Here’s what struck me most, and what makes this feel less like a criticism than a continuation. Coleman explicitly states that she is writing as tangata Tiriti. She also says, in a manner I respect, that meaningful partnership with tangata whenua “could not be achieved within the time frame allocated for producing this report” – that the findings here will likely be “built on, or refined, through those meaningful partnership conversations still to come.”

That’s an honest disclosure, not a hidden flaw. My point isn’t that she should have found more time. It’s that the report’s architecture treats that partnership conversation as what happens after the vision – a refinement to follow – when what my conversation this morning keeps suggesting is that it has to be what the vision stands on – not just for Māori but for tangata Tiriti as well. Until that conversation has happened, in full, what we have is a very well-made scaffold with the foundation still to be poured.

The last chapter falls short

When I came to the final section – “Building shared understanding of education” I was expecting it might be the piece that does this deeper work, simply located to the wrong place in the sequence. Reading it closely however, I don’t think that’s quite right either, and the distinction matters. That chapter is about growing public and community understanding of education’s value once its purpose is settled – communication, engagement, whānau and community voice shaping how a shared conception gets enacted. It’s good and necessary work. But it isn’t an interrogation of purpose itself. It assumes the “why” and builds outward from there.

So this isn’t simply a case of “move chapter six to the front.” Even moved first, chapter six wouldn’t yet ask the question that keeps surfacing in Māori education Kaupapa as well as non-Māori contexts. That question is not “how do we help people understand and support this vision of school?”, but whether the fundamental design of school, the beliefs that underpin this and the ideologies that have built it as we’ve inherited it is the right vessel for the purpose we’re claiming for it at all – and then, how do we create a vision of what school could or should be?

The report already knows how to ask this

What gives me confidence this isn’t an unreasonable ask is that the report does this kind of work already, in its equity chapter. It states outright that “addressing inequity therefore requires more than improving access to existing educational structures; it requires re-examining those structures themselves,” and it lists exactly the right questions: “whose knowledge is treated as valid, whose voices shape decisions, how success is defined, where responsibility for change is located.”

That’s the deeper conversation I’m asking for – applied, in this report, to outcomes within the system. My question is why that same rigour isn’t turned on the architecture of schooling itself, across all five ambitions, rather than reserved for the gaps it produces. If we ask who decided what counts as knowledge inside the curriculum, we should also be willing to ask who decided that a curriculum, delivered this way, in institutions built this way, is the right response at all. Otherwise we risk doing exactly what the equity chapter warns against elsewhere: improving access to a structure without re-examining the structure. Band-aids, however well-designed, on a wound whose cause we haven’t named.

Where this connects to a longer thread

I’ve been circling this from another angle in my series on why schools lose the capacity to learn and my most recent post on the competing ideologies shaping our classrooms. The pull between education as knowing (control, performance, compliance) and education as becoming (trust, purpose, possibility) is an example of what happens when there is lack of focus on the purpose of education. That post wasn’t meant as a binary choice, and neither is this one. But I think the two pieces are asking the same underlying question in different registers: before we can decide how to measure, structure, or resource learning, we have to be honest about which story of learning – and whose story of what school is for – we’re building from. You can’t align practice to values you haven’t yet dug deep enough to understand.

An invitation, not a verdict

And so I applaud the AEC for producing such a document and recommend it be read by educators across the motu. Coleman calls this report “a contribution to an ongoing conversation about the future of education in Aotearoa New Zealand.” I think this is exactly right – because it points to what comes next. The conversation she names as still to come, the one with tangata whenua that time didn’t allow, the one with numerous communities around the country and the one with system leaders and policy writers in central government. This conversation shouldn’t sit downstream of our vision for education and schooling as a later refinement. It has the better claim to being its foundation. I’m not intending this as a criticism of what’s been written here. It’s a recognition that this document, done with such care, has done us the service of showing us precisely where the next, harder work begins.

Download the AEC report here

From my blog:

The ideologies shaping our classrooms

Much of my work over the past few years has been in support of school leadership teams and boards of trustees as they review and develop their strategic plans. Typically, this involves a process of seeking feedback from students, teachers and parents/whānau as we work together to review the school’s vision and values and the beliefs that underpin these to ensure there is alignment of thinking in terms of the decisions we make. While this process has always provided an opportunity to identify and work with the diversity of views that people bring to the table, in recent years I’ve found this to be an increasingly challenging thing to do well – significantly because of how entrenched some of these beliefs about learning and the purpose of education are that emerge from these discussions. This seems particularly true at the moment as we face an increasing level of mandated change in our education system, much of which challenges the underlying beliefs and assumptions of many educators and their communities. In this post I thought I’d share some thoughts about this tension and what we can do to address it.

