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.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

System Persistence

This post is taken from some thinking I’ve been doing as I begin to construct my next ‘thought piece’. The motivation comes from reflecting on many years of effort in our education system to address many systemic issues that create pressure on schools, educators – and ultimately impact on the quality of educational experience of our tāmariki. As I’ve been working again in schools as yet another school year begins and witness the anxiety, confusion and frustration being expressed in so many places, I’ve been pondering again the challenge of the ‘revolution vs evolution’ argument re system change, and the extent to which system persistence represents a significant barrier to meaningful education reform.

Beyond Reform: The Case for Transformation

Our education system is not broken – it is functioning exactly as it was designed. This is precisely the problem. Created in an industrial era to produce standardised outcomes, sort learners into predetermined categories, and maintain existing social structures, the system continues to fulfil its original purpose with ruthless efficiency. The issue is not that the system needs improvement or reform – it needs complete transformation.

When we frame the challenge as one of “reform” or “improvement,” we perpetuate the fundamental misconception that the current system’s basic premises are sound. We cannot simply enhance a system designed for a bygone era with different societal needs, values, and understanding of human potential.

The Current Reality

Our education system stands at a critical juncture. Despite promises of reform and declarations of intent to create an inclusive, learner-centred system, we remain tethered to outdated paradigms that fail our tamariki and rangatahi. The statistics tell a stark story, particularly for Māori and Pasifika youth, whose disproportionate rates of academic failure, depression and suicide attempts reveal the human cost of our systematic shortcomings.

When you consider the current changes in education being made in New Zealand – and around the world – they reflect the ‘reform and improvement’ mindset, rather than transformation (with a few significant exceptions). Concerns about falling literacy and numeracy rates are being addressed by initiatives aimed at improving the way maths and reading are taught – and assessed. Solutions for poor attendance are seen as involving a range of measures to get students back to school, and difficulties with attracting and retaining suitably qualified teachers are being addressed through lowering entry standards and time for training. We continue to seek improvement without seriously challenging many of the assumptions upon which our current system is based.

Learning from Past Reform Efforts

The history of education reform in recent years in Aotearoa New Zealand provides compelling evidence for why transformation, rather than reform, is essential. Consider these examples:

Initiative	What was Promised	Shortcomings
Tomorrow’s Schools (1989)	Increased local autonomy and community involvement in school governance Improved educational opportunities and achievement for disadvantaged groups, particularly Māori children and those from low-income homes More efficient and less bureaucratic administration of schools Enhanced home-school partnerships Better targeted resource allocation to schools	Greater competition Wide variability in performance both between and within schools Widened gaps between communities – greater inequities Increased administrative burden Uneven outcomes between schools over time Reinvention of the wheel in many schools without overall system improvement
NZ Curriculum (2007)	A vision for young people as lifelong learners who are confident, creative, connected, and actively involved A curriculum that reflects New Zealand’s cultural diversity and values the histories and traditions of all its people Capabilities alongside content Flexibility for local contexts “Learner-centred” pedagogy	Emphasis on the ‘back half’ only Achievement objectives dominate planning Significant reduction in prescribed content compared to previous curricula, potentially leading to knowledge gaps Overemphasis on preparing students for workplaces at the expense of broader educational goals Concerns about a decline in academic achievement and persistent disparities between advantaged and disadvantaged students
Kahui Ako (Communities of Learning)	Develop collective responses to local challenges Build professional capability through collaboration Focus on student achievement challenges Create pathways across education levels Enable smoother transitions for learners between schools	Achievement challenges often became compliance exercises Leadership roles sometimes created tension within and between schools Bureaucratic requirements overshadowed genuine collaboration Time and resource constraints limited meaningful engagement Artificial groupings that didn’t always reflect natural communities Funding model reinforced hierarchical rather than collaborative relationships
Ka Hikitia	Māori achieving success as Māori Building cultural responsiveness System-wide change for equity	Focus on activities rather than deep change Limited impact of core teaching practices Overburdened Māori staff – system barriers
NCEA	Recognition of diverse forms of learning Promoting lifelong learning competencies Recognising success as progression	Schools continued to translate achievement standards into traditional numerical grades The focus shifted to credit accumulation rather than genuine learning progression Assessment became more granular and bureaucratic, rather than holistic The system’s flexibility became viewed as a weakness rather than a strength Its potential for recognising diverse forms of achievement was largely unrealised
Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs)	Fostering creativity, collaboration and student-centred learning Intentional linking of pedagogy and space	Adoption of physical changes without transforming pedagogical approaches Teachers were expected to work in new spaces without adequate professional development in new ways of teaching Traditional timetabling, curriculum delivery, and assessment practices remained unchanged Tension between innovative spaces and conventional practices leading to frustration and calls to return to single-cell classrooms
Modern Learning Practice (MLP)	Learner-centred approaches Project/problem-based learning Digital integration, collaborative teaching Flexible learning pathways	Technology being used to replicate traditional practices Collaborative teaching hindered by traditional timetabling Assessment requirements limiting innovation Professional development not matching ambition Parent resistance to unfamiliar approaches
National Standards (2010 – 2017)	Clear expectations of achievement Better information for parents and whānau Earlier identification of learning needs Ability to target resourcing to areas of need based on data	A narrowed curriculum focus Increased testing and labelling Contradictions with NZ Curriculum’s flexibility Creating artificial benchmarks Damaging student confidence and motivation

As illustrated in the table above, each of these large-scale, system-change initiatives has been introduced with the best of intentions, with promises made of delivering positive change that addresses identified areas of need that will ultimately benefit the learners we are seeking to serve. The column titled ‘shortcomings’ illustrates that, despite these best intentions, and the fact that there are unquestioningly many benefits that have been gained from them, the scale of impact that may have been achieved has not been fully realised – certainly not in a sustainable manner.

Structural Persistence

A key reason for these shortcomings existing is the issue of structural persistence – the deep-rooted tendency of educational institutions and broader educational systems to maintain their fundamental structures despite reform efforts.

At the school level, this manifests through the unwavering adherence to traditional organisational elements that have defined schools for generations. The rigid timetable structure, with its fixed periods and subject-based divisions, continues to dictate the rhythm of learning, leaving little room for more flexible, integrated approaches. Similarly, the classification of students by age into year levels persists, even when evidence suggests that ability-based or mixed-age groupings might better serve learning needs.

Equally significant are the system-wide structures that resist change: standardised funding models that perpetuate resource inequities, inflexible teacher accreditation systems that may not recognise diverse forms of expertise or emerging pedagogical approaches, and policy frameworks that struggle to adapt to rapidly evolving societal needs and technological possibilities. These entrenched structures at both levels – institutional and systemic – create a complex web of resistance to meaningful change.

