On one side, in Labour red: LIVE LIFE FULL OF TAX.

On the other, in National blue: LIVE LIFE TO THE MAX.

I have to give it to whoever came up with it. It’s somewhat clever.

It rhymes. You can process it in about three seconds. And it reduces what will undoubtedly be a complicated election campaign into a beautifully simple choice.

Tax. Or life. Pick one.

Except as we drove past the billboard, I actually laughed out loud. A few choice words may have been uttered in front of my impressionable (and voter-ready) teen. Not because it wasn’t somewhat clever. I laughed because “Live Life to the Max” felt so wildly disconnected from how life feels right now in Aotearoa.

I say that from a position of considerable privilege. I’m middle-aged, middle-class, Pākehā and professionally educated. I’ve had a good start in life, I have a successful career, and my family and I have choices available to us that many New Zealanders simply don’t. I tick many of the demographical boxes that would align with the ‘living life to the max’ side of the equation.

And yet I wouldn’t describe us as living life “to the max” right now.

Groceries cost noticeably more. Filling the car costs more. We think about what we’ll spend money on, where we’ll go, what we’ll do and what we’ll leave for another time. There are things we can afford to do but increasingly choose not to, because the cost is difficult to justify. These aren’t decisions about whether we can eat or pay the power bill - and that distinction matters enormously - but they are decisions we are making in response to the cost of simply living.

Which is why I laughed.

Because if a family like mine, with all the advantages I’ve just described, is consciously pulling back and making compromises, what does “living life to the max” mean for families who started with far less room to move?

What does it mean when there isn’t discretionary spending to trim? When the compromise isn’t whether to take the trip, eat out or buy something you wanted, but which bill gets paid this week? Power? Petrol, or food?

That’s where the slogan started to bother me.

This isn’t me making an argument for Labour. I’m not. Nor do I think higher taxation is inherently virtuous, or that governments deserve an unlimited cheque book. Of course they don’t. We should expect public money to be spent carefully and governments to be accountable for the choices they make.

But the billboard presents us with a much bigger proposition than that. It asks us to believe that tax is the thing standing between us and a better life. Looking around at New Zealand in 2026, I’m not convinced that’s the problem this government is actually trying to solve right now.

Some of the things that allow us to live really good lives are the very things we couldn’t possibly provide for ourselves. I don’t have a fire engine parked in my garage. I don’t employ my own emergency hospital department. I haven’t personally built the roads I use, installed the pipes that bring water to my house, or established a school down the road so the children in my community have somewhere to learn.

We build those things together. That’s kind of the deal.

We can, and should, argue vigorously about how much we contribute, who contributes what, and whether governments are making good decisions with that money. But reducing the entire conversation to the idea that tax is simply money taken away from our ability to live well misses something fairly fundamental.

Some of what we pay collectively is precisely what makes living well possible.

Which got me thinking about schools.

So what does “the max” look like in our schools?

Education is the world I know best, so perhaps inevitably that’s where my mind went next.

I’ve spent much of the past three years of the current government’s term working inside schools across Aotearoa. I’ve sat in classrooms, staffrooms and leadership offices, working alongside teachers and principals and listening to what is happening for the children in front of them.

There are extraordinary things happening in our schools. I see thoughtful, creative teachers doing wonderful work every week.

But if the question is whether our education system is currently enabling people to live life to the max, I’m not sure that’s the story educators would tell.

They are tired.

Principals are trying to stretch budgets that simply don’t stretch far enough. Teachers are working with increasingly complex groups of children and trying to meet needs that extend well beyond teaching reading, writing and mathematics. Teacher aides are doing highly skilled, demanding work alongside some of our most vulnerable children, while schools struggle to find enough money to employ them for the hours they’re actually needed.

And then there are the children themselves.

Children who need speech-language therapy, occupational therapy, behavioural support, psychological assessment or simply another adult alongside them for enough of the school day to make participation possible. Children who need breakfast, before learning is even an option for the day, or those with health needs that their families struggle to access support for.

Too often, the question isn’t what does this child need?

Schools know what the child needs.

The question becomes whether anyone can afford to provide it.

And that’s where the billboard starts to become particularly interesting. Because we’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years talking about what government costs us. The current government has had a ‘laser focused’ goal of reducing the cost of government for New Zealanders. However, schools offer us a glimpse of what happens when we don’t adequately fund the things we collectively expect government to provide.

We have a rather large hole

Over the past two years, my work with the Aotearoa Educators Collective has given me a particularly confronting view of that gap.

In 2025, we documented the gap between the level of need schools were seeing and the support they could actually access.

In 2026, after significant new government investment had been announced, we went back and asked whether things were getting better.

There has been investment as indicated in the 2025 Budget. This included more Learning Support Coordinators and additional teacher-aide hours. Early-intervention capacity is being expanded.Those are important moves, and it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge them.

But when we returned to educators earlier this year, the overwhelming message was that the relief had not yet reached them in a way they could feel. One school told us it received around $68,000 in learning-support funding.It was spending $238,000. Another was spending approximately $430,000 on teacher aides and still couldn’t meet the level of need.

Think about that for a moment. That money doesn’t magically appear. Schools raid other parts of their operational budgets, postpone things they had planned to do, rely on fundraising and ask already-stretched staff to somehow stretch a little further.

The cost hasn’t disappeared. It has simply moved. And I think that’s the bit that gets lost when we talk about tax only as something taken from us.

There is still a bill. The question is who ends up paying it.

When government funding doesn’t meet the actual cost, the bill can land with a school taking money from somewhere else, or with a family forced to pay privately for support they can’t access publicly. Educators contribute through additional time and labour that rarely appears on anyone’s balance sheet. Increased sausage sizzles to ‘fundraise’ for school costs are, in effect, a double tax to the community supporting them. They’ve paid their tax to contribute to education. But buy a sausage because it just wasn’t enough. We won’t call it tax - but the gap still needs funding.

And when none of those options can bridge the gap, the bill lands with the child who goes without.

That should bother all of us.

What would “the max” look like for a child?

This is where I keep coming back to the billboard.

If we’re going to use living life to the max as a measure of good government, then I’d quite like to apply it to children.

Because I’m not convinced that maximising childhood is the same thing as maximising test scores, attendance percentages, curriculum coverage or the number of instructional minutes we can squeeze out of a school day.

For me, a flourishing education system would give every child a genuine opportunity to belong and participate.

Disability wouldn’t require a battle for support. Teachers would have enough capacity to notice the child quietly disappearing under the radar as well as the one whose distress has become impossible to ignore. Principals might actually get to spend more of their time leading learning instead of plugging holes.

And the school day itself would have some breathing room.

Children could move, talk, create, investigate, build, read, write, calculate, argue, collaborate, imagine and play.

Knowledge would matter enormously, alongside curiosity. Achievement would matter too, without becoming confused with human worth.

We would understand that the purpose of education isn’t simply to produce economically useful adults at the other end of it. It is also to give children a bloody good childhood on the way through.

That feels much closer to “the max” to me.

Perhaps we’ve got the question wrong

The billboard asks us to choose between being full of tax and living life to the max.

I’m beginning to think that’s the wrong choice.

If “the max” simply means maximising the amount of money each of us gets to keep for ourselves, then perhaps the billboard works.

But if we’re talking about something bigger - health, opportunity, belonging, security, childhood, participation, creativity, connection, community - the equation becomes considerably more complicated.

My ability to live a good life isn’t entirely separate from yours. I want to live in a community where children are well educated, including children who aren’t mine; where someone experiencing a mental-health crisis can actually get help; where disabled people can participate fully; and where the infrastructure we all depend upon actually works. I want to live in a community where the firefighters I rely on to answer my call for help when needed, aren’t forced to hold placards every Friday lunchtime at the roundabout that ask me to “toot for support” because they’re wanting better pay and functioning fire engines!!

I benefit from those things whether or not I’m the person using the service today.

That’s the curious thing about public services. When they work well, they can be almost invisible. It’s often when they stop working that we discover what they were worth.

So yes, I’ll probably keep thinking about that billboard. It’s a great slogan. I’m just not convinced it’s the choice in front of us.

For this election, I’d like something more from every political party than a promise about how much money they’ll leave in my pocket. Tell me what kind of country your decisions will create.

I want to see public services that actually work. Teachers with enough capacity to teach. Principals who aren’t forced to decide which child’s needs they can afford to meet. Children receiving help before they reach crisis. Schools with enough space left in the day for childhood itself.

Show me flourishing.

Then we can talk about living life to the max.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

When ACT announced its proposal to strengthen legal protections for teachers who physically intervene with violent or disruptive students, my first reaction wasn’t, surprisingly, outrage. It was relief. Because, at least in part, it acknowledged something teachers in New Zealand have been carrying for years: there are classrooms across the country where keeping children safe sometimes extends far beyond teaching.

I’ve spent more than twenty-five years in education, in a variety of roles. Much of that time wasn’t in comfortable classrooms with compliant children. It was spent alongside some of the most vulnerable young people in our education system. Children whose lives had begun with trauma, neglect, violence, disability, abuse, or circumstances no child should have to navigate.

It is easy to look at behaviour in isolation. To see the kicking, biting, throwing, screaming or running, and conclude, in simple terms, that a child is “naughty”, defiant or out of control. It is much harder and significantly more mature to ask what happened to that child before they ever walked through the school gates.

Early in my career, part of my role involved supporting children whose behaviour, at times, became dangerous and violent. To prepare us for those situations, I completed Nonviolent Crisis Intervention (NVCI) training provided by the Ministry of Education.

Contrary to what many people might imagine, this training was never about how to restrain children. It was about how not to.

The overwhelming focus was on prevention. We learnt to recognise the earliest signs of escalation, to understand what children were communicating through their behaviour, to regulate ourselves before attempting to regulate someone else, to preserve dignity, build trust and de-escalate situations long before anyone’s safety was at risk. Physical restraint occupied only a small part of that training, and only as an emergency response when every other strategy had failed.

Looking back now, I can also see how our understanding has continued to evolve.

When I completed my training, behaviour management was still heavily influenced by behaviourist thinking. Since then, neuroscience has transformed our understanding of the relationship between the brain, the nervous system and behaviour. We now know far more about stress responses, co-regulation and why children experiencing overwhelming distress cannot simply reason their way back to calm.

What is interesting is that this newer understanding hasn’t made restraint more acceptable.

It has made prevention even more important.

Today we know even better ways of reducing the likelihood that children reach crisis in the first place. We know the importance of trusted relationships, emotionally available adults, predictable environments and responsive teaching. We know that regulation is far more effective than punishment, and connection far more powerful than control. The evidence supporting this is extremely clear and readily available.

And yet, despite everything we know, sometimes children still reach a point where immediate intervention is required.

Matthew

I remember one little 5 year old boy. I’ll call him Matthew. Away from crisis, Matthew was curious, affectionate and funny. He wanted to belong and most days, he wanted to do well. Like every child I’ve ever worked with, he was far more than the moments when life overwhelmed him.

But overwhelm him it did.

When Matthew became dysregulated, his nervous system entered survival mode. Thinking disappeared. His world became reduced to fight, flight or frantic desperation.

One afternoon he became so overwhelmed that he lowered his head and sprinted straight into the reinforced glass classroom door.

The impact echoed through the room.

Before anyone could fully process what had happened, he backed away and ran at it again.

And again.

There was no time to debate educational philosophy. No opportunity to wonder whether another consequence might be more appropriate. No possibility of simply asking him to stop. In that moment, the only safe option was to physically prevent him from causing catastrophic harm to himself.

This wasn’t a child “acting out”. This wasn’t a naughty five-year-old refusing to follow instructions. This was a little boy whose nervous system had become so overwhelmed that he could no longer keep himself safe.

Even though he was only five years old, the strength he could generate in that state was extraordinary. It required at least two trained adults to safely hold him. Not to punish him. Not to control him. Simply to stop him repeatedly driving his head into reinforced glass.

People often imagine restraint lasting thirty seconds. The swift removal of said child from the immediate environment.

That wasn’t my reality.

A child whose nervous system has reached that point doesn’t suddenly become calm because adults are holding them. Often the opposite happens. The fear intensifies. The struggle increases.

Every second you are reassessing. Is it safe to release? Has the danger passed? Will letting go now result in this child hurting themselves, another child or one of the adults trying to protect them?

In the case of Matthew, those moments lasted forty minutes.

Forty minutes where two or three adults were completely focused on keeping one little boy alive and safe. They are long forty minutes. Not just physically. Emotionally. Because every instinct you have as a teacher is telling you to comfort the child in front of you. To help them feel safe and to help them make sense of what is happening.

Instead, you are forced into becoming the barrier between them and serious injury. It is heartbreaking. And while all of this is happening, another question quietly sits in the background.

Who is teaching everyone else?

That question matters. It matters to Matthew. It matters to the classmates who have witnessed the incident, perhaps frightened or injured themselves. It matters to the teacher trying to hold together an impossible situation. And it should matter to every single parent across New Zealand.

Whether your child is Matthew or whether your child is quietly waiting on the mat while all of this unfolds, every family has a stake in this conversation. Parents rightly expect their children to be safe at school. They also reasonably expect that their child’s teacher will spend the day teaching.

When two or three adults are required to manage one crisis, those expectations don’t disappear. They simply become impossible to meet simultaneously.

This is why ACT’s announcement caught my attention, although not because I believe legislation expanding physical intervention is, by itself, the right response. What gave me a small measure of hope was the possibility that a political party was finally acknowledging the scale of the under-resourced complexity teachers across the country are already managing. Teachers should not be left fearing legal repercussions when they act in an emergency to prevent serious harm. But legal protection cannot be mistaken for a solution to the conditions that made the intervention necessary.

If ACT are acknowledging that teachers may be required to physically intervene with children experiencing extreme distress, then they must also acknowledge everything that follows.

