About This Report
The 2026 Education Environment Scan is the second edition of a resource first published by FutureMakers in 2022. It is designed to help educational leaders, policymakers, and communities make sense of the forces shaping education in Aotearoa New Zealand – and to think more clearly about what an effective, equitable, and future-focused response might look like.
A lot has changed since 2022. Generative AI has arrived as a mainstream reality, reshaping assumptions about knowledge, assessment, and the purpose of schooling. A new government has reset significant elements of the educational landscape. Cyclone Gabrielle has made climate resilience an operational necessity rather than a future concern. And persistent challenges, including teacher shortages, achievement gaps, youth wellbeing, chronic absence etc., have deepened rather than resolved. This scan maps all of it.
What makes this edition different
Where the 2022 scan identified two urgent ‘burning platforms’, this edition identifies four. But perhaps more importantly, it introduces what it calls the Convergence Imperative – the recognition that the forces shaping education in 2026 do not arrive one at a time. Each of these trends and themes interact, amplify one another, and require responses that cut across traditional domain boundaries. No single trend, addressed in isolation, can be meaningfully resolved.
The scan is structured around an expanded PESTLE framework – examining Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental, Education, and Workforce dimensions. It is designed to be read as a whole, providing a shared map from which leaders at every level of the system can develop coherent, coordinated responses to a genuinely complex future.
Who is it for?
This document is written for anyone with a stake in the future of New Zealand education – school and kura leaders, trustees, iwi education authorities, tertiary institutions, government agencies, sector organisations, and community leaders. It requires no specialist background. It asks only that its readers are willing to sit with complexity, resist the pull of simple solutions, and think seriously about the kind of education system our young people need and deserve.
A call to action
The scan closes with its most important argument: that the challenges facing New Zealand education cannot be addressed within a single parliamentary term. They are generational in scale and require cross-party commitment, sustained investment, and genuine partnership across the sector. This document is offered as a contribution to the shared awareness and honest reckoning that transformation will require – and as an invitation to that conversation.
Preview and download the paper below…
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