Traditional approaches to assessment represent another critical aspect of system persistence. Despite calls for more authentic evaluation approaches, standardised testing and summative assessments continue to dominate educational practice. These assessment structures often drive teaching methodologies backward, encouraging educators to “teach to the test” rather than embrace innovative pedagogical approaches. This assessment-driven culture reinforces conventional teaching methods and can stifle attempts to implement more progressive, student-centred learning experiences.

Perhaps most significantly, system persistence manifests in the maintenance of existing power relationships within educational institutions. Traditional hierarchies between officials, leaders, teachers, and students remain largely unchanged, with decision-making power concentrated at the top. This power structure can resist bottom-up innovation and limit the agency of both teachers and students in shaping their educational experience. When combined with entrenched structural practices, these power dynamics create a self-reinforcing system that naturally resists substantial change.

Where to from here?

Over the next few weeks I intend to continue exploring this thinking and in my next post I’ll write about three more things I see as contributing to reform failure: (a) Implementation gaps, (b) cultural resistance and (c) system contradictions. I’m also building a set of ideas and actions that may be useful for people at any level of our education system to become more thoughtful about the need for transformation in the work they do.

In this post I’ve attempted to develop a compelling argument for transformation over reform in education, highlighting the persistent structures and shortcomings of past initiatives. Here are some questions you might like to ponder and discuss with your colleagues as you think about what I’ve written…

“In what ways might the deeply ingrained power dynamics within educational institutions – from national agencies to classrooms – be the most significant barrier to transformative change? What strategies can be employed to redistribute decision-making power and empower teachers and students to shape their educational experiences more fully?”
“Given the history of well-intentioned but ultimately limited reforms in Aotearoa New Zealand, how can educators and policymakers move beyond incremental changes to address the core structural issues that perpetuate inequities – in particular for Māori and Pasifika youth?”
“Reflecting on the persistence of traditional structures like rigid timetables and age-based groupings in schools, what innovative, practical steps can you take in your context to foster more flexible, learner-centred environments within the existing system, even while advocating for broader systemic change?”

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

Leading for Transformation

One of the amazing things was how well this group from across a range of sectors and experience levels in leadership just came together and supported each other a grew together.
2024 Programme Participant

Around this time last year I caught up with friend and colleague, Maurie Abraham, who had recently retired after 11 years as foundation principal at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. Maurie was keen to canvas some thoughts on how he might work with a small group of principals who were keen to engage with him now that he’d retired, to learn more about how they might develop further in their leadership journey.

During our conversation we discussed how principals have access to a wide range of professional learning opportunities that fall broadly into the following areas of focus:

Maintaining – Developing the ‘mechanics’ of principalship – understanding their role as leaders of organisations. Equipping them with the knowledge and skills required to function as a leader in the school as it exists, ensuring they can manage and sustain current practices that focus on providing a quality education experience for their students. These programmes assume the system is operating effectively and focus on inducting leaders into understanding how to sustain it.
Improving – Recognising the need to make changes that address areas of weakness or concern in what is happening (e.g, student motivation and engagement, achievement in identified areas, attendance, the capability of staff etc.) and introducing specific strategies to change/lift performance and monitor outcomes. These programmes operate on the assumption that the current organisational structures are fit for purpose, but that there are areas where the school system should or could be adapted, modified or improved to deliver on better outcomes for all learners.
Transforming – Questioning the systemic factors that shape how schools operate, and unpacking the reason and purpose behind these things. Involves connecting with the ‘why’ behind what is being done currently and being prepared to challenge and change these things. Recognising that simply improving things won’t achieve the systemic change required to achieve an equitable, future-focused approach to teaching and learning for all. These programmes require a high level of commitment, buy-in and trust and support for pushing the boundaries to make change happen.

The image below provides a more simplified way of thinking about this relationship…

Maurie and I agree that there is value in all three of these approaches, but that while there are many opportunities available for school leaders to engage in the first two types of professional learning – there are far fewer in the third, and that of these, few are designed to fully support the transformation actually happening back in schools. This is because such change initiatives will inevitably encounter all sorts of roadblocks and challenges, causing leaders to loop back to the things addressed in the ‘maintaining’ or ‘improving’ approaches.

We talked about the approach that would be most appropriate for achieving the sort of transformational change that we were discussing I referred to the research-based principles I’ve referenced previously in which I identified following four characteristics of effective professional development:

It is in-depth

It is sustained over time

It is related to practice

It is contextually relevant

With these principles in mind, we set about designing an experience for school leaders with a vision for transformation within their school and the education system. As we explored this further we agreed that whatever we did needed to address the needs of participants at three levels:

Changing themselves – helping participants understand what motivates and drives them as a leader, the beliefs that shape their practice and the strategies they have to care for self in the midst of a challenging and demanding role.
Changing others – learning how to build trust so that others will be motivated to engage with and contribute to the change. Providing support for individuals while building a sense of collective ownership around an agreed direction and purpose.
Changing the environment – developing a ‘system mindset’ – understanding the school as a system and as part of a wider system, and the ‘connectedness’ between various parts of the system. Understanding how change made in one area will inevitably impact other areas.

(Astute readers will recognise this framework from our Agency By Design playbook)

And so the foundation for a programme we’ve called “Refresh, Reconnect, Refocus” was laid, and over the next few weeks we worked to design the elements of the programme and advertise it among our networks to see if we might find a group of principals willing to participate. The rest is history – the initial programme began with a retreat held at Hanmer Springs in March of this year, concluding with a day of celebration in July where participants were able to share the changes they’d achieved in their local contexts.

The programme we designed, as described on our web page, was spread over a period of 20 weeks, beginning with the retreat where relationships were formed, key themes and ideas explored, and tools to guide further action introduced. Over the following 20 weeks participants were involved in regular one-on-one coaching sessions with Maurie and I, ongoing contact with a participant ‘buddy’, and periodic group sessions where they could engage with international experts in different aspects of educational transformation. The programme concluded with the ‘celebration’ event where each participant shared what had been achieved in their personal context.