Someone still has to teach the other twenty-five children. Children who witnessed the violence require comforting. Calm needs to be restored to the classroom. The child in crisis needs support once they are regulated again, helping them repair relationships and return to learning with dignity intact. And all of this assumes that the incident involves only one student - when often it can involve many at any one time.

None of that happens because legislation changes. It happens because there are enough trained adults in the room.

So, on the eve of ACT’s announcement today, I now find myself anticipating the further announcements that will surely follow in the coming days. Because once we’ve acknowledged that teachers are being asked to physically intervene with children in crisis, there are a number of practical realities that naturally flow from that recognition.

Training

The first announcement, I imagine, will be around comprehensive training.

Surely every teacher who may now be expected to physically intervene will receive practical, hands-on training in safe restraint. Not simply an online module explaining the legislation, but the opportunity to develop the judgement, confidence and skills required to keep both children and teachers safe.

The risks of getting restraint wrong are significant. A teacher responding on instinct, without appropriate training, can unintentionally injure a child, injure themselves, or escalate an already dangerous situation. Safe restraint requires knowledge, practice and ongoing professional learning. If we are extending teachers’ legal powers, then providing every teacher with the training to exercise those powers safely seems the obvious next step.

Additional adults in classrooms

I also imagine we’ll hear an announcement about additional adults in every classroom.

Because the moment a teacher steps into the role of physically intervening with one child, they inevitably step away from every other child in the room.

This is something teachers have been calling for over many years. Not because classrooms have become harder to manage, but because they have become more complex.

Today’s classrooms include children with increasingly diverse learning profiles, neurodivergence, trauma histories, communication differences, mental health needs and significant behavioural challenges. None of those children are the problem. The problem is expecting one adult to simultaneously meet all of those needs.

If today’s announcement recognises that teachers may spend extended periods of time physically supporting one child through a crisis, then surely it also acknowledges the need for another trained adult to remain with the rest of the class. The remaining children in the class still needs an adult who can continue the learning, reassure frightened children, notice those sitting quietly in shock, and provide a calm, steady presence while the crisis is managed.

Whether we call them teacher aides, learning assistants or classroom support staff is almost beside the point. What matters is that every classroom has another trusted adult available when the teacher’s attention is necessarily drawn elsewhere.

Earlier support

Perhaps the next announcement will focus on helping schools prevent these situations from occurring in the first place. After all, restraint is not an intervention that changes behaviour. It is an emergency response when every other strategy has already failed.

If we genuinely want fewer restraints, then schools need faster access to educational psychologists, speech-language therapists, occupational therapists, behaviour specialists and learning support services. Under the current funding model, many schools will be waiting for these supports until at least 2029. Schools need professionals who can help understand why a child is reaching crisis and work alongside schools and whānau to reduce the likelihood of it happening again now - not in 3 years time.

Time and Capacity

I also hope there will be recognition that prevention cannot be squeezed into the margins of an already overloaded day. Building trusting relationships, meeting with families, collaborating with specialists and developing thoughtful support plans all require protected time. So too does the work that follows a serious incident: documenting what happened, debriefing with colleagues, supporting affected students and rebuilding safety with the child at the centre of it.

After managing a forty-minute episode with Matthew, I was often physically and emotionally exhausted. Restraining a child was never part of my vision of being a caring and nurturing teacher, and it frequently meant that trust had to be rebuilt afterwards. Yet too often, because there was no time and no other staff member available who could safely work with the children in my class, I was expected to step straight back into the day and continue teaching as though nothing had happened. There was no opportunity to reflect, regroup or even replenish the energy the incident had taken.

This work is often treated as though it sits somewhere outside teaching, when in reality it is part of what makes teaching possible. Without the time and staffing to do it properly, schools remain trapped in a cycle of reacting to crises rather than preventing them.

Professional learning

Finally, I expect we’ll hear about ongoing investment in professional learning around child development, neuroscience and trauma.

Our understanding of behaviour has evolved enormously over the past two decades. We now know far more about the relationship between stress, the nervous system and learning than we once did.

If we are serious about reducing violence in schools, then every teacher deserves access to the best evidence available, not simply greater legal authority to intervene once a child has reached breaking point.

Because when I look back over my own career, one thing has become abundantly clear. The debate isn’t really about restraint or removal of problem children. It’s about capacity. Restraint is simply the moment when a lack of capacity becomes impossible to ignore.

If today’s announcement is a very crude acknowledgement of the complexity teachers are managing, then I genuinely welcome it. But permission to step in cannot be where the response ends. Teachers also need the people, the knowledge, the time and the support that will make stepping in far less necessary in the first place.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

Not because it has suddenly become important. It has always been an essential part of a healthy diet. Rather, what has changed is the way it is being presented to us. Over the past year or two, it has become increasingly difficult to walk through a supermarket without being reminded that almost everything now comes with added protein.

There is protein coffee, protein water, protein yoghurt, protein cereal, protein chocolate and even protein chips. Before long, I suspect there will be protein toothpaste.

None of this is inherently problematic. There are good reasons why many people are paying closer attention to protein intake, and for some, these products may provide a genuinely useful way of meeting their nutritional needs. What interests me, however, is not protein itself. It is what happens when a scientifically legitimate idea becomes a marketing device.

The word protein has gradually shifted from describing what something contains to implying something about its quality. It has become shorthand for better. The presence of the word alone often carries enough authority that we instinctively assume the product sitting in front of us represents a healthier choice.

Of course, anyone with even a passing interest in nutrition knows that things are rarely so straightforward. The word on the front of the packet tells us remarkably little. The amount of protein matters. The source of that protein matters. The balance of the rest of the ingredients matters. The nutritional needs of the person consuming it matter. Good nutritional advice has always required us to look beyond the marketing and read a little more carefully.

As I found myself reflecting on this rather curious “proteinification” of food, I realised education seems to be experiencing something remarkably similar.

Our own shelves have become increasingly crowded with approaches described as the science of something. Alongside them sit programmes promoted as structured, evidence-based, research-backed or grounded in cognitive science. These descriptors have become so commonplace that they often function less as descriptions and more as endorsements. Their presence appears to reassure us that the difficult work of evaluating an idea has already been done.

To be absolutely clear, this is not an argument against science, nor against evidence. If anything, it is an argument for taking both more seriously.

Education should be evidence-informed. It would be difficult to argue otherwise. Research has transformed our understanding of learning, memory, language, child development and countless other aspects of teaching. Teachers should absolutely have access to this knowledge, and policy should be informed by the strongest evidence available.

What concerns me is something slightly different. Increasingly, we seem to be treating scientific language as though it were synonymous with scientific thinking.

Scientific thinking is not demonstrated by attaching the words science or evidence-based to a programme. It is demonstrated by remaining curious enough to examine the claims being made. It asks how a concept has been defined, whether that definition is shared by others, what evidence supports it, under what conditions it appears to work well, where its limitations lie and whether the conclusions have been independently replicated. Those questions are not obstacles to evidence; they are the very habits that evidence demands of us.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident at present than in the emergence of the phrase structured maths.

I want to tread carefully here because it would be easy to misrepresent the issue. There is a substantial body of research examining effective mathematics teaching. There is evidence supporting explicit instruction in particular contexts, carefully sequenced learning, retrieval practice, worked examples and many other approaches that contribute meaningfully to mathematical learning. None of that is in dispute.

What is far less clear is whether structured maths itself represents a coherent, internationally recognised pedagogical approach. Unlike structured literacy, which has a body of evidence, and has been subject of scholarly thinking and review, ‘structured maths’ appears to be used in markedly different ways depending on who is speaking. Sometimes it refers to explicit instruction. Sometimes to curriculum sequencing. Sometimes to commercial resources. Sometimes to a philosophy of teaching. Frequently it appears to encompass all of these simultaneously.

That lack of conceptual clarity should give us pause, not because the practices themselves lack merit, but because evidence depends upon precision. If we cannot clearly define what we mean by a term, it becomes remarkably difficult to claim that the evidence supports the term rather than particular practices that happen to sit beneath it.

This is not unique to mathematics. Education has always been susceptible to the appeal of language that promises certainty. Every generation develops its preferred vocabulary, each suggesting that we have finally discovered the key that previous generations somehow overlooked. Yet classrooms have an inconvenient habit of reminding us that learning remains deeply contextual, profoundly relational and stubbornly resistant to simple slogans.

Perhaps that is why the protein analogy has stayed with me.

The presence of the word protein on the front of a packet tells us very little until we look more closely. Sometimes it represents a genuinely thoughtful product. Sometimes it is little more than an ordinary snack wearing the language of nutrition.

The same might be said of education.

Words such as science, structured and evidence-based should invite our curiosity rather than suspend it. They are the beginning of a conversation, not the conclusion of one. If we genuinely aspire to be evidence-informed educators, then our responsibility is not simply to consume ideas carrying scientific language. It is to retain the habits of critical thought that science itself has always required.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

I’d like to introduce you to the love of my life. She’s more than fifty years old. She’s collected a few bumps and scrapes over the years. At the moment she’s covered in primer, body filler and sanding dust, undergoing what can only be described as extensive cosmetic surgery.

I talk to her. Quite regularly, in fact.

My kids know there is only one circumstance under which she’ll ever be sold: if one of us requires urgent medical treatment in Mexico. Short of that, she isn’t going anywhere.

She is a 1974 Mazda RX-3.

This is probably not the opening you expected from someone who usually writes about education.

Most of the time you meet me wearing my education hat. Consultant. Researcher. Advocate. Business owner. Today I wanted to introduce you to the other part of my life. The part that has quietly become one of my greatest teachers.

Every weekend (and if time permits at the end of a workday) I head into the workshop with a clear purpose, usually focused on one practical task that will move the restoration forward. It might involve straightening a sill, sanding out a ripple, finishing a repair, or working through a problem I haven’t yet solved. The goal never changes. Every small job brings this battered old girl one step closer to the day I can fire up that rotary engine and drive her on the road again after decades away.

To someone walking into the workshop, it probably looks like I’m restoring an old car.

I am. But what they can’t see is that something else is happening at exactly the same time.

The workshop where ideas are born

Over time, I’ve realised I have a very particular creative process.

It requires an old Mazda. Far too much body filler dust. At least one discovery that makes me question the life she had before I became her owner. A sanding block. And 1980s rock played at a volume that I’m reasonably confident audiologists would discourage.

There is also one non-negotiable requirement. I have to sing along. Badly.

Fortunately, my audience consists of a Mazda who has never once criticised either my taste in music or my complete inability to hold a tune.

Somewhere between AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses and trying to feather body filler into old steel, my brain quietly decides it’s ready to get to work.

Not on the car. On everything else. This is where keynote presentations begin, where coaching conversations untangle themselves. Its the start of my advocacy submissions and where articles like this one first appear.

The funny thing is that none of those ideas begin in my office. They begin here. In a workshop paint booth, surrounded by sandpaper, an air compressor, bog and primer.

Purpose without permission

One of the things I love most about restoring this car is that it isn’t a free-for-all. I don’t wander into the workshop wondering what I feel like doing. I have a goal. The work is purposeful and systematic. It requires planning, research, observation and persistence.

Sometimes I spend an entire afternoon on one panel, slowly reshaping it and bringing it back to how it would have once looked. Other times I discover that a repair completed decades ago needs to be undone before I can move forward.

Restoration is patient work. Most days, I leave without anything dramatic to show for my efforts. A panel fits a little better; a weld looks cleaner; a surface feels a little straighter than it did that morning. Often, the difference is barely visible to the naked eye. It takes a lightness of touch to recognise the moment when a panel has finally been restored to its former glory.

To anyone else, those gains might seem insignificant. To me, they represent progress.

I walk away knowing I’ve moved one small step closer to something that matters deeply to me. That feeling is profoundly satisfying, and not because I’ve finished. But because I know I’m becoming more capable than I was the day before.

And nobody has to make me go into the workshop. I don’t receive a reward for sanding another panel. I don’t have someone checking whether I’ve met the day’s objective and ticking it off on a matrix.

The work itself is enough.

The question that wouldn’t leave me alone

Earlier this week I found myself reflecting on an assumption that sits quietly beneath so much of education. An assumption that learning has a particular appearance. That it happens in a particular place, at a particular time, under particular conditions. These include children preferably being seated, quiet and inside the four walls of the classroom.

As I stood there covered in sanding dust, I realised how strange that assumption feels. Some of the most important professional work I ever do doesn’t happen sitting at my desk. It certainly doesn’t happen staring at a computer screen waiting for a bolt of inspiration. It happens while my hands are completely occupied doing something else.

Eventually those ideas find their way back to my office. They become reports, articles, presentations, phone calls or frameworks. People see the finished product and naturally assume that’s where the thinking happened.

But the office is where the thinking is captured, not where it began.

So - if I don’t do my best thinking sitting obediently at a desk, why are we so certain children must?

Learning or schooling?

The more I reflected, the more I realised we often talk about learning and schooling as though they are the same thing. But they aren’t.

• Schooling is a system. Learning is a human process.

• Schools need timetables. Learning doesn’t.

• Schools need classrooms. Learning doesn’t always.

• Schools need routines, organisation and structure.

Learning has a habit of appearing wherever curiosity, purpose, challenge and meaning collide.

Talk to a runner and they’ll tell you their best ideas arrive somewhere around kilometre six. A gardener will describe solving problems while pulling weeds. Writers often speak about ideas arriving in the shower or while walking the dog. And then there's that 3am idea that we lament not having written down at the time, after reawakening at 7am.

Most adults recognise this instinctively and we rarely question it. But then we arrive at school and somehow begin believing that children learn differently from the adults they will eventually become.

We expect thinking to begin because the timetable says it should. As though our brains notice the clock and quietly announce, “Excellent. It’s 9am. Time to start learning.”

That has never been my experience.

This week I spent hours restoring my old Mazda. To anyone walking past, it looked like I was working on a car. I was. I was also writing this article. I just hadn’t picked up the keyboard yet.

What schools are really for

None of this is an argument against schools. Schools matter enormously.