What do we believe learning is ultimately for?

This question is fundamental to all of the debates we have in education a the moment, and links strongly to my previous series of posts on Why Schools Lose Their Capacity to Learn.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s educational history is really a succession of overlapping answers to three questions:

What is worth knowing?
What kind of person should schooling produce?
What kind of society and economy should schooling serve?

We’ve moved, over the decades, from asking what learners should know, to asking what they should be able to do, to asking who they might become. But no era has ever fully replaced the one before it. I believe that contemporary education has to hold all three questions at once – and that’s precisely why the system feels so contested right now.

Schools are already living with competing ideologies

Walk into almost any staffroom, curriculum meeting or ERO review and you’ll find several ideologies operating simultaneously, often unacknowledged and sometimes in open tension:

a liberal expectation that students become responsible, informed citizens;
a scholar-academic expectation that they master disciplinary knowledge;
a progressive commitment to inquiry, experience and the interests of the learner;
a social-efficiency demand for measurable progress and qualifications;
a constructivist view of learners as active meaning-makers;
a relational and culturally responsive commitment to identity, belonging and community;
a neoliberal or managerial pressure to demonstrate performance through data.

None of these is new, and none of them is going away. What’s changed is the balance of power between them – and right now, two are pulling hardest against each other.

The fault line: knowing versus becoming

Strip away the jargon and the current tension in our system comes down to a single, deceptively simple contrast – one I’ve attempted to sketch out in the illustration below that contrasts Learning as Knowing against Learning as Becoming.

This image shows two ideologies, side by side: the Knowing classroom optimised for control, performance and compliance; the Becoming classroom optimised for trust, purpose and possibility. Most schools live somewhere between the two – the question is which one is currently winning.

Learning as Knowing treats knowledge as the primary product of education. Success is what you can recall and reproduce. Intelligence is conceived largely in academic and cognitive terms. Curriculum is something to be covered. The learner is, to a significant degree, a recipient. Its risk is inert knowledge – content transmitted but never metabolised – and it leaves an uncomfortable question hanging: who authorises the knowledge of the school?

Learning as Becoming treats knowledge as a means to human development and possibility. Success is what you can do, create, contribute and become. Intelligence is understood holistically. Curriculum is something to be experienced, explored and applied. The learner is an active agent in their own development. Its risk is the mirror image of the first – vague capability or identity-talk untethered from any real knowledge – and it carries its own hard question: whose values, history and knowledge inform this vision, and whose future is it building toward?

Put visually, the contrast sharpens further: one side organised around control, performance and compliance – timetables, test scores, report cards, a teacher at the front converting facts into grades; the other organised around trust, purpose and possibility – collaborative, holistic, oriented toward wellbeing and belonging as much as achievement.

It’s a genuinely useful distinction. It’s also, I want to be careful to say, a caricature if left there.

Learning as knowing and becoming

The temptation, once you’ve drawn a contrast this clean, is to pick a side. We must resist that. “Learning as knowing” and “learning as becoming” are best treated as ideal types – useful for diagnosis, dangerous as a menu. The enduring truth is that becoming always requires something to become through: knowledge, practices, relationships, languages, histories, participation. Strip knowledge out in pursuit of capability and dispositions, and you’re left with confidence built on nothing. Strip becoming out in pursuit of coverage and measurement, and you’re left with content that never becomes anyone’s own.

This is where I think the strongest position sits – not as a compromise, but as a genuine synthesis: learning as knowing-and-becoming. Learners become through knowing, and what they know is transformed by how they participate, interpret and act. That formulation avoids two reductions at once. It refuses to treat education as the delivery of decontextualised content. But it equally refuses to treat learning as a set of dispositions, competencies or identities that can be developed independently of powerful knowledge.

Why this matters for the assessment conversation right now

This isn’t an abstract argument. It’s the argument sitting underneath a very live conversation I’ve been found myself having with colleagues recently: are we measuring what’s important?