Sarah Martin was one of the participants in our 2024 cohort. Sarah has been principal at Stonefields School in Auckland for more than a decade, and she had this to say about her experience of the programme and how these elements wove together to help shift her practice and thinking as a school leader:

Much of what Sarah says here is captured by the feedback received by another of our participants in this year’s programme:

“It’s not often that you will find a professional learning programme that reignites your leadership fire for education! As well as being supported and encouraged throughout the six months; I feel like I have had an over-qualified cheerleader working alongside me! This programme offers all the good stuff: a retreat but guilt-free workshop, a new network, practical and tested ideas for leadership, future of education insights, 1:1 coaching, ongoing peer support and bite size professional learning invites – all with just the right amount for busy Principals to engage with.“

Weaving all of these things together to provide the right balance of personal reflection and growth alongside developing the capacity and capability to lead change lay at the heart of our programme design, and lies behind choosing the name ‘Refresh, Reconnect, Refocus“.

As we suspected, the importance of maintaining a purposeful, supportive connection with and between participants during the 20-week period proved to be a key element of the programme. This is highlighted well in the feedback from another 2024 participant, Dyane Stokes who is at the start of her principalship journey at Paparoa Street School in Christchurch:

Each of these participant views highlight the success, for them, of the programme design and how this has helped them in their personal and professional motivation to achieve the goals they have for their schools, their staff and their students – and for themselves as leaders.

Throughout the process Maurie and I emphasised the importance for participants to think of themselves as system leaders, rather than simply leaders of an organisation. While it is both inevitable and important that attention is given to addressing the everyday and often urgent matters that face leaders within the organisational context of a school, to be effective as a transformational leader you need also to sustain a broader scan of the education environment, and be skilled at understanding and managing the complexity of relationships that exist within the learning ecosystem.

Would you like to be involved?

Now that we’ve crafted a successful programme design, Maurie and I are offering this opportunity to fresh cohorts in 2025. Next year we’ll be offering a repeat of the programme for principals beginning with a retreat at Hanmer Springs from 13-15 March.

In response to numerous requests from a number of people, we’re also offering a modified version of the programme to specifically address the needs of AP/DPs, beginning with a two-day hui in Wellington on 23-24 January.

In addition, we’re working with the Lutheran Schools Network in Australia to co-construct a variation of the programme for a mixed group of principals and senior leaders in Melbourne, starting in April.

One of the key benefits of these programmes is the level of personal attention you will receive. We have deliberately designed for smaller cohorts of around 20 participants, so that there is a greater degree of intimacy and personal connection in the experience.

If this sounds like you please click on the image below to take you to a page where you can find additional information and links to the registration forms. I encourage you to share this post with anyone in your network that you think may benefit from being a part of a programme to support them in becoming a leader of transformation in their school or context.

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

Looking for more ambition in 2024!

Photo by Leif Christoph Gottwald on Unsplash
Rocket image: https://www.needpix.com/photo/174049/

“There’s no definite roadmap for a successful moonshot; the path is littered with obstacles and failure. It takes passion, grit, luck and sometimes a decade or more of hard work to see a moonshot materialise, much less succeed.”
Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur, futurist, technologist, New York Times Bestselling Author

I was at secondary school when the Apollo 11 mission made a successful moon landing. I was one of those completely caught up in the wonder of that event – I still have the scrapbook I kept of every newspaper clipping I could lay my hands on at the time! 1300 of us gathered in the school assembly hall and sat in silence for almost three hours, listening to the broadcast on a single speaker that had been set up on the stage. (Yes, no live-stream TV in those days – in fact, no colour TV even, we watched the fuzzy, black and white images a day or two later!)

That was 1969! Just a few years earlier, in 1962, US President, John F. Kennedy, planted the seeds of a dream when he declared “We choose to go to the moon this decade.” At the time this must have seemed near impossible to many, yet it inspired a nation to believe – and to act. The president didn’t say precisely how it was going to happen – he simply set a timeframe for something ambitious, something incredible to happen. It was his ‘moonshot’ moment.

Decades later this concept has become known as ‘moonshot thinking’, when you choose a huge problem, such as climate change, and propose to create a radical solution to the problem using a disruptive technology.

I reckon we could do with some ‘moonshot thinking’ in education at present. There’s no shortage of huge challenges facing us, but there is a distinct lack of any ambition in the solutions being proposed. Mostly we see the same old ideas being re-cycled like the re-runs of Home Alone movies at Christmas. It all seems so tired, unambitious and focused narrowly on short-term wins that pander to the populist vote. It’s been like that for many years now, and there appear to be no changes on the horizon despite a change in government. The table below illustrates just a few examples of the challenges schools face currently and the responses we are seeing…

Consider our current approach…

Problem	Solution	Concerns
Students not attending school, truancy.	Employ people to track students down and bring them back to school. Punish parents for not sending them to school.	Why are they choosing not to attend in the first place? How might we make schools and learning more engaging and meaningful for all learners?
Digital Distraction.	Ban mobile devices at school.	How do we prepare young people (and teachers!) to function effectively in an increasingly digital world – including understanding the safety and moral issues of being a digital citizen?
Declining literacy and numeracy achievement.	Spend more time on structured approaches to reading, writing and maths, focusing primarily on the mechanics.	How do we inspire writers, authors and mathematicians for the future? How to sustain an interest in literature, story-telling and mathematics in the world around us?
Bullying.	More supervision, more punitive measures for those responsible.	How to address the social influences and generational patterns of behaviour that are behind this sort of behaviour?
Recruitment and retention of high quality teachers.	Introduce teaching standards, recognition of excellent teachers and punitive measures for those not performing.	How to make teaching a profession that attracts the very best candidates. How best to design initial teacher education programmes and professional learning programmes that sustains a dynamic profession?
Low level of participation in STEM subjects to meet demand for employment in the tech sector.	Privilege resourcing of STEM programmes and STEM teachers.	What about the arts subjects where creativity (a key element in innovation) is cultivated?
Increasing numbers of learners with special learning needs (incl. ADHD, autism etc.)	Limited funding for special needs teachers and support people. Teachers expected to become skilled in dealing with these demands.	What are the conditions that are most suitable for these learners, and what support is most helpful? How can we personalise/individualise programmes within the traditional one-class, one-teacher structures?
Ongoing disruption and change (e.g. natural disasters, weather events, pandemics etc.)	Short term mitigations, targeted resourcing to bridge the gap until things ‘return to normal’.	What if ongoing disruption of this nature is the ‘new normal?’. How might we structure schooling to take account of the ongoing challenge to sustain an approach that is historically dependent on attendance at a single site?

As the table above attempts to illustrate, it’s not that the solutions being suggested or implemented are inherently wrong – indeed, many have sound research supporting their use in defined contexts. The issue is that while they may provide an effective solution for particular learners in particular contexts, they are unlikely to address some of the wider (and more complex) concerns that are a part of the problem they are attempting to address. It’s not a binary argument – it’s about understanding the broader, richer and more complicated tapestry of interactions among and between these areas that create the current form and function of schools and schooling.