The question isn’t whether schools are important. The question is what they exist to do. Perhaps schools don’t need to become workshops. Or forests. Or playgrounds. Or garages filled with rotary Mazdas and terrible 1980s singing.

But perhaps they do need to become places that understand how human beings actually learn. Because learning has never belonged to a timetable. It has never cared much for desks. It has never waited patiently for permission to begin, or been limited to one hour a day per subject area. It has never been solely relegated to important text books or worksheets. It has always emerged where people find themselves absorbed by something meaningful.

These are places where learners have agency, can recognise their own progress, and experience challenge at a level that stretches them without becoming overwhelming. They leave with the satisfaction of knowing they have moved one small step closer to a goal that matters.

When I restore my Mazda, I’m learning constantly. Technical skills, problem solving, persistence, judgement, creativity and patience, just to name a few!

None of that learning is separate from the joy I experience. The joy is part of the reason the learning flourishes.

Perhaps we’ve become so focused on organising learning that we’ve started mistaking the organisation for the learning itself. Confusing the idea that learning equals sitting at desks, writing in special learning books or occurring at the ring of a special bell. They’re not the same thing.

Schooling exists to support learning. Not to replace it.

This morning I’ll be making the most of the last Friday of the school holiday break and will head back into the workshop.

There are many hours of sanding and panel beating waiting for me. There is most certainly more filler dust, more loud music, and more spectacularly bad singing.

Somewhere between all the sanding, solving and singing, another idea will quietly appear. Eventually I’ll carry it back to my office, where someone may assume that’s where the work happened, not realising just what had occurred to make that learning visible.

Perhaps learning has always depended less on its location or outward appearance than on the conditions that allow a person to become fully absorbed in something that holds genuine meaning for them. If schools exist to nurture learning, then surely our task is to protect and create more of those conditions, rather than narrowing our understanding of learning to the places and forms that are easiest to organise.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

Today the Minister of Education announced a major expansion of the ENRICH oral language programme, growing it from 65 early childhood services to 525 over the coming years, backed by $12.4 million from Budget 25 and targeting children from 18 months through to school entry. The announcement was framed around a concerning claim: that five year olds are arriving at school with the language skills of two year olds, with high levels of screen time at home named as a contributing factor.

Let me be clear from the outset. Any investment in the early years is welcome. The first five years of life do more to shape a learner’s trajectory than any other period, and they have been chronically under-resourced for decades. So when money flows toward children under five, and toward oral language in particular, that matters. It is also worth acknowledging that ENRICH is not an imported package. It grew from research at the University of Otago through the Kia Tīmata Pai study, developed and trialled here with New Zealand children.

But an announcement is not an outcome, and a programme is not a system. The questions that follow are not about ENRICH itself. They are about the conditions it is being planted into, because those conditions will determine whether this investment grows anything at all.

The condition no programme can compensate for

ENRICH works through interaction. Its unit of delivery is not a resource or a lesson but a sustained, responsive exchange between an adult and a child. That means its effectiveness is bounded by one simple question: how much genuine interactional time does each teacher actually have with each child?

Here the maths gets uncomfortable. Our ECE sector regulated minimum ratios sit at one adult to five children under two, and one to ten for children over two, in all-day services, stretching to one to fifteen in sessional settings. Many services operate at or near those minimums, not through any failure of will but because the funding model makes anything better difficult to sustain. Early years researchers and sector advocates have long argued that responsive caregiving for infants and toddlers requires something closer to one adult for every three children under two. ENRICH enters at 18 months, squarely into the age band where the gap between what the science asks of adults and what the ratios permit is at its widest.

Picture the serve and return exchange the research describes. A toddler offers a word, a gesture, a discovery, and the adult receives it, extends it, waits, and returns it. Now picture doing that with authenticity while four other 18 month olds also need you, right now, for feeding, comfort, nappies, safety and their own conversational offerings. Early years teachers I work with do not lack the desire for rich interaction. They lack the structural time and thinking space to be intentional about these interactions. Many of the concerns we later observe in five year olds, the very concerns this announcement responds to, trace back not to what teachers do not know but to how thinly their attention must be spread.

So here is the first question. As ENRICH scales, will its evaluation attend to the conditions under which it succeeds or struggles? A programme built on interaction quality cannot outrun an underfunded interactional environment. It would be a genuine loss if strong evidence about what children need became an argument that we have done enough, rather than an argument for resourcing the time that makes the practice possible. Announcing a programme is considerably cheaper than fixing ratios. It should not be mistaken for the same thing.

What about the resources we already have?

The Ministry has invested substantially in oral language over recent years. Te Kōrerorero | Talking Together sits freely available to every service. Kōwhiti Whakapae, the practice and progress tools spanning oral language and literacy, maths, and social and emotional learning, was developed specifically to help teachers notice, recognise and respond within our curriculum framework, with hard copies recently delivered to services across the country. He Māpuna te Tamaiti supports the social and emotional dimensions that the ENRICH trial itself found improved.

It would be easy to frame ENRICH as duplication. The more accurate picture is one of continuity, since some of the same researchers and implementers behind ENRICH contributed to the Ministry’s earlier oral language resources.

However continuity among the people involved does not automatically produce coherence for the teaching team in the room. So here is the second question. How will ENRICH be positioned alongside Kōwhiti Whakapae and Te Kōrerorero so that teachers experience one connected story about language and learning, rather than an accumulation of initiatives, each with its own resources, professional learning and expectations? Initiative fatigue is real in our sector, and it is the enemy of exactly the deep practice change this investment hopes to achieve. The hundreds of services joining this rollout deserve to know how the pieces fit together, and whose job it is to make them fit. If the answer is that nobody has thought about it yet, that tells us something about how this sector is planned for.

ENRICH inside Te Whāriki, not instead of it

Te Whāriki remains one of the most internationally respected early childhood curriculum frameworks in the world precisely because it refuses to reduce children to a schedule of skills. It is holistic, grounded in relationships, and built on the aspiration that children grow as competent and confident learners, secure in their identity, language and culture. Nothing in ENRICH’s underlying philosophy is at odds with that. Responsive conversation through play is Te Whāriki in action.

The risk is not the programme’s philosophy. The risk is implementation drift, the slow slide by which a programme’s fidelity requirements, assessment moments and resource sets begin to function as the curriculum, with Te Whāriki relegated to the poster on the wall behind them. We have watched versions of this movie in other jurisdictions, and increasingly in our own primary schools. The safeguard is not complicated, but it must be deliberate. ENRICH needs to be framed, resourced and evaluated explicitly as a way of enriching teacher practice within Te Whāriki, with the full breadth of its strands intact.

I would also note the framing that accompanied this announcement. Locating the problem primarily in screen time at home risks a deficit story about families, and describing five year olds as arriving with the language of two year olds risks a deficit story about children. Both framings sit awkwardly beside a curriculum whose starting point is the competence of the child and the aspirations of those who love them. The evidence for concern about language development may well be sound. The story wrapped around it matters, because teachers partner far more effectively with families who have been invited into a shared project than with families who have been implicitly blamed. Our youngest learners deserve better than to be introduced to the nation as a problem to be fixed.

The question that follows the logic

Here is what strikes me most about this announcement.

In backing ENRICH, the Government has endorsed a proposition that early years advocates have argued for decades: that children learn best through responsive relationships, rich conversation and play, met at their developmental level rather than marched to an external timetable. That is the beating heart of this programme, and the trial evidence cited in support of it, stronger oral language, better self regulation, improved early literacy and social skills, is evidence for exactly that proposition.

So here is the third question, and it is the one I most want answered. Why does this logic stop at the school gate? The refreshed New Zealand Curriculum moves in the opposite direction for the very same children just months later, toward year by year prescription and earlier formalisation. I anticipate the response, that both reflect a commitment to the science of learning, and I take it seriously. But it does not hold. The science ENRICH rests on is the science of responsive interaction, oral language and play as the engine of early learning and self regulation. That evidence does not expire on a child’s fifth birthday. If rich conversation and developmentally attuned teaching produce these gains at three and four, the burden of proof sits with those who believe five and six year olds suddenly need something structurally different. A child does not become a different kind of learner over the summer holidays between kindergarten and school.

The refreshed English curriculum makes this tension concrete. To be fair, oral language is not absent from the document. It appears as a named focus in the early years and as a component of the structured literacy approaches the curriculum mandates. But presence is not parity. Oral language sits in the curriculum largely as a servant of print, valued as the on-ramp to decoding and writing rather than as a literacy in its own right. The advisory thinking that shaped the redesign went further still, recommending that texts be defined exclusively as written material so that oral and visual modes would not draw time away from reading and writing. And the machinery of monitoring tells the real story. We check phonics. We assess writing. We report on reading. Nobody is measuring whether our eight year olds can hold a reasoned discussion, tell a story or argue a point aloud.

Which raises an awkward question about today’s announcement. If oral language matters enough to fund a national programme for our two, three and four year olds, why does it fade into an instrument the moment children start school? The implicit theory seems to be that ENRICH will finish the oral language job before age five, delivering children ready for the ‘real work’ of written literacy. That is not how language development works. Oral language is not a stage to be completed and signed off at school entry. It grows, or stalls, across the whole of childhood, and it remains the foundation on which comprehension, writing and thinking are built right through the school years. A programme at four cannot inoculate a child against an oral language desert at eight. If the Minister believes this investment is the panacea for oral language, the curriculum her own government has introduced quietly disagrees with her.

The transition to school is exactly where the gains this $12.4 million hopes to secure will either compound or evaporate. A government genuinely following its own evidence would be asking how the pedagogy it has just funded for four year olds carries through into the first years of school. That is the announcement I am still waiting to read.

Where this leaves us

Investment in the early years is always welcome, and the researchers and teachers who built this evidence base deserve every recognition coming their way. But the same recognisable pattern presents itself here. A programme is announced. The structural conditions beneath it go unaddressed. The announcement becomes the story, and the system rolls on unchanged.

So three questions, offered in good faith. Will we resource the adult time that interaction-based practice actually requires, specifically in relation to teacher:child ratios? Will teachers experience coherence rather than accumulation across the initiatives already in their hands? And will the developmental logic this programme embodies be allowed to follow our children through the school gate?

Programmes come and go. Conditions, coherence and curriculum are what endure. The measure of this investment will be whether it strengthens all three, and on that, the announcement is silent.

A footnote from the evening news

One last observation, offered with a smile. Watching the coverage on 1News tonight, there was the Minister, holding one of the ENRICH books up for the cameras. Clearly bilingual. Te reo Māori sitting proudly above the English. These are the resources the trial results were built on, the very evidence being celebrated in this announcement.

Readers with long memories will recall that this is the same Minister who, by her own account, once weighed up rewriting 27 decodable readers to strip out the Māori words beyond proper nouns. It seems the evidence has a sense of humour. The programme now fronting the Government’s early literacy story grew its results in books where both languages sit side by side on the page. Worth remembering, perhaps, the next time the presence of Māori words in children’s books is framed as an obstacle to literacy rather than part of it.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation



P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning



Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

In the past week, two educators have trusted me with stories that have been bravely shared, but incredibly hard to read.

One came from a teacher on the cusp of retirement after forty years in education. She described her early years of teaching favourably. The collegiality, the stimulation, the fun, the deep support given to her as a graduate teacher and the professional learning that set her on a lifelong path in literacy education. There was trust in teachers. There was play. There was a belief that children were whole people, arriving in classrooms with bodies, emotions, imaginations, social needs and intellectual possibilities.

Her final week of teaching has looked very different.

This experienced teacher described having to evacuate two classes because of violence. The children were six. She watched another experienced teacher resign to protect her own mental health after being left to manage persistent and unsafe behaviour without the depth of support needed to make any real difference. She described children who are dysregulated, disengaged and overstimulated while teachers are expected to deliver an increasingly narrow curriculum.

She shared that she “no longer recognises education”.

The second story came from a tertiary educator and facilitator. She has worked in classrooms, literacy facilitation, initial teacher education and assessment support. Her story carries a different kind of pain. She described the loss of work in literacy when particular versions of “structured literacy” and the “science of reading” became dominant in public and policy discourse. She was careful to acknowledge the importance of teachers understanding how sounds work in words and how words work in texts. She is not ‘anti-structured literacy’. Her concern was with the narrowing that followed. The loss of balance. The shrinking of pedagogical knowledge. The disappearance of common sense about the development of the whole child.

In her work with student teachers, she sees the consequences. Many students now enter school placements where teaching is mediated through slides, scripts and formulaic programmes. The rich practice discussed in tertiary workshops is often difficult for them to observe. They are learning about responsive pedagogy while being placed in classrooms where responsiveness has little room to breathe.

Her concerns mirror the recent media shared by others in the tertiary sector.

Her story also moved into assessment. She described feeling morally conflicted about work connected to Ministry priorities and said she tried to make the work meaningful by focusing with schools on the purpose of assessment and reporting for learners. She met schools where they were and worked to deepen their thinking, but the cost to her own wellbeing became too high. After a lifetime of work guided by moral purpose, she broke.

These stories are personal. They are also deeply recognisable.

I share these stories because I think they reveal something important about the emotional weather inside education right now. Beneath the debates about literacy, curriculum, assessment, behaviour and achievement sits a quieter layer of professional grief. In my itinerant role, moving in and out of classrooms and kura around Aotearoa, the story is the same. Teachers are exhausted. Demoralised and overwhelmed. The weather in their rooms, and across their schools - while they work hard to keep the sun shining, have a heavy atmosphere that those who know education well can recognise.

Many educators are grieving the loss of an education they still believe in.

That grief is easily misread. It can be framed as resistance to change, romantic nostalgia or professional defensiveness. I think that reading is too shallow. The educators who send me these stories are not afraid of learning. They have spent entire careers learning, adapting, mentoring and serving children. They have changed practice many times. They have carried new curriculum documents, assessment systems, behaviour approaches, digital tools, pedagogical movements and policy resets.