It’s worth being clear here that assessment never moves alone – it’s one point in a curriculum–pedagogy–assessment nexus, and none of the three can really be understood in isolation from the other two. Right now in Aotearoa New Zealand, all three are shifting together: a more tightly specified, knowledge-rich curriculum; a pedagogical push toward explicit teaching, with structured, time-boxed instruction (an hour a day) mandated for foundational literacy and numeracy; and a move toward standards-based assessment to check whether it’s landing. Taken as a package, this is a coherent, deliberate Learning-as-Knowing response to a real and legitimate concern – that too much was left implicit, too much depended on which school or which teacher you happened to get, and too little was actually being checked. That’s a fair critique of a system that had drifted too far toward Becoming without enough scaffolding underneath it.

But a nexus that tightens in the same direction on all three fronts is exactly where the risk of reduction is greatest – and assessment is where it bites hardest, because assessment is what ultimately defines “success” for everyone in the system. If what gets measured is only what’s easiest to test – recall, procedural fluency, coverage – then curriculum specification and explicit pedagogy, however well-intentioned, will quietly narrow to serve that measure. We’ll have specified the knowledge beautifully, taught it explicitly and consistently, and still failed to ask whether learners can do anything with it, become anything through it, or see themselves and their communities reflected in it. Measuring only the Knowing side of the ledger doesn’t just under-value Becoming – over time it erodes the very engagement and sense of purpose that makes deep knowledge stick in the first place.

The task in front of the sector isn’t to pick knowing or becoming, and it certainly isn’t to let an assessment regime built for one silently pull curriculum and pedagogy intentions built for both back toward it. It’s to ask, of every assessment decision: does this let us see knowing and becoming – content mastered and what it enabled a learner to do, create, contribute and become? If the answer is no, we’re not measuring what’s important. We’re just measuring what’s convenient.

Call to action

None of this gets resolved by a blog post – it gets tested in practice, in the daily decisions teachers and leaders make about what to teach, how to teach it, and what counts as evidence that it’s worked. If you’re using this as a starting point for a PD session or a professional inquiry, here are some questions worth putting on the table.

For teachers, on practice:

When I look at what I actually spend assessment time on, is it weighted toward what’s easy to check, or what’s important?
Where in my programme does a learner get to show what they can do, create or contribute – not just what they can recall?
Is there a foundational skill I teach explicitly that learners never get to apply to something that matters to them? What would it take to close that gap?
If a learner from my class could only be judged on one piece of evidence from this term, would it show knowing, becoming, or both?

For leaders, on system and culture:

Look across our school’s assessment schedule – does it, as a whole, make becoming visible, or only knowing?
Where are curriculum, pedagogy and assessment pulling in the same direction in our school, and where are they quietly working against each other?
What message are we sending – through timetabling, reporting formats, or what we celebrate – about which ideology we actually value, regardless of what our documents say?
If an ERO reviewer, a parent and a Year 9 student each described “success” at our school, would their answers agree?

For both, together:

What would we have to stop measuring, or start measuring, to genuinely capture knowing-and-becoming rather than one at the expense of the other?
Whose knowledge, values and vision of the future are embedded in what we currently teach and test – and whose are missing?

These aren’t questions with tidy answers. But asking them together, as a staff, is a reasonable place to start putting knowing-and-becoming into practice rather than leaving it as an idea on a page.

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

Applying this to leadership

Compliance with Direction

The purpose of vision

Back to purpose

What can you do?

Futuremakers Newsletter

Futuremakers Newsletter

The urgency is real

Prosper, prepare, protect

A phone-free classroom isn’t a digitally-free classroom

1. Teach the difference between consuming and creating

2. Teach attention – don’t simply protect students from distraction

3. Teach when technology enhances thinking – and when it replaces it

4. Build digital judgement into everyday learning

5. Teach students how to put the technology down

But teachers need to learn this too

And schools can’t do this alone

From managing devices to developing digital agency

Further reading:

Futuremakers Newsletter

What the report says it is

The report already told us where the gap is

The last chapter falls short

The report already knows how to ask this

Where this connects to a longer thread

An invitation, not a verdict

Read more:

Futuremakers Newsletter

What do we believe learning is ultimately for?

Schools are already living with competing ideologies

The fault line: knowing versus becoming

Learning as knowing and becoming

Why this matters for the assessment conversation right now

Call to action

Further reading

Futuremakers Newsletter

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

What others say

Resources

Services