I believe we need to see more ambition our efforts to identify (and courage to follow through on) solutions that matter. Of course, there’s plenty of ambition around at a personal level, with individuals seeking to ‘climb the ladder’ of personal success, or schools seeking to outdo their rivals down the road – but this sort of ambition is counter-productive in terms of achieving the solutions required to some of our ‘wicked problems’ in education.

I’m talking about the sort of ambition that is linked with taking risks (something that is frowned upon in our current bureaucratic structures), to ‘stretch’ beyond the current limits and push the boundaries of educational possibility. This sort of ambition sets aside personal interest for the corporate good. It involves releasing dreams and capturing the interest and trust of others to pursue those dreams. It’s about letting go of conventional thinking and ways of working, and experimenting with new forms of teaching, schooling and learning to find what works and what will help us achieve our ‘moonshot’ ambitions.

In the table below I’ve shared just a handful of ideas that could form the basis of the sort of ambitious ‘moonshot’ thinking that we’re talking about here. There will, of course, be others you can think of (hopefully!), so regard these as they are intended – something to stimulate your thinking. It might be helpful to consider taking one or more of these and using them as a starter for a conversation with colleagues, or at a start of year staff meeting – anything to help stimulate conversation and lift the level of thinking beyond ‘the ordinary’ as we seek to find ways of resolving the increasingly challenging problems we face in education.

Could these be your moonshot…?

Moonshot 1:
Agency and Joy!

Imagine if…

…we were to create schools where learners come curious and leave inspired? Where learners were eager to attend because they found what happens there, day by day, exciting, engaging and relevant to their needs and interests. Where learners ( and teachers) experience JOY each day, where their physical, mental, social and academic health and wellbeing were all being addressed as a matter of course. Where there is a definite ‘shift in ownership’ of learning, and learners (and teachers) experience agency in all aspects of their learning.

Moonshot2:
Learning Laboratories

Imagine if…

…we were to design our schools as learning laboratories, and our learning programmes around a culture of experimentation, where teachers and learners are open to risk and learn from failure? What if our approach to learning across the curriculum left space for teachers and students to experiment with new ideas and pursue the questions that are important to them. What if, instead of following prescribed methodologies we encouraged innovative approaches to solving problems, including how to address individual learning challenges or needs (e.g. as those in the medical profession do when making a diagnosis).

Moonshot 3:
Boundary-less Schools

Imagine if…

…we conceived of schools as ‘boundary-less’ entities, as nodes in a network or learning ecosystem. Where physical attendance to participate in social, sporting, cultural and collaborative activities, is valued alongside access specialist teachers in other contexts, including community settings and virtually. And what if that learning was all recorded and tracked in a single ‘record of learning’ that recognises the value of what is learned in all of these contexts? What if we recognised the roles of those providing support for learners differently – as specialist teachers, as pastoral support, as virtual teachers etc. as opposed to assigning all tasks to a ‘generic’ teacher. How might we include the link with home and partnership with parents as an essential aspect of this ‘boundary-less-ness’?

Moonshot 4:
AI Enhanced Personalisation

Imagine if…

…we could harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create truly personalised programmes of learning for both individuals and for groups based on an analysis of their needs and preferences? What if the AI platform could then provide personalised support and feedback as the learner/group worked on the learning task, scaffolding and shaping the learning activity based on the learner response and evidence provided. What if the platform could also maintain a record of learning for each learner with dynamic links to the evidence provided by the learner to illustrate achievement against the criteria set.

Moonshot 5:
New Structures

Imagine if…

…we were to completely suspend all of the structures around which our current school system is designed – learning spaces, timetables, curriculum, staffing allocations, assessments/exams etc. How would we design things differently? How would the school day work? What would the curriculum look like? What if we were to create the opportunity for learners to be immersed in learning for as long as it takes for them to become accomplished in what they are doing? How might we keep track of what is being learned, how it is being learned and when it has been learned?
What would be the role(s) of educators in all of this? How would they be supported?

Moonshot 6:
New Measures of Success

Imagine if…

…we adopted completely different ways of measuring success? Where exams and summative assessments were replaced by more dynamic and ‘real-time’ provision of evidence to match against the progression indicators linked to criteria established at the beginning of the learning activity? What if learners were actively involved in the decisions around the criteria and the indicators? Instead of designing learning to match the assessment criteria, what if learners were able to immerse themselves in meaningful learning activity, and then select the criteria that they have evidence for – from across different ‘subjects’ and different levels?

[Rocket image: https://www.needpix.com/photo/174049/]

None of the scenarios above are particularly original. In fact, examples of each of these innovative approaches already exist in various jurisdictions and contexts around the world. As William Gibson once said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed yet‘. Also, while the scenarios have been separated out here to emphasise a specific idea, there are many overlaps between them and in most cases, a ‘moonshot’ idea will likely include elements from two or more of the scenarios above (and others not mentioned here).

Create your own moonshot:

Being ambitious in our thinking like this doesn’t come naturally. For many of you reading the list of ‘imagine if’ statements above you may find yourself thinking immediately of all the reasons why this couldn’t happen. That’s quite normal. It’s how we’ve been programmed – a consequence of the education we’ve received and the structures and systems we conform to. But you can break the habit – all it takes is some courage to allow yourself a little space to dream and ponder.

The important thing is that, like JFK, you don’t have to have it all sorted from the beginning. You simply have to imagine, put the idea(s) out there, and be relentless in seeking to find ways of making it happen.

Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur, futurist, technologist, and writer of the TechBlog has a simple five step approach for MoonShot Planning:

5-Year Goal: Briefly describe your 5-year Moonshot goal in a clear, objective fashion using specific dates and numbers.
1-Year Goal: What concrete, measurable milestones can you achieve in 12 months that will put you on track? Remember, your progress is exponential. You just need to hit 6.25% of the target.
30-Day Goal: What can you do in the next 30 days to test and ‘de-risk’ your 1-year and 5-year objectives?
PROOF: What evidence can you provide to your team that this Moonshot is possible?
ACTION: What single action can you take right now to make immediate progress? (Do it in the next hour).

Why not use this framework to create your own moonshot and consider the ambitious approach you want to take in 2024? You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, it’s best if you do it in collaboration with others. Build the dream collectively. Get the buy-in of those who need to be involved and for whom it matters.

Imagine if, across the country, school leaders and teachers found time in these last few weeks before the next school year begins to work through the five steps outlined above, so that as you return to school for 2024 it isn’t simply to repeat what you did in 2023 with a few minor tweaks and improvements, but is something more revolutionary, more purposeful and more life-changing!