The grief I hear is more precise than commentators are framing up. It is not a dislike of change. It is not the holding on to ‘nostalgia’.

It is the grief of seeing children reduced to data points, reading groups, behavioural problems or curriculum delivery targets. It is the grief of watching play, the arts, drama, movement and story pushed to the margins when they are often the very experiences that help children become available for learning. It is the grief of knowing that relationships sit at the centre of effective teaching while policy settings continue to privilege pace, coverage and compliance.

There is also moral distress here.

Educators enter this profession with a strong sense of responsibility. They want to do right by children, whānau, colleagues and communities. When they are asked to participate in practices that sit awkwardly with what they know about children, development, learning and equity, something inside them begins to fracture. They can comply outwardly while feeling compromised inwardly. Over time, that gap becomes exhausting.

This is why the current sector mood in Aotearoa feels so raw.

Teachers and principals are carrying the accumulated weight of reform, workload, behaviour complexity, learning support shortages and public mistrust. Many are trying to make sense of curriculum changes while managing children whose needs have become more complex. Principals are being asked to lead improvement while absorbing a level of operational, emotional and political pressure that would strain any human being. Teachers are being told to raise achievement while the conditions that support deep learning are often the very conditions being squeezed.

The stories arriving in my inbox are not isolated laments. They are signals.

Even PISA is pointing toward flourishing

I keep thinking about the timing of all this because, internationally, the conversation about education is moving in an interesting direction. The OECD, the organisation behind PISA, has been advancing a framework for education for human flourishing. This matters because PISA has had such a powerful influence on global education policy. For decades, systems have looked to international comparisons of reading, mathematics and science as signals of educational quality. Those measures have shaped policy ambition, political rhetoric and public anxiety.

Now the OECD itself is talking about education in broader human terms.

Its Education for Human Flourishing work asks systems to think beyond a narrow human capital model. It speaks to purpose, fulfilment, human agency and the kinds of lives young people are being prepared to lead. It positions flourishing as a significant direction for future education policy and the ongoing development of PISA.

If even the authors of PISA are pointing toward human flourishing, then Aotearoa needs to be very careful about rushing further into narrowness. A system cannot claim to value flourishing while steadily removing the conditions that allow children and educators to experience it.

Flourishing is not an abstract ideal. In education, it has very practical requirements.

Children flourish when they are known deeply by adults who have time to notice them. They flourish when curriculum is meaningful, relational and connected to their lives. They flourish when there is room for curiosity and for sustained attention. They flourish when their bodies, cultures, languages, interests and identities are not treated as interruptions to learning.

Educators flourish under conditions that allow professional judgement to be exercised with integrity. They need trust, time, relational safety and access to meaningful support. They need leaders who are not drowning. They need assessment practices that illuminate learning rather than flatten it. They need curriculum that leaves space for children to encounter the world with wonder and seriousness. They need policy settings that respect complexity.

Teacher and principal flourishing cannot sit on the edge of the conversation as a wellbeing extra. It is foundational infrastructure.

The OECD has also recognised teacher wellbeing as a systems issue, particularly in the context of shortages, turnover and the declining attractiveness of teaching. Its work on teachers’ occupational wellbeing links the quality of working environments with the wellbeing of teachers and the quality of teaching. That is hardly surprising to anyone who has worked in a school, but it is significant when stated at system level.

A depleted teacher cannot keep producing relational abundance forever. A principal under sustained pressure cannot endlessly absorb complexity without consequence.A facilitator whose moral compass is repeatedly strained cannot remain whole simply because the contract says the work must be done.

We need to talk more honestly about the human cost of the current direction of travel.

This does not mean rejecting explicit teaching. It does not mean abandoning evidence, assessment or accountability. It does mean refusing to let any one policy movement, programme or ideological frame consume the whole educational landscape. Children need skilled literacy teaching. They also need play, conversation, movement, art, agency, time, belonging and adults who are well enough to respond to them with wisdom.

The retiring teacher’s story reminds me that education can be joyful, demanding and deeply purposeful. She began her career in a system that invested in her, trusted her and allowed her to build a love of literacy through professional learning and collegial practice. She leaves still believing in children and still committed to creativity, imagination, drama and story.

The tertiary educator’s story reminds me that professional conscience is one of the most important resources we have in education. When thoughtful educators begin choosing their words carefully because balance has become dangerous, we should pay attention. When people who have given decades to learners begin taking unpaid leave to recover from moral distress, we should pay attention.

These stories ask something of us.

They ask us to listen beneath the policy language. They ask us to notice the grief inside the profession. They ask us to stop treating educator wellbeing as a personal resilience project when so much of the harm is being produced by system conditions.

Most of all, they ask us to remember that human flourishing begins with humans.

If we want children to flourish, the adults around them need conditions that allow them to think, breathe, create, respond and remain whole. They need to be trusted as knowledgeable professionals. They need to work in systems that make moral sense.

The two educators who wrote to me still believe in education. That is what makes their stories so powerful. They are not walking away from children. They are telling us what happens when a system loses sight of the people who hold it together.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

A budget is a statement of priorities, and Budget 2026 has stated them plainly. After two years aimed at primary literacy and maths, the headline money this year moved to secondary: the rebuild of NCEA and the new senior curriculum. Primary, meanwhile, received a $136.9 million package of maths and literacy materials, assessments and professional development, framed around the Government’s target of 80 percent of students at curriculum level by 2030.

The question this piece asks is not whether any of those things are useful. Some are. It is whether they are what primary classrooms actually needed this year, and whether the children who are hardest to teach were anywhere in the Minister’s thinking when the money was allocated.

A word for our secondary colleagues

A nod across the fence first. Secondary teachers are being handed an overhaul most of them did not ask for. NCEA is to be scrapped and replaced from 2028 with two new qualifications, a return to compulsory external exams in every subject, fewer internally assessed subjects and a new A-to-E grading scale. None of this was the change the profession was calling for. The New Zealand Association for the Teaching of English has said plainly that it wanted NCEA strengthened, not replaced. For all its faults, it was working. The Principals’ Federation, alongside 88 industry leaders, has urged the Government to pause, describing the process as rushed and frantic, and education leaders have called the pace reckless. By any fair reading, the reception has been scathing. The funding attached to it, roughly $20 million in professional development for around 32,000 teachers, is thin for the scale of disruption being imposed.

The exam-weighted model also carries a warning that belongs here. The students most disadvantaged by a shift toward high-stakes external examination are precisely those who do not perform on demand in an exam room: many learners with additional needs, and those who do their best work in collaborative or applied settings. A qualifications system built around the exam tends to sort out the very children the rest of this Budget is silent about. Funding that rebuild while leaving their support unfunded is not two unrelated decisions. It is the same blind spot showing up twice.

What primary actually got

Strip the primary package back to its components and a pattern emerges. Around $29.7 million covers maths hubs, hands-on maths kits for every Year 0 to 8 classroom, a new times-table and division check, plus 36 additional maths teachers. Some $38.7 million provides writing and tuhituhi workbooks for more than 130,000 Year 4 to 5 students and a universal digital writing tool for over 200,000 older students. A further $19.4 million funds decodable readers, an end-of-Year-2 literacy check and new literacy programmes. Then $43.5 million for professional development, and $5.6 million for music instrument kits, an average of $2,000 each, sent to roughly 2,160 schools.

Look at what is being bought. The overwhelming majority of this money purchases things: kits, workbooks, decodables, digital tools, checks and the training to use them. Of the entire primary package, the only line that puts additional adults in front of children is the 36 maths teachers, lifting the national pool from 143 to 179 full-time-equivalents across every primary and intermediate school in the country.

Thirty-six people. That is the human capacity this Budget adds to the primary classroom.

Resources nobody was begging for, while the real need goes unmet

Much of what was outlined in the Budget (the workbooks, the times-table checks, the prescriptive materials) was not what the profession was asking for. Teachers have not been short of worksheets. They have been short of the people and the time to teach the children who cannot access a worksheet in the first place.

We know what that gap looks like, because we documented it. Still Beyond Capacity, published this month, found schools absorbing learning-support shortfalls that dwarf their funding: one Auckland school receiving $68,000 and spending $238,000; another spending $430,000 on teacher aides and still unable to meet demand. It recorded a non-speaking autistic child who survived a choking incident only because a trained adult happened to be in the room. The pressure sits heaviest on the “missing middle”: children whose needs exceed what a mainstream classroom can manage but fall below the thresholds that unlock support. These children are overwhelmingly in primary classrooms, right now.

A structured writing workbook does not help a student who cannot yet regulate enough to sit down. A times-table check does not de-escalate a crisis. A music kit, however lovely, does not keep a dysregulated child and the twenty-five around them safe and learning. The Budget has invested in the curriculum a child is expected to access while remaining largely silent on whether that child can be kept in the room to access it.

It is worth putting the materials spend in the unit that matters in a classroom: teacher aide hours. At the teacher aide rate of $35 an hour, the $38.7 million spent on writing workbooks and the digital writing tool would pay for around 1.1 million hours of teacher aide support. The $5.6 million for music kits is about another 160,000 hours. These are rough ceilings rather than a precise count, since the real cost of employing someone runs a little above the headline wage, but as a measure of priorities they are stark. The Minister chose laminated resources over hours of human support, disregarding the call from the sector about what need is most pressing for schools.

To be fair to the package: explicit teaching has an evidence base, structured literacy can help readers, and building teacher capability is not wasted money. The criticism is not that these things are worthless. It is one of sequence and proportion. When the binding constraint in a classroom is whether there is an adult available to keep every child safe and engaged, spending the year’s primary money on universal products and new assessments, most of them unrequested, is a misreading of the actual problem. You cannot resource your way to higher achievement by ignoring the children least able to reach it.

And the foundation we keep refusing to fund

If the Government were serious about children being engaged in education, it would start where engagement itself begins: the early years. Instead, early childhood education received a 1.5 percent increase to most funding rates, and kindergartens less than half of that, at 0.48 percent.

Set that against inflation. Te Rito Maioha notes that this 1.5 percent sits against CPI of 3.1 percent, and that it follows a 2 percent increase against 4 percent inflation in 2024 and a 0.5 percent increase against 2.5 percent in 2025. Three consecutive years in which funding has gone backwards in real terms. NZEI Te Riu Roa’s analysis puts ECE funding more than 13.5 percent behind inflation since 2020. This is not a sector being supported; it is a sector being asked to do more each year with less.

The consequence is precisely the thing the rest of this Budget claims to care about. The early years are where additional needs first become visible, where early intervention is cheapest and most effective, and where the foundations for later engagement are laid. Underfund that, and children arrive at school with needs unidentified and unsupported, needs that then land on already-stretched primary classrooms where, as we have seen, the support is not funded either. The Government has built a pipeline of unmet need and then declined to fund either end of it.

A serious commitment to engagement would mean a long-term ECE workforce strategy, better teacher-child ratios and a funding model that keeps pace with the real cost of quality. A cost-of-living adjustment that does not even cover the cost of living is not that.

Ordering off the shelf

Across early years and primary, the same instinct runs through this Budget: fund products and assessments over people. Buy the workbook, build the check, ship the kit, but do not fund the adult who makes any of it reachable for the children who need the most help.

The children at the centre of Still Beyond Capacity will not be reached by a tuhituhi workbook or a times-table app. They will be reached by skilled, present, properly funded adults. That is what the sector has been asking for, consistently and with evidence. It is, once again, the one thing this Budget chose not to buy.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

Yesterday I spoke at Parliament on behalf of the Aotearoa Educators Collective to launch Still Beyond Capacity: Learning Support in Aotearoa After the 2025 Budget. The report asks whether the Government’s 2025 learning support investment has changed the daily reality for children, whānau and educators. The answer from schools across Aotearoa is clear and deeply concerning. Many children are still waiting for the support they need, schools are still stretching limited resources to meet complex needs and educators are still carrying the human cost of a system under sustained pressure. The speech below was written to honour those voices and to bring the reality of learning support from policy settings back into the classrooms where its impact is felt every day.

Launch Speech: Still Beyond Capacity

Parliament, Wellington | May 2026

I want to start with a smell. One I’m sure you’re all familiar with. That smell of a sausage sizzle.

A Friday afternoon barbecue outside the school hall.

For many schools, that once meant celebration. Families arriving. Children running between tables. A community raising money for camp or helping someone through a hard season.

Today, one of the principals who contributed to this work described that same scene very differently. The barbecue now helps cover wages.

Disco entry fees help pay for teacher aide time. Raffles around Mother’s Day now carry the weight of staffing decisions. That school, like many others across Aotearoa, has had to pull back from helping its community because essential support inside the school now depends on community fundraising.

That is the reality this report brings into view.

This report connects policy, resourcing and public commitments to the daily experience of children and schools.

It examines the distance between promise and delivery. The work we are sharing today is grounded in lived reality. It shows the practical, human effect of learning support operating beyond its capacity.

That distance shows up in classrooms, in staffroom conversations and in the children still waiting for support.

We see it in a child who spent a full term in the school office instead of a classroom. For ten weeks, a member of the senior leadership team supported him because the school had no classroom placement that could safely meet his needs. He needed skilled, consistent support that the system had not yet provided.

Another example is a seven-year-old boy nearing the point where Ministry speech-language support may end. His needs are increasing while his confidence is falling. His whānau are paying privately for half-hour appointments when they can manage it, even though that support should be available as part of his right to education.

A five-year-old girl shows the same pressure in another form. She has brightness, potential, an ASD diagnosis and no ORS funding. Her teacher put the reality plainly: “I am trying to fill a canyon with a teaspoon.”

That teacher leaves school worn down in body and spirit. Her commitment is clear; the demands in that classroom exceed what one person can carry safely for long.

This report was built from people who were generous enough to be honest, including when that honesty was painful. It draws on principals writing late at night, learning support coordinators spending their days responding to crisis after crisis and teacher aides carrying safety-critical responsibilities for pay that does not reflect the skill or risk involved.