Instead of planning to get ‘back to normal’, let’s make 2024 a year of being extra-ordinary, of being ambitious in what we seek to achieve for our learners and our schools!

Check out some of these links for further ideas…

Tags education leadership, educational change, educational transformation, learner agency, learner engagement, school leadership

Growing as Principals

Announcing an exciting opportunity for New Zealand principals to engage in an innovative professional learning programme in 2024!

Are you a primary or secondary school principal in a New Zealand School who is…

passionate about making a difference for your students?
looking for fresh and innovative ways to engage them in powerful learning?
seeking ideas and support to manage the complex task of leading change in your school?
wanting to push the boundaries of the traditional model of schooling?

Then read on… this post is for you. (If this isn’t you, then please forward this post to someone you think would appreciate hearing about it!)

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with a friend and colleague, Maurie Abraham, to design and develop a unique professional learning opportunity for principals which we’ll be offering in early 2024.

Until recently, Maurie was the principal of Hobsonville Point Secondary School – a highly innovative secondary school in Auckland, a school that emphasises project-based learning and has a strong focus on digital technology and innovation. It also promotes a collaborative and inclusive learning environment. Having been principal at HPSS since it started back in , Maurie now heads up his own consultancy called How Might We Lead.

Our recent collaboration has resulted in the development of a powerful and sustainable approach to support principal wellbeing which focuses on leaders reconnecting with their personal ‘why’ and being equipped with tools to bring that to life in their schools, supported by a strong network of like-minded leaders who maintain a strong connection throughout the 20 week programme.

We’ve called our programme Refresh, Reconnect, Refocus – highlighting the triple focus we have incorporated into our programme design:

Refresh – We provide opportunities to address physical, mental and social well-being, and introduce tools that you can use beyond the time of this experience.
Reconnect – You will explore your personal ‘why’ – the things that motivate and drive you in the work you do. We introduce tools and processes to help you focus on what’s important and to plan forward from there.
Refocus – We will be designing a personal and collective view of a future-focused approach of schooling, supported by a community of other like-minded people. We assist you to plan out practical steps to make this happen in your context.

We believe that while addressing personal wellbeing as school principals is crucial, true transformation lies beyond individual practices. Merely attending to personal wellness, while essential, may not resolve the foundational issues contributing to the lack of wellbeing in the first place. To truly rejuvenate, principals must dare to envision a new paradigm for their schools. This demands the courage to reimagine the very essence of their educational institutions and take bold steps toward profound systemic changes. It necessitates a radical shift in how staff, students, and the entire school community collaborate and operate together. Only by embracing this courageous approach to rethinking and reshaping can principals pave the way for lasting, holistic transformation within their educational ecosystems.

If you or someone you know would like to join us for this 20 week programme please check out the details here, and register your interest in participating. We’ll send you more details of what’s involved and how you can secure your place in the programme which we have limited to just 20 principals. Already half of the places have been taken since we first let people know about it less than a week ago.

Click here to register your interest

Tags education leadership, educational change, school leadership

Overwhelm

Overwhelm is the fact or feeling of not being able to cope or deal with something.
Collins Dictionary

The headline in a paper this week, quotes a new report from MFAT that says the ‘Future looks grim“. The report details what MFAT believes Kiwis should know about risks to NZ’s security, and that conflict in our region ‘could occur’. According to the report the globe is experiencing “heightened strategic tensions and considerable levels of disruption and risk“, with New Zealand just as affected as others due to its interconnectedness, the changing nature of the Pacific and the evolution of new threats. Grim reading indeed!

All of this on top of the disruptions we have faced through pandemics, weather events, political unrest and the impact of rising interest rates and housing (un)affordability! It really is a bit overwhelming.

As if that’s not enough, in education there’s yet another avalanche of disruption and change being experienced as a result of declining achievement in key areas, the introduction of a new curriculum, changes in assessment practices, changes in PLD allocations plus ongoing issues with truancy and low levels of learner engagement – just to name a few.

No wonder educators are feeling overwhelmed and looking to other career options. According to NZ’s Newshub teachers are leaving in droves currently. And not just in New Zealand. The USA Today reports that the number of teachers quitting has hit a new high, with one teacher quoted as saying ‘I just found myself struggling to keep up’.

Understanding the perceptions teachers have about all of this was the focus of a recent FutureMakers report titled Roadblocks and Drivers, which provides an analysis of the responses received through submissions to an online survey posted on the FutureMakers website in early 2023. The analysis reveals a comprehensive list of perceived drivers and roadblocks in our system, highlighting a range of complex and interconnected issues. The most prevalent challenges reported include:

initiative overload leading to fatigue and lack of follow-through
inadequate resources in terms of staffing and funding,
resistance to change driven by a focus on tradition, and
difficulties related to leadership, such as vision deficits and poor communication.

One word that sums up the feeling across all of the responses received is overwhelm. While it’s true to say that the notion of overwhelm has been impacting many for a number. of years now, the evidence in the survey analysis reinforces the view of may others that the level of change and disruption being faced in our profession (and society) is escalating rapidly, and is also becoming increasing diverse – impacting us on many fronts.

The survey responses paint a picture of teachers who are facing an increasingly challenging and overwhelming environment in schools. They are bombarded with a multitude of new initiatives and requirements, not giving them time to reflect or renew their energies. They are also overwhelmed by the constantly changing demands from parents and communities, and the evolving behaviours and learning needs of their students. This overwhelming situation can lead to a sense of paralysis within the education system.

This sense of overwhelm is captured in the following from one respondent:

“It’s just too busy. There never seems to be enough time to do the day to day job as well as learn new and better ways. When under pressure, we often revert to old ways. Teachers don’t fully adopt new ways because they don’t really understand the why and how….and they don’t get a chance to spend time on these. Usually they do want to do things better, but get caught up in their day to day work and have no capacity for more.”

Some respondents referred to the notion of ‘burden’ – the sense that everything is being added to what they are already doing, and that there really needs to be a ’letting go’ of things that they are already doing in order to create space and have the freedom to change. Others raised concerns over change initiatives occurring on multiple fronts of activity, often overlapping or causing conflict.

Addressing this level of ‘overwhelm’ must surely have to be a key focus of our system leaders you would think. But what we see at present appears to be even more layers of disruption and change being imposed – most of it appearing as a re-hash of previously tried (and failed) approaches. As Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results!” My concern is that Continuing to do what we’ve always done and expecting better results is not only a sign of insanity, it is depriving our young people of their future!