The voice in this room today belongs to them.

One teacher aide saved a child’s life last year. A non-speaking five-year-old with Pica choked on a small thread during lunch. His key worker was close enough to act. She cleared his airway. He survived.

She is paid less than the living wage. Her position is uncertain. The funding model that shapes whether her job exists next year remains unresolved.

This report was written to hold decision-makers to account: those responsible for policy design, budget approval and public claims of historic change.

The report we are sharing today is grounded in lived reality. It reaches beyond figures, funding lines and policy language to show what happens in the space between promise and delivery. That space is real. You can recognise it in the smell of sausages cooking to pay for support staff, in the sound of a dysregulated child trying to get through the day and in the face of a child waiting for help that has not arrived.

People in a wide range of schools, communities and resourcing contexts are naming the same reality.

The system has not changed in the ways children, educators and whānau urgently need.

Now, I want to acknowledge something directly.

The government will point to the timeline. And yes, a timeline does exist. Learning Support Coordinator rollout continues through 2027. Additional teacher aide hours come later. Meaningful system change at this scale takes time. We recognise that addressing complexity requires careful implementation.

In May 2025, this government stood up and called that budget a “seismic shift”. “Transformational. The largest investment in learning support in a generation”. Those words do not describe a slow and phased administrative process. They signal a fundamental shift or change in the system.

For many schools, one year later, children, teachers and whānau have not yet experienced the promised shift.

A principal told me yesterday that her school has received none of the money it expected from the 2025 Budget.

Other principals described similar realities: little practical change, no visible impact for their communities and no meaningful movement in the daily experience of learning support.

These are experienced school leaders who understand that systems take time to change. They are telling us that the distance between the language of transformation and the reality on the ground is measured in more than months. For many, it is measured in years. For the children in their care right now, those years are their childhood.

We also need to be honest about the workforce challenge sitting underneath the Budget commitments.

Even where funding has been allocated for specialist roles, money alone cannot immediately create the trained professionals required.

Schools across Aotearoa are struggling to access psychologists, speech-language therapists and specialist support workers. Funding has been signalled. The next challenge is building the professional workforce needed to meet the scale of need.

Waitlists remain. Existing relationships have been disrupted. In some schools, the educational psychologist who once understood the children and community context has gone. No replacement has arrived.

A funded role only becomes real for children when a trained specialist is available to do the work. A child with complex needs cannot wait for a workforce pipeline to catch up.

And finally, there is another layer of this reality that the Budget did not reach adequately.

The system is failing the children we have been describing. It is failing tamariki in kura kaupapa Māori even more deeply.

In te reo Māori, validated screening and diagnostic tools are almost absent. Kura contributing to the report are developing their own approaches because appropriate tools are not available elsewhere.

A tamaiti who may be identified quickly in an English-medium setting can remain unseen for months or years in a kura. Their kaiako may see the need clearly while the system lacks the tools to recognise and respond to it.

Specialist support through te reo Māori is also unreliable. When help arrives, it often lacks the language knowledge or cultural grounding needed to work well for kaupapa Māori education.

The Budget invested in additional specialist roles, yet te reo Māori capability does not appear to be a required feature of that workforce. Greater numbers will improve equity for tamariki in kura only when specialists are prepared to work through te reo Māori and within kaupapa Māori settings.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi affirms Māori authority over the education and wellbeing of tamariki in their own language, culture and kaupapa. Learning support that cannot identify, assess or respond through te reo Māori falls short of that responsibility.

The recent weakening of school boards’ statutory Te Tiriti duties, shifting them from an equal primary duty into a supporting objective, sends a troubling message about whose needs are centred by the system.

Inclusion must reach every child. Every single one.

The sector is asking for honesty about where we are and urgency about where we need to go next.

Before I finish, I want to leave you with what the sector said they would do if they were Minister for a day. In our 2025 Beyond Capacity report, we asked respondents what they would do if they were Minister for the Day - and we posed this question again for this 2026 report.

They named practical, honest changes that would make an immediate difference.

The first priority is to repair the way teacher aide support is funded. Classrooms need trained, supported adults who are paid properly for the work they do with teachers. Inclusive education depends on that basic condition.

A second priority is fund the ‘missing middle’ - learners who sit between the current support tiers. The system must serve learners whose needs fall just beneath current eligibility cut-offs. Those children are equally deserving, even when the system sees them less clearly.

The specialist workforce also needs sustained investment. That means building the pipeline, growing the profession and ensuring specialists can work with tamariki through te reo Māori and in ways grounded in kaupapa Māori. This capability should be treated as a baseline requirement.

Finally, schools need a national plan. That means a real mechanism for consulting with schools about what is actually happening on the ground and what is needed in order to serve their communities effectively and inclusively.

Success should be measured by the experience of every child across languages, communities and classrooms throughout Aotearoa. Not media announcements and soundbites.

The educators who contributed to this report remain deeply committed. They are exhausted, frustrated and in some cases grieving. They still showed up to be counted because they believe this can be different.

But belief and budget announcements now need to be matched by delivery children can feel.

The children in our classrooms, our tamariki, cannot wait another year to find out whether delivery will match the promise.

Ngā mihi koutou.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

I wish this felt less familiar.

RNZ has reported that children’s enjoyment of reading, writing and maths has dropped. The story draws on Curriculum Insights data showing that more children are saying they do not like these learning areas, and more are saying they do not feel good at them. Among Year 8 students, dislike of reading has doubled since 2019. Dislike of maths has also more than doubled since 2018.

No educator wants to be right about children losing joy.

The point of warning about a narrowing curriculum, high-stakes measurement and an overly mechanical view of learning was never to win an argument later. The point was to prevent exactly this.

I have written before about the danger of confusing a tidy metric with genuine progress. In Tremendous Progress: When Education Data Starts Talking Like Trump, I questioned the way partial education data can be used to create political confidence long before the deeper story is known. In The Illusion of Success in New Zealand Education, I wrote about the temptation to treat narrow indicators as proof of system-wide improvement.

This latest report should make us pause.

Children are reporting lower enjoyment in the very areas receiving the most policy pressure. Reading, writing and mathematics have become the centre of national reform efforts, yet many children appear to be experiencing these learning areas as less enjoyable and less personally attainable.

That matters profoundly.

Enjoyment is sometimes treated as a decorative extra in education, something nice to have once the serious work has been done. In reality, children’s relationship with learning shapes how they attend, persist, practise and return. A child’s sense of themselves as a reader cannot be separated from the technical work of reading for long. The code matters. Fluency matters. Vocabulary and comprehension matter. So does the child’s growing belief that reading is worth the effort.

That distinction keeps getting lost.

A child who can decode words has learned something important. A child who reaches for a book, talks about it, argues with it, returns to it and begins to recognise themselves as a reader has learned something larger. Literacy lives in that larger space. It includes mechanics, meaning, identity and desire.

The current conversation has spent enormous energy on how reading is taught. Much less attention has gone to the kind of reader our system is producing.

The RNZ data gives us a glimpse of that deeper question. Children are telling us how learning feels. Their answers deserve more than a shrug, a press release or another round of fidelity checks.

Reading is a relationship, as well as a skill

There is a strange thinness in much of the public conversation about reading at the moment.

Of course children need explicit, systematic teaching. Of course they need to understand how the alphabetic code works. Of course they need opportunities to develop fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. None of that should be controversial.

The concern is what gets crowded out when the conversation becomes too narrow.

Reading is never just the mechanical conversion of print to sound. It is also the making of meaning. It is the development of attention. It is the building of background knowledge. It is a relationship between text and self, text and world, text and other people.

A child becomes a reader through skill, practice and identity. Leave one of those undernourished and the whole structure becomes fragile.

The National Reading Panel’s work is often used to justify a particular emphasis on phonics, and phonics has a clear place in early reading instruction. Yet even that work identified several major components of reading instruction, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. A full reading life reaches further again, into motivation, access, time, choice and culture.

That is where the disposition of the reader becomes so important.

Dispositions are not fluffy. They are the tendencies children develop over time: to persist, to wonder, to reach for a book, to reread, to ask questions, to see themselves as capable, to take pleasure in effort. These dispositions are built through repeated experiences. They grow in classrooms where reading has value beyond task completion.

Children learn what reading is by the way adults organise it.

If reading is mainly something timed, tested and corrected, children notice. If books are treated as vehicles for evidence extraction, children notice. If independent reading is squeezed because it does not produce an immediate data point, children notice. If choice disappears, children notice.

They may not describe the system in those terms. They may simply say, “I don’t like reading.”

That sentence should worry us.

Joy belongs inside the learning process

Joy in learning is often misunderstood. It gets mistaken for entertainment, looseness or a lack of seriousness. That misunderstanding does real damage.

The joy I am talking about is more serious than fun. It is the satisfaction of growing competence. It is the pull of curiosity. It is the emotional safety to take a risk. It is the pleasure of understanding something that once felt out of reach.

Neuroscience keeps reminding us that learning is not a purely cognitive transaction. Attention, emotion, motivation and memory are entangled. Children learn through nervous systems, bodies, relationships and environments.

A classroom drained of joy may still produce compliance. It may even produce short-term gains on narrow measures. The longer-term cost is harder to capture, although children often show it plainly through avoidance, disengagement and the quiet conclusion that a subject is simply “not for me.”

That is a devastating outcome in reading.

Reading depends on volume. Children get better at reading by reading. They read more when they want to read, when they have access to books that speak to them, when they are given time to build stamina, when adults help them find texts that feel meaningful.

Motivation and achievement feed each other over time. A system that lifts decoding while weakening the desire to read has created a fragile version of progress.

New Zealand research into children’s reading for pleasure has shown a strong relationship between enjoyment and frequency. In one Growing Up in New Zealand analysis, children who very much enjoyed reading had much higher odds of reading frequently. That finding should surprise no one who has spent time with children and books. Enjoyment draws children back. Repeated reading builds competence. Competence can strengthen enjoyment.

There is a living loop there, and policy should be careful not to break it.

The warning is decades old

Guy Claxton was writing about this years ago in What’s the Point of School? His concern was never simply that schools assess children. Assessment has a place. The deeper concern was what happens when the logic of testing begins to shape the culture of learning.

Claxton argued for schools that cultivate powerful learners: children who ask questions, think for themselves and develop the confidence to keep learning beyond school. His critique of stressful exams and regurgitated knowledge feels painfully relevant in the current moment.

The research he refers to about ten-year-olds in the UK should feel uncomfortably familiar now. Decades ago, children were already showing the effects of high-stakes assessment: reduced engagement, a narrowed experience of learning and a growing tendency to see reading through the lens of performance.

The detail belongs to another country and another era. The pattern is recognisable.

That is the part that should unsettle us most. We are not encountering a brand-new problem. We are repeating an old one with new branding.

When assessment becomes the dominant signal of value, children learn the signal. They notice what counts. They notice what gets squeezed or skipped. Reading for pleasure becomes vulnerable because it is harder to quantify. Deep discussion becomes vulnerable because it takes time. Teacher judgement becomes vulnerable because it cannot be packaged as neatly as a standardised score.

None of this requires bad intentions. A system can be full of people trying to improve outcomes and still create conditions that make learning feel smaller.

The mistake is choosing a narrow idea of success

The public has been told repeatedly that literacy and numeracy need urgent attention. That is true. Too many children are not experiencing the success they deserve, and we should care deeply about that.

The problem comes when urgency turns into simplification.

A narrow response can look decisive. It can produce attractive dashboards, clear talking points and neat implementation timelines. It can reassure the public that something concrete is being done.

Children’s experience may tell a more complicated story.

If achievement rises on a narrow measure while enjoyment falls, we need to ask what kind of progress we are seeing. If children can perform a skill under assessment conditions yet avoid the subject in their own time, the result deserves careful interpretation. If teachers feel pressured to protect the metric rather than protect the learner, something has gone wrong at the level of system design.

This is especially important in reading, because the long game matters.

A ten-year-old who dislikes reading may still be able to complete a comprehension task. That same child may avoid books whenever choice is available. Over time, avoidance has consequences. Less reading means fewer encounters with vocabulary, syntax, ideas and perspectives. It means less practice building stamina. It can mean fewer chances to experience reading as a source of comfort, knowledge or independence.

A system serious about literacy has to care about the child’s relationship with reading.

That relationship is shaped every day in classrooms, homes, libraries and communities. It is shaped by whether children have access to books that reflect them and stretch them. It is shaped by whether reading time is protected. It is shaped by whether teachers have professional space to respond to the children in front of them. It is shaped by whether policy trusts the complexity of learning.

Children are giving us data of another kind

The RNZ article matters because children are telling us something that standard achievement data cannot fully show.

They are telling us about the emotional climate of learning.

They are telling us about confidence.

They are telling us about whether reading, writing and maths feel like places where they can belong.

That data is easy to minimise because it does not look as authoritative as a score. Yet any teacher knows how much it matters. The child who has decided they are “bad at maths” brings that belief into the next lesson. The child who sees writing as humiliation brings that expectation to the blank page. The child who associates reading with pressure brings tension to the text before the first sentence has even begun.

These are learning conditions.

Treating them as peripheral is educationally reckless.

Achievement and enjoyment should not be placed in competition with each other. Children deserve both. They deserve explicit teaching and rich experiences. They deserve knowledge and wonder. They deserve practice and purpose.

The system has to become mature enough to hold that complexity.

What we should be asking now

The question is no longer whether children need strong teaching in reading, writing and maths. They do.

A better question is whether our current approach is building the conditions that make long-term learning more likely.

Are children becoming more confident?

Do they have time to read widely?

Can they choose books that interest them?

Are teachers able to respond to motivation as well as accuracy?

Does assessment inform teaching without taking over the life of the classroom?

Are we protecting the dispositions that help children keep learning when no one is measuring them?

These questions matter because education is not only about what children can produce on demand. It is also about what they carry with them.