Continuing to do what we’ve always done and expecting better results is not only a sign of insanity, it is depriving our young people of their future.
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Fortunately the survey responses weren’t all negative. There were some useful suggestions provided in the responses, offering some ways to address the issue of ‘overwhelm’ including:

Streamline initiatives and requirements: Rather than overwhelming teachers with a constant influx of changes, focus on implementing a few well-thought-out initiatives that have a proven track record of effectiveness.
Provide targeted professional development and support: This may include mentoring, coaching and wellbeing programmes to provide guidance and help teachers cope with the demands they face.
Foster more collaboration: This reduces the burden on individual teachers and allows them to leverage collective knowledge and support.
Prioritise well-being and work-life balance: Provide resources and support for managing stress and burnout. Encourage schools to adopt policies that promote reasonable workloads and create opportunities for self-care and rejuvenation.
Engage stakeholders in decision-making: When stakeholders feel heard and valued, it can reduce the sense of overwhelm and foster a sense of ownership and collective responsibility.
Research and evidence-based practices: Ensure that initiatives, requirements, and interventions are based on sound research and evidence. Avoid adopting trends or fads without a solid foundation.
Advocate for systemic change: We must recognise that the sense of ‘overwhelm’ experienced by teachers may be indicative of broader systemic issues within the education system.

None of the things on this list will come as a surprise. In fact, I’d recognise most as being the things I observe in the practice of some of our more effective school leaders as they provide leadership for their staff and communities through these times of change.

In times of crisis and overwhelm one would look to the leadership at a system level and in our schools for a strong and robust response, but it would seem that this sort of practice is not uniformly experienced. This may have something to do with the quality and experience (or lack of) of our current school leadership.

A recent ERO report has found that a third of principals in our schools have less than five years of experience. It also notes the difficulty in recruiting and retaining quality leadership at principal level. How can we expect great leadership in times of disruption where the depth of experience simply isn’t there? This is yet another indicator that we have an education leadership crisis in our country.

Sure, there’s always the exception to the rule, the outstanding individual who has been well mentored and understands intuitively what to do when faced with complex issues or a crisis event, but they are a small minority. Good leadership becomes great on the basis of experience – in the same way a good athlete becomes great through putting in the ‘hard yards’ of training in all circumstances.

One thing is for certain – there is no returning to the (imagined) stable state of what we experienced in the past. Research suggests that this is a sign of an inexperienced leader – that when the chips are down they resort to using strategies they remember having experienced, and not the sorts of things that evidence is suggesting need to be employed in a VUCA world. We see evidence of this on a daily basis it seems, particularly right at the moment as the political parties are putting forth their ‘solutions’ for what they see as a failing system. These are yet more examples of what I wrote about in a previous post listing signs of system and organisational distress.

What can leaders do?

Two thoughts as suggestions occur to me. There’s no silver bullet here, but we can take responsibility for the things that fall within our locus of control, so here they are:

Start by acknowledging that the sense of ‘overwhelm’ that your staff and community may be feeling is a natural response to the pressures they may be feeling from the continual barrage of change initiatives and demands that come with that. It isn’t their fault or a sign of weakness. But it can be addressed.
Next, make time for your own personal reflection and become self-aware as a leader. The minute you find yourself falling back into the ‘old ways’ or defending actions that are indefensible, stop! Seek support, seek guidance and seek the assistance from those who can help you work through what you need to do with a fresh set of eyes.
Then, determine to do something to address this. The list of actions above provide a pretty useful starting point. Read each carefully and consider how you could take some positive steps to make this a reality in your context. Don’t waste valuable time trying to create a comprehensive plan that has everything covered before you start – just do it, reflect often and change as required. If you can’t think of anything, don’t give up – seek the counsel of a wise colleague, listen to what they have to say. And make time for some professional reading as a way of understanding what successful leaders are doing in other contexts.
Finally, understand that the pace of change that we’re currently experiencing isn’t likely to ease, and that our traditional ways of managing change are simply not fast enough or effective enough to keep up, let alone get ahead of the situation. We have to do things differently – starting with letting go of some of our sacred cows of management (e.g. complex bureaucracies, top-down management, positional authority, organisational silos, KPI-driven performance etc.) and be prepared to embrace experimentation, risk taking and learn from failures. Look to release staff to pursue short-cycle experiments that empower them to discover new ways of working where the old ones aren’t. But make sure as you’re doing this, you have a clear eye on the horizon, and are mission-led in your leadership style, and not tangled down in the weeds.

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

We all want trees – now!

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Chinese Proverb

Whether we’re talking about climate change, the health system, education or environmental issues, a common refrain in much of the current rhetoric is the urgent need for action. This sense of urgency belies the fact that what needs to be done should have been started a long time ago, but by ignoring the signs, we’re now faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges in terms of the scale and complexity of the problems that lie before us – and our children.

Consider the following:

Climate Change: extreme weather events affecting our ability to sustain food supplies, erosion of our coastlines and rising sea levels, rising temperatures making parts of the planet uninhabitable – these are just some of the signs of the impact of climate change. Experts in the field are warning that we may have less than ten years to put in place measures that will mitigate these things happening. Warnings of this change have been sounded for well over a century now.
Health: Increasing demand for health services, an ageing population, advances in care and many more people having chronic (long-term) health conditions combined with a shortage of medical professionals and the growing inequity of provision for Māori and low socio-economic groups. This 2004 paper highlights these issues being raised nearly two decades ago.
Environment: The environment that sustains our life on this planet is under significant threat from things such as pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, plastics and soil erosion and degradation to name a few. These things haven’t just happened overnight – but the significance of the impact is escalating. While there have been occasions through the history of the planet involving environmental degradation caused by purely natural reasons, what we are facing now is an escalation due to the impact of human behaviour, referred to by many as the Anthropocene.
Education: The already existing challenges within education have become a lot more visible with the global pandemic. The outdated educational approaches, growing rates of truancy, lack of qualified teachers, and widespread inequity in terms of access to digital technologies are suddenly out in the open. The downward trends in achievement in critical areas such as literacy and widely observed lack of engagement are key indicators of the problems we’re facing here. This recent Forbes article on the education crisis summarises the issues well, and provides some useful advice for action regarding teacher recruitment and retention for example.

Our biggest challenge is that, as these problems are now reaching crisis levels, we want to see solutions immediately. We’re wanting to see a forest before us, but we should have begun by planting the seeds 20 years ago, as the Chinese proverb says.

We’re wanting to see a forest before us, but we should have begun by planting the seeds 20 years ago.
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While the problems may seem quite daunting (and they are), our most responsible actions must be on planting the seeds today that will become the full solution into the future. Otherwise we’re simply adding to the overhead of responsibility that our children and their children will face – and the prospect of them looking up at me in my old age and asking ‘why didn’t you do something back then?’ doesn’t excite me.

Increasingly I am concerned (and frustrated) by the huge inertia and lack of action at all levels. It’s easy to point the finger at governments and Ministries, and blame their lack of effective strategy and action, and use that as an excuse as to why we can’t do anything at the local level. While I’m not excusing governments and Ministries – they certainly are culpable – we can’t use that as an excuse for a lack of action in any way with things that are within our own locus of control.

Consider, for example about the issue of plastic pollution and its rapidly escalating threat to our environment. When you think about the pressure there is now on supermarkets and product suppliers to cease using single-use plastics, and the successes seen over a relatively short period of time, we can take at least a modicum of encouragement. It wasn’t governments or even the supermarkets that lead this change – it was the people, everyday individuals who exercised their voice and changed their behaviours because of the conviction of belief they hold. As a result, we’re seeing a response from supermarkets, suppliers and government (albeit timid) to introduce changes in policy, process and structures to ‘normalise’ the use of materials other than plastic in the bags, containers and wrappings used. Not a forest yet, but seeds germinating?

So what about education? Everyday we are bombarded via the media with stories of the numbers of kids not attending school (almost 50% in some of our main centres at present); the drop in literacy levels, problems with retaining good quality teachers in our school, issues of inequity and racism to name just a few areas of concern!

From the perspective of our bureaucracies it’s not for lack of trying. A quick skim of the Ministry of Education’s website reveals a portfolio of initiatives that address all of these things (and more) – and includes the full agenda of recommendations that were made in the Tomorrows Schools Review! So why so little change – or at least, why such slow change?

It seems our ability to respond quickly and appropriately is hampered by several factors:

a fundamental lack of belief among some (many?) of the scale and potential impact of these problems. Often these things are regarded as someone else’s problem and don’t apply in ‘my context’. Further, this results in actions that are continually responsive rather than pro-active.
a lack of clear identification of the problem, its causes and the ways in which it might be addressed.
lack of goal clarity – with so many issues confronting us we can end up setting too many goals which leads to ‘goal juggling’, and the result that with so many goals to pursue nothing actually gets done.
a lack of a clearly understood (and adhered to) change process. Instead, we have change that is directed and implemented from the top down, without sufficient ‘buy-in’ and where the significant barriers to implementation haven’t been identified and addressed. (This applies within institutions as much as it does in systems as a whole).
poor models of leadership at all levels of the system – not speaking here of individuals, but of the leadership paradigm(s) that we operate within.
lack of future-focused thinking – and where this does exist, it quickly gets subsumed within the tyranny of the urgent, the things that are demanding our urgent attention, but whose impact is short term compared to the long game here. Quick-wins, fire-fighting and keeping people happy all seem to be the dominant drivers.
established patterns of behaviour that are simply too hard to shift – and so they become self-reinforcing. “It worked for me, so why shouldn’t it work for my kid?” etc.
bureaucratic structures that simply aren’t designed to be agile and responsive – their focus is on ensuring success, not innovation. They’re structured for risk aversion, rather than experimentation. For example, a five year programme to design a new curriculum may have served us well in the past, but represents the lifetime of an entire generation of students in a secondary school, and thus, if our current curriculum needs to change and isn’t sufficient, we are failing them while waiting for the ‘complete’ curriculum to emerge.
competing political agendas, driven by the desire to remain in power over the drive to actually make a difference – resulting in lots of ‘dry-run’ change, addressing the cosmetic/surface issues and short-term gains, aimed and winning voter approval over long-term success for learners and for our education system.

If you’ve read this far it may all sound a little gloomy – but this is our present reality. It’s my grand-kids I’m thinking of here – and already the eldest of those are at secondary school with only another three years before they graduate!

Could a ‘citizens revolt’ (from educators) contribute to turning around some of these escalating issues we face? What might that involve, and how could it be managed to ensure equitable and sustainable outcomes? And what, then, might (or should) be the response of governments, educational institutions and the Ministry?

Call to action

There are a number of things that I feel worth considering in light of this dilemma, none of which are solutions in themselves, but all of which are pre-requisites for at least starting to plant the seeds we need to grow into trees. In making these suggestions I’m thinking about the response of individuals – like you – whether that be teachers, parents, principals, system leaders… the change begins with each of us.

Be informed – it staggers me just how many educators and in particular, educational leaders I interact with who are so poorly informed about some of these issues. Knowledge is power, and without that you’re conceding that power to others. As recently as this week I heard an education leader explain to me she was simply too busy to keep up to date with this stuff. While I can certainly understand the pressures she may feel, it is disappointing to hear. When this is the case it actually adds to the stress being felt, because every new thing that emerges comes as a surprise and can’t be anticipated.
We can’t rely solely on the evening updates on the TV news to keep abreast of the issues we need to be engaged with. And we most certainly need to engage widely, be informed of a broad range of perspectives, and apply the critical thinking capability we believe to be so important for our learners to the process of forming our own views and thinking. The environment scan on the FutureMakers website might be a useful start – it has dozens of links to other authoritative sources of information, including the OECD, UNESCO, World Bank etc.
Collaborate – don’t take this journey alone! Find your tribe and become engaged in conversations about these things. Find a safe environment in which these ideas can be unpacked, challenged and new thinking emerge. A professional learning group provides an ideal context here – best if there are a variety of voices and perspectives at the table, so it’s not just a group of like-minded ‘yes’ people. Consider also subscribing to some online news feeds and/or Twitter feeds for example, as a way of connecting to the thinking of others. This can be especially useful when you feel confident enough to hit the ‘reply’ button to ask a question or pose an alternative viewpoint.
Identify your theory of change – If your approach to change, whether in your classroom, your institution or agency, isn’t founded on a clearly understood and articulated theory of change, then it will fail. This will happen because you’ll simply go about it the way you have experienced in the past – and that is likely to have failed also! Most often we see change happen as a result of someone or group having a ‘good idea’ or coming up with a ‘plan’ for doing something different – then ‘imposing’ that on those who are expected to embrace the change. A good change strategy will include ways of building buy-in and bringing people (including the difficult ones) onside. It will also address the potential barriers and roadblocks, identifying ways of removing them or at least mitigating their impact. And then comes the interesting part – instead of simply expecting the change to be implemented according to some pre-determined plan, the approach should involve a culture of experimentation, with a higher tolerance of risk and mechanisms for spreading the successful ideas that emerge from this.
Be the change you want to see – before imposing what you feel needs to be changed on others consider what you need to do to change personally. To use the plastics example earlier, it’s pointless undertaking a crusade to end the use of single use plastics if you continue to be a high user of single use plastics yourself!
As an educator, don’t expect others to engage critically with information you pass on to them unless you’ve cultivated that capability yourself. You’re unlikely to succeed in helping your students to become more self-managing if you don’t possess those skills. And you’re unlikely to create the conditions for collaboration if you haven’t committed to working collaboratively with others yourself – and that includes working alongside those you find difficult to work with!
Experiment!! – don’t just wait for someone else to do something, commit to giving something a go – and ensure you learn from the experience. Truth is that we learn from experience – not data. Data can inform our decisions and also validate the results of our experience, but it is a poor teacher. There’s a popular phrase used within the innovation sector – ‘fail fast, fix fast’. The challenge is to start by trying something that will address a particular problem or concern you have, be intentional about how you approach it and keep short accounts so you are constantly reviewing and refining the solution you have created – and be prepared to accept that sometimes you’ll fail. There’s no shame in walking away from something you’ve tried – as long as you’ve learned from that and can carry that learning into the next experiment you try.