A child who leaves primary school technically capable but emotionally alienated from reading has been poorly served. A child who can complete a maths task yet feels maths is a place of anxiety has been poorly served. A child who writes only to satisfy a marking rubric has been poorly served.

We can do better than that.

Here we are again

I keep coming back to the sadness of this moment.

The decline in enjoyment was predictable. Teachers have been warning about it. Researchers have been warning about it. Many of us have written about it in different ways, from different angles, for years.

Now the children are saying it clearly.

The response should be thoughtful rather than defensive. It should invite a wider conversation about what counts as evidence, what kind of progress we value and what sort of learners we hope children become.

Reading instruction needs rigour. It also needs life.

Writing instruction needs structure. It also needs voice.

Mathematics instruction needs clarity. It also needs curiosity.

The future of learning in Aotearoa cannot be built on a shrinking emotional landscape. Children need to feel capable, connected and engaged in the very areas we claim to value most.

So I do not want to say I told you so.

I would much rather say: we still have time to listen.

Children are telling us something important about the emotional life of learning. The research has been telling us for decades. Teachers have been noticing it in classrooms long before it reached a headline.

If the goal is genuine literacy, then the question cannot stop at whether children can read the words in front of them. We also have to ask whether they are becoming people who choose to read, who feel at home in books, who see reading as part of how they learn, think and live.

That is a larger ambition than a lift in a narrow score.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

Today the Government announced $131 million for literacy and numeracy. Reading, writing and maths matter deeply. Every child deserves strong foundation skills, and every school wants learners to succeed.

The real question is whether this investment will reach the children who are struggling most in the way they actually need.

For many tamariki, difficulty with reading, writing or maths is a visible sign of something deeper. A child may be dyslexic, autistic, anxious, traumatised, disabled, struggling to communicate, unable to regulate, or learning in an environment that does not yet fit them well enough.

Achievement data can tell us who is behind. It cannot, on its own, tell us why.

That distinction matters, because a one-size-fits-all response will miss too many learners. A new assessment may identify low writing achievement, but it will not provide communication support. A workbook may give extra practice, but it will not help a child manage overwhelm. A digital tool may track progress, but it will not notice the learner who has quietly shut down.

In last year’s Budget, the Minister of Education announced what was described as the biggest boost to learning support in a generation. That Budget acknowledged what schools experience every day: children are waiting too long for help, specialist services are stretched, teacher aide hours are under pressure, and teachers are carrying increasingly complex needs without enough support around them.

That diagnosis was sound.

The next step should be faster delivery.

The Government has already committed to more Learning Support Coordinators, more early intervention, more teacher aide hours, more speech language therapists, psychologists, occupational therapists and specialist support for children with complex needs. The new $131 million could accelerate that work into classrooms and early childhood services now.

It could bring Learning Support Coordinators in sooner. It could increase teacher aide hours before the later stages of the rollout. It could help clear early intervention waitlists. It could strengthen the specialist workforce pipeline. It could fund practical learning support expertise in dyslexia, autism, ADHD, trauma, communication, behaviour, disability and neurodiversity.

That would do more than respond to low achievement. It would address the conditions that often sit beneath it.

Schools are facing a compounding crisis. Learning needs are no longer isolated or occasional. In many classrooms, communication needs, neurodiversity, anxiety, trauma, disability, behavioural distress, attendance challenges and gaps in learning sit alongside one another.

When support is delayed, small barriers grow. A child waiting for speech language support may fall further behind in writing. A learner who cannot regulate may miss the maths teaching that would help them progress. A student with unidentified dyslexia may experience repeated failure until confidence and engagement are damaged.

By the time low achievement appears in the data, the need has often already deepened.

This is why the Government’s $131 million literacy and numeracy package feels misdirected. Schools do not need more ways to confirm that children are struggling. They need more capacity to respond while learning is actually happening.

That is where the call for a teacher aide in every classroom matters.

This proposal is practical, immediate and directly connected to achievement. A teacher aide changes what is possible inside the room where learning happens.

They can repeat instructions, support a child to re-enter a task, help a learner access text, adapt an activity, practise a nearly-mastered skill with a small group, and keep a child connected before frustration becomes failure.

That support contributes directly to literacy and numeracy progress.

A teacher aide in every classroom would support learners with identified needs and improve the learning conditions for the wider class. It would give teachers more capacity to teach, make small-group support easier to sustain, strengthen inclusion, and reduce the daily trade-offs teachers face when several learners need different forms of help at the same time.

This is achievement infrastructure.

NZEI Te Riu Roa has identified that putting a teacher aide in every classroom would have a significant impact on achievement outcomes. That makes sense to anyone who has spent time in a classroom. Achievement grows through relationships, repetition, adaptation, encouragement, careful noticing and timely support.

The Government will argue that the $131 million targets children who are not meeting expectations in literacy and numeracy. But targeting achievement data alone risks missing the diverse reasons children are struggling.

Low achievement does not have one cause. A standard response will leave too many learners under-supported.

The better investment is the one the Government has already begun to describe through its own learning support Budget: more skilled adults around children, earlier and closer to the classroom.

That means teacher aides, Learning Support Coordinators, early intervention specialists, speech language therapists, psychologists, occupational therapists and specialist teachers working together so that literacy and numeracy teaching can actually land.

If achievement is the goal, people are the strategy.

The $131 million announced today could go a long way toward getting the Government’s own learning support goals into schools faster. It could bring forward teacher aide hours, speed up the rollout of Learning Support Coordinators, reduce waits for specialist support, and help schools respond to the needs that sit behind many literacy and numeracy struggles.

One of the clearest steps should be available as a result of this funding: a teacher aide in every classroom.

That is where this money should go.

Fund the teacher aides. Bring the learning support workforce into schools faster. Give children support that fits while learning is happening.

That is how literacy and numeracy improve.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

There is a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep.

It is the tired of being asked to do more with less, to implement what contradicts what you know, to absorb the shock of each new directive before the last one has settled. It is the tired of caring deeply, professionally and wholly while the system around you seems to be designed for something other than children.

If you are a teacher, a principal, a leader, a SENCO or a board member navigating 2026 in Aotearoa, this is for you. Because I see you, and I think you need someone to say plainly: the chaos you are swimming in is not a personal failing. It is a policy environment.

But I also want to ask you something.

What hill will you die on?

The Weight of Now

Let us be honest about what is on your plate right now, because I don’t think it is often named all at once.

You are being asked to implement a curriculum that many of our most experienced educators believe does not accurately reflect what we know about how children learn. Not in its depth, not in its pace and not in its cultural foundations. A curriculum that was developed without meaningful co-construction with Māori, that has been described by Māori principals and leaders at a recent Waitangi Tribunal urgent hearing as nothing short of the recolonisation of education.

That is not a fringe view. Bruce Jepsen, who leads Te Akatea, the national association of Māori school principals and leaders, has warned that the curriculum changes being introduced will erode progress made in education for Māori by as much as fifty years. These are people who dedicated careers to building something. They are watching it be dismantled.

The Waitangi Tribunal heard urgent claims from Northland iwi Ngāti Hine, hapū Te Kapotai and NZEI Te Riu Roa, the country’s largest education union, challenging changes to the Education and Training Act 2020 that removed the legal requirement for school boards to give effect to Te Tiriti, as well as the reset of Te Mātaiaho and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. The claimants are not being dramatic. More than 1800 kura, around 70 percent of all schools in New Zealand, have publicly reaffirmed their commitment to giving effect to Te Tiriti regardless of the legislative change. That is not compliance. That is conscience.

The Education and Training Amendment Act 2025 removed an explicit obligation on school boards to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, replacing it with language about “equitable outcomes” and “reflecting New Zealand’s cultural diversity.” The wording sounds almost reasonable, until you sit with what was lost. A covenant of care. A legislative spine. A reason to prioritise tamariki Māori that did not rely on the goodwill of whoever happened to be sitting on your local board.

Leaders from Te Akatea have noted a wider pattern of actions seeking to reduce te reo, tikanga and mātauranga Māori in schools, including the discontinuation of culturally responsive initiatives like the Māori Education Collaborative and Huia Kaimanawa, and the removal of funding for Te Ahu o Te Reo Māori. These weren’t abstract programmes. They were the scaffolding that allowed many of us to do this work well.

And then there are the assessment requirements. From the start of 2026, schools are required to use the Phonics Check and to assess Year 3 to 8 students twice yearly in Reading, Writing and Maths using specified tools, with SMART (the Student Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting Tool) now available for use. Alongside this sit Progress Indicators and report card rubrics that, as the Aotearoa Educators Collective has so precisely documented, are pulling in fundamentally different directions. A curriculum that promises knowledge, assessment tools that measure a narrow slice of it and reporting rubrics that ultimately judge something else entirely. Not what was taught, but independence, disposition and confidence. Teachers are left in an impossible position, having spent a year teaching knowledge explicitly and systematically, only to be asked to translate all of that professional expertise into a descriptor framework that does not ask about any of it.

There is also the attendance regime. From Term 1 2025, schools were to use revised attendance codes to record and report daily student attendance data every single day schools are open for instruction. For many families navigating housing insecurity, health complexity, intergenerational trauma or simply the grinding weight of hard lives, this system does not see their reality. It counts their absences. It does not count the courage it took to get their child to school three days out of five. It does not count what you did in those three days to make school feel worth coming back to.

In November 2025, the government announced it would move the Teaching Council’s responsibility for standard-setting and initial teacher education to the Ministry of Education and also change its governing body so that a majority of members would be ministerial appointees. A move teacher unions described as a ministerial power grab. The bill that enabled this would also give the Minister the power to change the curriculum at will. That sentence deserves to sit alone for a moment.

The Minister. To change the curriculum. At will.

And school boards, many of them newly elected for 2026, many of them community members who stepped up with tremendous goodwill but without necessarily the context to filter the noise, are now navigating all of this. They have been told that a school board’s highest priority objective is now educational achievement, with new supporting objectives around student attendance and assessment. That sounds clear. But tell me: what does “educational achievement” mean when the assessment system is incoherent? What does it mean when the children we are most obligated to serve are being made invisible in their own curriculum?

And then there is the fuel crisis. The cost of living. The principals doing the mahi of six people. The teachers who haven’t had a real break because the holidays filled with planning, because the term filled with reporting, because the weekends filled with all the things the school day couldn’t hold.

A Curriculum That Doesn’t Know Its Children

Let me pause on the curriculum itself, because I think we haven’t named this clearly enough.

The 2023 Te Mātaiaho framework, the one that emerged from genuine collaborative work involving Māori educators, subject specialists and community voice, had something important at its heart that the proposed 2026 draft quietly removes. In Science, the overarching strand of Nature of Science was foundational. It was not a content strand. It was a way of being a scientist: a set of dispositions and practices around wondering, questioning, investigating and making sense of evidence, grounded in the understanding that science is a human endeavour shaped by culture and context. It gave tamariki a reason to see themselves in science. It asked: how do we know what we know? It built the habits of genuine inquiry.

The 2026 draft removes it entirely. In its place is a content-heavy structure of prescribed facts across two strands, Physical Science and Biological Science, with knowledge organised year by year. And the knowledge itself raises serious questions about who designed it and whether they have spent time with actual children.

In the Year 1 Science curriculum, for five-year-olds, teachers are expected to teach that Theophrastus (c.371 to 287 BCE) described plant forms and structures. His botanical texts were used for centuries as primary references. Stephanie Madden, chair of NZEI Te Riu Roa’s Principals’ Council, responded to this with exactly the right question: Have they met a 5-year-old?

A child who is five years old is learning what “yesterday” means. They are working out where they fit in a sequence of events. The maths curriculum for the same year level teaches them to use words like “before,” “after,” “tomorrow” and “yesterday.” And simultaneously, the science curriculum asks their teacher to explain a Greek botanist who died 2,300 years ago. The cognitive dissonance here is not subtle.

This is not about whether knowledge matters. Of course it does. It is about whether we have designed a curriculum that reflects what we actually know about how children learn, what meaning they can make at different ages and what will ignite the curiosity that sustains a lifetime of learning. The answer, in too many places, is no.

Then there is Social Sciences. And this is where it becomes impossible to separate curriculum design from political intent.

The Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum that became compulsory in 2023 was hard-won. It came directly from students, from young people at Ōtorohanga College who gathered 10,000 signatures demanding that this country’s own stories be told truthfully in its schools. It centred Māori history as the continuous and foundational thread of New Zealand’s past. It asked teachers and students to wrestle honestly with colonisation, land loss and the New Zealand Wars. Not as fringe content, but as the stories without which nothing else about this place makes sense.

The 2026 draft replaces much of that with a vast sweep of global history, heavily European in its framing. Year 6 students will study the Elizabethan and Victorian ages. Year 7 students are asked to cover Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the 1852 Constitution Act, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution all in a single year. History teachers have called this “overcrowded, lacking focus and unrealistic.” The NZ History Teachers Association said the draft ignored the input of their representative in the curriculum-writing process entirely.

Meanwhile, the rich, contextualised and locally grounded content that gave our children a reason to care, stories set in the places they live and histories that explained their own community’s past, is being displaced by the Elizabethan era and ancient European political structures.

The concern is not that New Zealand history is absent from the new curriculum, but that it will be taught in a cursory and monocultural manner, possibly reinforcing outdated misconceptions and myths. As historians have noted, the new social sciences draft positions British history as the default and universal story, with exploration, industrialisation and trade presented as neutral or positive developments, without the counterweight of what those developments cost indigenous peoples globally.

The Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum was described by one historian as a rongoā, a salve, for the wound left by generations of schooling that never named what happened here. We were finally beginning to heal something. The 2026 draft risks reopening it.

For teachers, this is not an abstract policy debate. It is a daily professional dilemma. How do you teach content you know to be developmentally inappropriate? How do you motivate a child in South Auckland to care about the French Revolution when no one has told them the story of what happened in their own rohe? How do you hold your professional integrity when the curriculum hands you a script you do not believe in?