These are just some of the seeds you can start sowing straight away – the forest will grow, but we have to start planting today!

E tu kahikatea
Hei whakapae ururoa
Awhi mai awhi atu
Tatou tatou e

Stand like the kahikatea (tree)
To brave the storms
Embrace and receive
We are one together

Tags collaborative teaching, educational change, educational transformation, environment scan

Give a S***!

I am in the habit of riding my bike along the local river trail as regularly as I can. It’s a shared trail that is used by other cyclists, walkers, runners and those walking their dogs – everyone appreciating the opportunity this great community asset provides.

Cycling is one of those activities that provides me with thinking time. This morning my thoughts were on the many dogs I pass on this trail each time I ride it, the different types there are, and the different owners I observe.

This morning I was reflecting on the inevitability of these animals taking a moment to relieve themselves at some point during their morning walk, and the responsibility that falls on these owners to deal with that.

My observations today led me to the conclusion that there are actually three types of dog owner. There are those who are diligent when it comes to scooping up the small piles of excrement their beloved pet deposits and there are those who simply look the other way and ignore that it has happened.

Then, this morning, I became aware of a third group. This group give the appearance of doing the right thing – they scoop it up in a plastic bag and tie the ends, but then, at some point along the way they simply place it on the side of the path – presumably hoping someone else might collect it and dispose of it for them I can only imagine.

I refer to ‘group’ here as it’s certainly more than one. In a 10km stretch I cycled this morning I spotted four such bags, so there were at least four people who fall into this category. Two of the bags were actually within 50 metres of a special ‘dog poo’ collection bin placed on the side of the track by the local council to encourage responsible dog owners to do the right thing.

So why use my blog to today to write about this? Well, because it its own small way, the way these dog owners deal with the inconvenience of having to clean up after their pets provides a small window of reflection about the things that bind us as a community, as a society. The social norms and mores we observe and adhere to that we might enjoy the benefits of a healthy, cohesive and sustainable social ecosystem. A place where everyone can thrive and enjoy the benefits that accrue from our collective endeavours.

Healthy, thriving, sustainable communities have always been characterised by a strong emphasis on complying with a set of behaviours that have come to be recognised and agreed upon as being important to the collective as a whole. Sometimes these behaviours have to be spelled out in the form of ‘rules’ or ‘reminders’ so there’s no confusion about what is expected. Whether the result of compliance with rules or driven by some sort of social altruism, this is how healthy democracies work. While there have always been a minority who choose not to observe these behaviours, they are generally far outweighed by those who do.

But what about this ‘third group’? Is this a more recent phenomena, or has there always been this group in our midst? These are the people who, while not wanting to be seen to be not complying, are actually just as disinterested and deflecting of their personal responsibility in all of this as the group who outrightly say ‘no’.

So what are the possible drivers for someone to act like this? Certainly there’s a driver for social acceptance – they don’t want to be identified as a ‘rule breaker’ because of their actions – thus they at least go through the motions of scooping up the excrement. But why not complete the task of then carrying it to the bin? It seems the reasons that lie behind this rule have completely escaped them – it’s something that applies to everyone else, but not them. The driver to actually do the right thing appears to be superseded by the driver to be giving the appearance of doing the right thing.

My thought drift here isn’t really about categorising dog owners. That was simply the catalyst for a wider reflection – back into the world of education and schools that I inhabit for much of my working existence. There we have the same concerns when it comes to both learners and their parents and whānau.

The recent government announcement to add a significant amount of money to help schools battle truancy is but the tip of this iceberg. In his press release for this, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said:

“Some of what the regional response fund will be used for is ensuring pathways are there for disengaged youth alongside iwi, schools, councils and community groups and providers. It can be used to support whānau-led responses to break the cycle of disengagement, or brokering services with other agencies to ensure students have the level of support they need to stay in school. It’s important and complicated work,”

The focus on an ecosystem response (multiple agencies/organisations/family/whānau engagement) hinted at here is extremely encouraging – but might it end up being like the dog owners who simply place their bags of excrement along the track after appearing to do the right thing. “Oh well, we gave it our best shot!” they say.

The reality is that any solution to this problem must be an ecosystem response – no single entity (e.g. a school or a truancy service) is going to be able to address the escalating issue there is with non-engagement. Particularly when the measure of non-engagement is non-attendance. What about the increasing levels of non-engagement among students who are actually attending, but simply not engaged with what’s happening?

There are a myriad of reasons for this non-engagement becoming an issue – and a plethora of solutions to be considered. Schools could work to make their programmes more authentic, purposeful and interesting – that could be a start. The curriculum could be more current, relevant, inter-disciplinary – that would help. The Ministry of Education could provide more support, better resources and more expertise – there’s certainly been a decline there. These things fall within the locus of control of those within the education system – but what about those things outside of that? These students each come from a family/whānau context that may or may not be upholding the same expectations, they spend time in their communities where patterns of behaviour and expectations of their peers may have different drivers etc. etc.

We live in a VUCA world – this is the complexity we must grapple with if we are to resolve challenges such as the engagement one. We must work to establish meaningful and mutually beneficial ways of working, living and loving alongside each other.

We can’t allow this ‘third group’ mindset to grow – where the appearance of doing things right matters more than actually doing the right things! We’ve got to stop leaving our bags of s*** on the side of the road for someone else to deal with!

Tags democracy, educational change, educational transformation, learner engagement

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