This is why the filter matters. Because the curriculum document is not always right. And you, the teacher who knows the child in front of you, sometimes are.

The Chaos Is Not an Accident

I want to say something that might be uncomfortable, but that I think you already know somewhere in your body:

The pace of change is not a byproduct of ambition. It is a mechanism of control.

When people are overwhelmed, they comply. When the ground keeps shifting, people stop asking whether they should be standing on it at all. When teachers are drowning in implementation, they stop asking: is this good for children?

That is the risk. Not that educators are lazy or uncommitted or burned out beyond repair. The risk is that good people, people who came into this work with fire and clarity and deep love for children, begin to lose their filter. Begin to mistake busyness for purpose. Begin to absorb the next directive simply because there is no bandwidth left to interrogate it.

The question I want to hold with you is this: in the middle of all of this, what do you stand for?

The Filter That Matters

Every decision you make as an educator, every lesson, every policy, every conversation with a family and every hour spent planning, passes through a filter. Or at least, it should.

That filter is not government policy. It is not ERO. It is not SMART data. It is not a rubric.

It is the child in front of you.

Is this right for the children I am teaching? Is this what we know is effective for children at this age, in this stage, in this body and with this history? Is this honouring the community I am serving? Is this building something in this tamaiti, identity, confidence, belonging and wonder, that they will carry for a lifetime and not just to their next assessment checkpoint?

These questions are not soft. They are the hardest professional questions there are, because they require you to hold your ground when the pressure is enormous. And the pressure right now is enormous.

Tamariki Māori and Pasifika children are watching. Not abstractly but actually watching. They are watching whether the adults around them believe their language, their stories, their worldview and their brilliance is worth fighting for. When their curriculum is built without their people’s voice, when the legal protections for their presence in schools are quietly removed, when consultation timelines are so compressed as to be an insult, they absorb the message. Leaders from Te Akatea have reported an escalation of racism in schools, suggesting the removal of Treaty protections has created an opening for voices that diminish Māori authority. Children feel that shift in the air before any of us can name it.

So the filter matters. Your filter matters. More than ever.

Pick Your Hill

There is a saying: if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. I think it has never been truer in New Zealand education than right now.

I am not calling for recklessness. I am not asking you to burn your planning or rage-quit your reporting obligations. I am asking you to name, for yourself, what you will not surrender.

Maybe it is the time every week where children choose, explore, play and make, because you know what that does for their brains and their sense of self, regardless of what the curriculum framework says about it.

Maybe it is the pepeha on the wall, the karakia that opens each day, the moment you spend telling a child their language is taonga, because you know that a child who knows who they are will outlearn a child who doesn’t, every single time.

Maybe it is the way you talk about a child in a meeting. Not as a data point, not as an attendance percentage and not as an “emerging” or “developing,” but as a whole, complex and brilliant human being with a story that the SMART tool will never hold.

Maybe it is the conversation you have with a family where you say: your child is more than this report. Let me tell you what I see.

These are the hills. Small, daily and irreversible acts of professional integrity. They compound. They matter. They are what teaching is, underneath all the noise.

To the Principals

I want to speak to you specifically, because I think you are carrying something very few people fully see.

You are the human buffer between policy and people. Every directive that arrives at your school arrives first at you. You are the one who reads the email at 11pm and must figure out how to translate it into something your staff can hold. You are the one managing the board who is managing the noise, the teachers who are managing the load and the families who are managing everything else.

Your wellbeing is not a luxury. It is a professional responsibility, to yourself and to every person in your school community. A depleted leader cannot hold a vision. A burned-out principal cannot model the courage they are asking their staff to have.

So, let me ask you, too: what hill will you die on? What is the thing you will protect, even when the pressure comes from every direction? Because your school will orient itself around that answer, whether you say it aloud or not.

To the Boards

Many of you are new. You stepped up because you care about the children in your community. You are trying to do the right thing in a climate that makes “the right thing” genuinely hard to locate.

Here is what I would offer: the noise is loud, but your north star is simple. Every decision you make as a board should be tested against one question: is this right for the children in our school? Not: is this what the Ministry said. Not: is this what other schools are doing. Not: will this insulate us from scrutiny.

Is it right for the children.

Boards who hold that line will make imperfect decisions in an imperfect climate and that is okay. Boards who lose that line get swept along with everything else.

The Truth Underneath

I believe that most of the people in New Zealand education did not come into this work for the job. They came for something they couldn’t fully explain at the interview. A feeling, a memory, a conviction that children matter and that how we treat them matters and that there is no more important work in the world.

That is still true. It is true despite the rubrics and the reporting requirements and the legislation that no longer names Te Tiriti. It is true in the classroom where a teacher is kneeling beside a child who is struggling, giving them her whole attention. It is true in the meeting where a principal says: no, we are not going to speak about this child that way. It is true in the school where the board chair says: let us come back to what our community needs.

The chaos is real. The weight is real. The harm being done to tamariki Māori and Pasifika through these reforms is real and documented and the subject of urgent constitutional inquiry.

And your integrity is also real.

So, I will ask you one last time, and I want you to sit with it:

What hill will you die on?

Because the children you teach need you to have an answer to that question. Not a policy. Not a compliance framework. Not a directive from the Beehive.

An answer that lives in your professionalism and your values and your reason for being here.

Pick your hill. Stand on it. And don’t let them move you.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation

P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning

Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

Yesterday I went to Armageddon in Wellington with my 19-year-old daughter.

I didn’t go as a fan. Not really. I went as the driver, the bag holder, the quiet observer on the edge of someone else’s excitement. The role you step into after years of raising a child who has always leaned towards stories. The kind that don’t sit neatly inside the everyday. The ones filled with magic, mystery, alternate worlds, strange creatures, complicated heroes.

If you raise a human like that, these spaces eventually become familiar.

Armageddon. Comic Con. Conventions of every kind.

You learn the rhythm of them. The queues. The anticipation. The careful planning around who to meet and what to see. The quiet seriousness with which a list is made and followed.

So I went along, expecting what I’ve always expected. But something shifted.

Not in the event itself. That has always been what it is. Something shifted in how I saw it.

This Has Never Been Small

At first, it would be easy to think this is a small world.

There’s a tendency to place events like this on the edges of society. To think of them as belonging to a particular group. A subculture. Something niche.

But the numbers tell a different story.

Armageddon Expo has been running in New Zealand since 1995. Across its events each year, it attracts well over 120,000 attendees nationwide, with some estimates placing that closer to 130,000 annually. Individual events regularly bring in tens of thousands of people through the doors.

Globally, this kind of gathering is even more expansive. Events like New York Comic Con draw around 250,000 people annually.

These are not fringe numbers. These are not outliers. These are large, visible, sustained expressions of something deeply human.

The Queue

Our day started in a queue.

Andy Serkis was at the top of my daughter’s list. For those unfamiliar, he is the actor behind Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, along with a long list of other characters that exist somewhere between human and something else entirely.

We joined the line early. And then we waited.

There is something about a queue that slows everything down. It removes distraction. It creates space for noticing.

So, I watched. At first, it was the obvious things.

People in full costume. Armour that had clearly been crafted with care. Helmets, intricate detailing, fabrics that moved differently to everyday clothing. Some carried mock weapons, attached carefully to hips or backs, part of a whole identity they had stepped into for the day.

Others were less obvious. A jacket. A hat. A t-shirt that signalled something to those who knew what to look for.

Then there were the families.

Entire groups moving together through a shared story. Star Wars appeared often. Princess Leia alongside Luke. Toddlers dressed in scaled-down versions of the same universe. You had to stay aware of your surroundings. A tail might appear where you didn’t expect it. A long, 3D printed braid might swing behind someone as they turned.

And then something quieter began to stand out.

People spoke to each other.

Not in the way strangers usually do in public spaces. Not with caution or distance. There was an ease to it. A willingness to notice and to comment. Someone would recognise a costume. Another would respond. A small exchange would unfold.

There was delight in recognition. A kind of shared language that didn’t need explaining. And importantly, there was no sense of hierarchy in it. No one trying to outdo the next person. No visible competition for attention.

Just people, standing in a line, comfortable in who they had chosen to be that day.

Where Stories Meet People

When it was our turn, my daughter met Andy Serkis, clutching her extremely worn copy of The Hobbit. There’s a particular kind of moment that happens when someone meets a person connected to a story that has mattered to them. It’s not about celebrity in the usual sense. It’s something else.

A bridge, perhaps. Between imagination and the person who helped bring it to life.

I stood back and watched that too. Because even that interaction carried the same tone as the queue. Respect. Presence. A shared understanding that this mattered.

Inside the Space

If the queue was an introduction, the wider space was the full expression.

The scale of it is hard to capture quickly. Stalls stretched in every direction. Not uniform. Not predictable. Each one offering something slightly different.

There were playing card traders. Sword and knife sellers. Jewellery that felt like it belonged in another world entirely. Comic stores. Anime merchandise. Independent artists with original work. Pottery. Handcrafted objects that sat somewhere between functional and imaginative.

There were droid builders. Workshops. Light saber suppliers who were already promoting an upcoming meet-up in Wellington later in the month.

Small businesses sat alongside more established ones. People who had clearly turned their interests, their curiosities, into something tangible. Something they could offer to others who understood its value.

It wasn’t just consumption. It was participation.

And woven through it all was something easy to overlook if you weren’t paying attention.

This was big business. Not in a polished, uniform way. Not in straight lines or predictable categories. But in the steady movement of people choosing, buying, trading, supporting.

Every stall represented someone who had followed a particular interest far enough to shape it into something real. Something others were willing to spend money on.

There was no single model for how to do that. No standard pathway.

Just a collection of people building something from what made them different and finding that difference had value.

You could feel it in the energy of the room. Not just excitement. Momentum.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, it became something clearer.

What This Really Is

At some point, my daughter named it. Armageddon is a place that safely celebrates being unique.

Once she said it, everything aligned. Because this is what sat underneath all of it.

Not just a gathering around shared stories. A space where people are allowed to be fully themselves, without explanation, without reduction, without needing to justify why they care about what they care about.

You could walk through that space as a character, or as a quieter version of yourself, and both were equally valid.

There was no visible judgement. No scorn. No sense that anyone needed to be less to fit in. Even the interactions reinforced it.

People asked before taking photos of those in costume. Apologies were immediate if someone was bumped into. There was a noticeable level of care in how people moved around each other.

At scale. That’s not a small thing.

Who Gets to Belong

What also stood out was who was there. People with visible additional needs. Mobility challenges. Hearing supports. Visual supports.

And those whose needs were less visible.

Social anxiety. Sensory sensitivities. The kinds of experiences that often make large-scale events something to avoid rather than move towards.

But this space held them differently. Because for many of the people there, this wasn’t an environment they had to adapt to. It was one that was already shaped around them.

There’s a difference.

At most large events, there is an unspoken expectation that you will adjust yourself to fit the space. You tolerate the noise, the density, the unpredictability. You manage your discomfort quietly, or you leave.

But here, the centre of gravity was different.

The interests, the expressions, the ways of engaging that might sit on the edges elsewhere were at the centre here.

Which meant people didn’t have to perform a version of themselves that felt more acceptable. They could arrive as they are.

I spoke briefly with a lecturer from Massey University who was there representing GRAIL, the Gaming Research and Investigation Laboratory.

He shared, quite simply, that in most large group settings like this, he would experience social anxiety.

That familiar tightening. The awareness of too many people, too much movement, too much to process at once.

But not here. At this event, he didn’t feel it. He had found his people. His space. His way of being that didn’t require adjustment or explanation.

And that seemed to be the quiet thread running through the entire space. For people who might normally stand at the edges, or choose not to attend at all, this was different.

Because it was about them. Their interests. Their way of engaging with the world. There was no need to step outside of that in order to belong.

And because of that, they didn’t just attend. They participated. Fully.

And Then the Contrast

Because once you have spent time in a space that openly celebrates difference, it becomes harder to ignore what is happening outside of it.

There is a shift underway in Aotearoa at the moment. It doesn’t always announce itself loudly. It shows up across different areas, different decisions, different pieces of legislation. But when you place them side by side, a pattern begins to form.

A movement towards simplification. Towards consistency. Towards systems that are easier to define, easier to measure, easier to manage.

Across different domains, the same instinct begins to show up.

The Treaty Principles Bill sought to define the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in law. To fix something that has long been understood as relational and evolving into a single, more stable interpretation.

The Regulatory Standards Bill introduces a framework for what “good law-making” should look like, applying a consistent set of principles across legislation.

The Fast-track Approvals Act creates a streamlined pathway for development, reducing the variability of process and decision-making.

The reinstatement of the three strikes sentencing regime brings a more fixed, rule-based structure to justice, where outcomes are increasingly determined by predefined thresholds.

In health, the disestablishment of Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority, removed a structure that had been designed specifically to respond to inequity, folding it back into a unified system.

Changes to Pharmac’s direction have reduced the emphasis on Te Tiriti considerations in funding decisions.

The repeal of the smokefree generation policy has shifted away from a targeted response to known disparities.

And in quieter ways, shifts in bilingual signage and naming conventions are influencing what is seen, what is centred, and what becomes normal in public life.

None of these decisions sit in the same category. They operate across law, health, development, public policy.

But they share something. A preference for uniformity.

A movement away from systems that are designed to respond differently depending on who is in front of them, towards systems that apply the same structure to everyone, regardless of who is in front of them.

The Appeal of Sameness

From a systems perspective, this is not difficult to understand. Difference is complex.

It introduces variation. It resists standardisation. It makes outcomes harder to predict and harder to measure. Uniform systems, on the other hand, offer something appealing.

Clarity.

Consistency.

Control.

They allow for cleaner reporting. Clearer benchmarks. A sense that something can be completed, achieved, delivered. There is comfort in that.

The Cracks Are There

But this is where something begins to press against itself. Because these systems are not operating in a vacuum. They are operating on people.

And people are not uniform.

They do not arrive with the same histories, the same identities, the same ways of thinking, learning, engaging, expressing.

You could see that clearly at Armageddon. Not as an abstract idea. As a lived reality.

Thousands of people, in one place, expressing themselves in ways that do not fit a single mould.

Not one version of normal. Many.

The Deeper Belief

So, a quieter question begins to emerge.

What if, at the centre of these shifts, is not just a desire for efficiency… But a discomfort with difference?

Because difference cannot be easily managed. It cannot be reduced without losing something essential. It asks more of systems. More flexibility. More responsiveness. More trust in things that cannot always be measured cleanly.

Sameness, by contrast, is easier. It allows systems to hold steady. It creates the impression that if everyone is treated the same, then the system is fair. But treating everyone the same and serving everyone well are not always the same thing.

And Then There’s Education

Because if there is one place where this underlying belief becomes visible, it is in education.

In the idea that if we align curriculum, standardise year levels, define knowledge clearly, and assess consistently, then outcomes will follow. That if we create enough structure, enough sameness, then learning will become more predictable. More controllable. More successful.

But that belief rests on something that does not hold. That the learners themselves are the same. But humans are not simple systems Education, in particular, has never been simple. It is relational. Contextual. Deeply human.

It involves people who are still forming their sense of self. Still discovering what they care about. Still working out how they fit into the world. Each one carrying something that is not quite like anyone else.

And yet, the direction of travel suggests something different. A belief that if we tighten the system enough, learning will follow.

You can see it in the renewed emphasis on structured literacy and mathematics programmes. A move towards more prescribed approaches to how reading and maths are taught, with less room for variation in how teachers respond to the learners in front of them.

You can see it in the increasing weight placed on standardised assessment. The idea that progress and success can be captured through common measures, applied at the same points, in the same ways, across all learners.

It shows up again in expectations that age determines stage. That a child in a particular year level should be in roughly the same place as every other child in that year, regardless of how differently they may have arrived there.

And it is clear in curriculum refreshes that tighten what is to be taught, when it is to be taught, and how progress is to be tracked.

Each of these, on its own, can be explained. Structure can support consistency. Assessment can provide insight. Clear expectations can guide teaching.

But taken together, they begin to narrow the space.

They create a system that is easier to oversee, easier to measure, easier to report on. And in doing so, they quietly place pressure on difference. On the child who learns in a way that doesn’t fit the prescribed approach. On the child whose interests sit outside the defined content. On the child who moves faster, slower, sideways, or in bursts rather than in a steady line. On the child who is still working out who they are, and needs space to do that.

The system does not necessarily reject these learners.

But it does ask them to adjust. To come closer to the line. To fit, as much as possible, within what has already been decided.

Back to the Space that Works

Armageddon does not try to resolve that complexity. It does not attempt to standardise it. It does not ask people to move towards a single way of being. It creates a space where complexity can exist without needing to be simplified.

Where people can step fully into what makes them different and find that difference reflected back to them. Not as something to minimise. But as something to recognise. Something to connect through. Something to build from.

There’s Still Time to See It

The Minister still has time. Or anyone for that matter.

We’re going back for Round Two. Auckland. 25 to 27 April. Come and walk it with us.

Stand in a queue. Listen to the conversations. Notice the care.

Watch how people show up when they are not asked to be anything other than themselves. Pay attention to the range of expression that exists in one place, at one time.

Not controlled. Not standardised. Not reduced.

Just… human.

This is what our schools hold. This is what our communities hold.

The same range. The same variation. The same unpredictability.

And yet, it works.

Without forcing people into a single way of being. Without asking them to leave parts of themselves at the door. It won’t offer a model that can be scaled or standardised.

But it will show something far more important.

What happens when people are allowed to belong as they are. And what becomes possible when we stop trying to make them the same. Because human uniqueness is not a flaw in the system.

It is the reason any system exists at all.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

As Pasi Sahlberg shared on LinkedIn, Finland has released its new “Vision for Finnish Comprehensive Schools 2045.” He described it this way:

“The vision takes a strong stand on the fact that, in the midst of the changed operating environment, there is an increasing demand to reinforce not only basic skills but also our ability to work together. These changes are guided by bildung, hope, agency and our common good.”

Pause for a moment on that language:

Bildung. Hope. Agency. Common good.

Finland is not responding to global disruption with tighter monitoring or narrower targets. It is responding with a generational vision of human development.

The document frames education not merely as preparation for change, but as a force for shaping the future - a system that equips young people to build a meaningful life, sustain democracy, and live within planetary boundaries.

Finland is asking:

What kind of human beings do we need to cultivate for 2045?

That question matters, because it reveals what a country believes education is for.

And it prompts a harder question for us in Aotearoa:

What is New Zealand asking of its education system right now?

A Tale of Strategic Depth

To understand the contrast more clearly, it helps to visualise not just direction, but depth.

Education strategies can be framed at different layers. Some focus primarily on technical performance — attendance, targets, monitoring systems and measurable attainment. Others move outward into pedagogical redesign — competencies, professional agency and curriculum transformation. And some extend further still, articulating education as a civilisational project concerned with democracy, sustainability, identity and the common good.

When we examine the dominant framing of each jurisdiction’s current strategy document, a pattern begins to emerge.

The diagram below illustrates where the strategic centre of gravity appears to sit in each case.

Strategic Orientation of Contemporary Education Frameworks

In the model above, Finland’s Vision 2045 sits clearly within the outer layer — a civilisational vision that frames education around democracy, sustainability, agency and the common good. Wales’ Curriculum for Wales also reaches into this outer horizon, signalling national renewal through curriculum reform. British Columbia’s curriculum transformation is positioned primarily within the pedagogical reform layer, emphasising competencies, professional agency and systemic redesign.

New Zealand’s Strategic Intentions 2025–2029, by contrast, are located predominantly within the inner layer of technical performance measures — attendance targets, literacy benchmarks, standardised monitoring and system stewardship.

This is not an argument that foundational skills or accountability are unimportant. They are essential.

The question the diagram raises is different: at what layer does a system place its strategic centre of gravity?

In other words, what level of ambition is driving the narrative of reform?

What Finland Is Signalling

Finland’s 2045 vision is structured around three pillars:

• A meaningful life

• Life together

• Life on the planet

It emphasises:

• Human growth beyond technical skill

• Agency as a central educational goal

• Democracy and social cohesion

• Ecological sustainability

• Ethical engagement with technology

The Finnish system is not retreating to fundamentals in the face of AI, climate change, or social fragmentation.

It is expanding its conception of education to meet them.

That is what leadership looks like in uncertain times.

Wales: Curriculum as Civic and Cultural Renewal

Wales’ Curriculum for Wales is not simply a technical curriculum update. It is framed as a national re-articulation of purpose.

At its heart are the Four Purposes — that children and young people become:

• Ambitious, capable learners

• Enterprising, creative contributors

• Ethical, informed citizens

• Healthy, confident individuals

These are not attainment descriptors. They are civic descriptors.

The Welsh reform deliberately moves beyond subject coverage toward broader human development. It positions curriculum as a vehicle for:

• Democratic participation

• Ethical reasoning

• Cultural identity

• Wellbeing

• Creative capacity

Crucially, the reform transfers significant curriculum design responsibility to schools. Teachers are not merely implementing prescribed content; they are designing locally responsive curricula within a national framework.

This is why Wales sits between the outer and middle layers of the model. It combines pedagogical redesign with an explicitly civic and cultural ambition. The reform is not framed primarily around targets and monitoring; it is framed around national renewal through education.

British Columbia (Canada): Competency-Based System Transformation

British Columbia’s curriculum transformation similarly signals more than incremental adjustment.

The BC Curriculum is organised around “core competencies”:

• Communication

• Creative and critical thinking

• Personal and social responsibility

These competencies cut across subject areas and explicitly position education as preparation for complex, interconnected futures. They embed:

• Identity development

• Ethical engagement

• Social responsibility

• Indigenous knowledge and reconciliation

The curriculum is flexible and locally adaptable. It foregrounds inquiry, reflection and student agency. Literacy and numeracy remain central, but they are situated within a broader conception of learner development rather than isolated as stand-alone strategic drivers.

BC’s reform sits predominantly within the pedagogical reform layer of the model, with strong outward movement toward civilisational themes — particularly through its commitment to reconciliation and cultural inclusion.

It represents structural redesign of curriculum philosophy rather than refinement of performance management systems.

Taken together, Finland, Wales and British Columbia demonstrate that it is possible to pursue foundational skill development while simultaneously articulating a broader horizon for education. In each case, literacy and numeracy sit within a wider narrative about democracy, identity, agency and long-term societal resilience. The reforms differ in structure and emphasis, but they share a common feature: they frame education as more than system performance.

It is against that backdrop that New Zealand’s current strategy invites closer scrutiny.

And What New Zealand Is Signalling

New Zealand’s current strategy foregrounds:

• Attendance percentages

• Literacy and numeracy benchmarks

• Structured instructional approaches

• Standardised assessment tools

• Monitoring and reporting frameworks

These are important elements of any functioning system.

But they are managerial instruments.

They are not a generational narrative.

They focus on small measurable moments — whether students are present, whether they are “at level,” whether data is being tracked consistently.

What is less visible is the larger horizon.

Where is the language of democracy?
Where is the language of agency?
Where is the framing of education as a response to planetary crisis?
Where is the invitation to imagine 2045?

At a time when Finland is articulating hope as a capability and Bildung as a guiding force, New Zealand’s strategy feels cautious.

Incremental.
Operational.
Short-sighted.

It does not feel especially brave.
And in a period of profound global uncertainty, the courage to articulate a larger educational horizon may be precisely what leadership requires.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

The Government’s proposed “move on” powers targeting people sleeping rough should stop us in our tracks.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has defended the policy by saying it’s about ensuring people don’t feel “intimidated,” that public spaces must be safe, that police need the tools to respond when rough sleeping becomes disruptive.

On the surface, that language sounds measured.

But sit with it for a moment.

We are describing people with nowhere to live as a source of intimidation.
We are framing visible poverty as a public order issue.
We are positioning the discomfort of passers-by as politically urgent.

That is not neutral language.

That is a choice.

“Move On” to Where?

The policy would allow police to issue orders requiring people sleeping rough to leave an area.

The question that seems almost too obvious to ask is:

Move on to where?

If someone has no stable housing, no secure tenancy, no access to emergency accommodation - what exactly are we directing them toward?

A different doorway?
A different park?
A less visible corner?

This is not a housing solution.
It is spatial management.

And when the Prime Minister defends it as necessary to stop people feeling unsafe or intimidated, it reveals something far deeper than legislative tinkering.

It reveals a hierarchy of whose discomfort counts.

Just When We Thought We Knew

Many of us have already felt uneasy watching the tone of this coalition government unfold - in education, in social policy, in its rhetoric about “personal responsibility” and “getting back on track.”

But this feels like a ramping up.

Just when we thought we were seeing the governing philosophy clearly, it sharpens.

Because this is not about tweaking welfare settings.
It is not about bureaucratic reform.

It is about deciding that the visibility of human suffering is politically intolerable.

And that removing it, not resolving it, is an acceptable response.

There is a difference between being tough on systems and being tough on people.

This crosses that line.

The Politics of Optics

Luxon has repeatedly framed the issue as restoring order and ensuring public spaces are usable for everyone.

But let’s interrogate that.

Public space in a democracy is not curated for aesthetic perfection. It reflects the full spectrum of society, including inequality.

When the state steps in to clear away those who disrupt the visual narrative of prosperity, we have shifted from governance to optics.

We are no longer asking:

• Why are more people ending up without secure housing?

• Why is emergency accommodation stretched?

• Why are mental health and addiction services so fractured?

We are asking:

• How quickly can we tidy this up?

That is a fundamentally different moral posture.

Language as Policy

When leaders use words like “intimidation” in reference to rough sleepers, it does more than justify legislation.

It reframes the unhoused as a threat.

And once that framing sticks, compassion becomes weakness.
Enforcement becomes common sense.
Visibility becomes provocation.

This is how societies slowly recalibrate what is acceptable - not through dramatic declarations, but through tone. Through repetition. Through normalising the idea that some people are problems to be managed rather than citizens to be supported.

The Pattern Is Familiar

Followers of Curiosity Creator will recognise this pattern.

In education, we have seen increasing emphasis on control, compliance, and standardisation - tightening the system in response to complexity.

Struggling students? Tighten the curriculum.
Underperforming schools? Increase oversight.
Uncomfortable data? Shift the playing field.

Now we are seeing a similar reflex socially.

Visible homelessness? Increase enforcement.
Public discomfort? Increase police powers.

Control over curiosity.
Order over humanity.
Optics over dignity.

Different sector. Same instinct.

A Defining Political Moment

This is why this moment matters.

Because it signals what kind of leadership we are normalising.

Strong leadership does not confuse visibility with threat.
Strong leadership does not respond to suffering with displacement.
Strong leadership does not describe the powerless in the language of intimidation.

If anything, strong leadership absorbs discomfort and directs it toward structural solutions.

Housing supply.
Mental health investment.
Addiction services.
Preventative social policy.

Those are hard, slow, politically unrewarding fixes.

“Move on” is fast.
It is visible.
It signals action.

But it does not signal humanity.

The Question We Cannot Avoid

This is not a left-versus-right argument.

It is a moral one.

When someone is sleeping outside in a country with the resources and institutional capacity that New Zealand has, the scandal is not their presence.

It is the conditions that placed them there.

If our response is to move them along rather than move toward them, we are defining ourselves in ways that will echo far beyond this bill.

Just when we thought we understood the trajectory of this coalition government, it has shown us something sharper.

History tends to remember the moments when nations decided whether discomfort or dignity would lead.

Right now, we are being tested.

The question is not whether our streets look tidy.

The question is whether we still recognise each other as human when it matters most.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

There’s a familiar rhythm to education announcements in New Zealand.

A press release.
A confident ministerial statement.
A number that sounds impressive when isolated from context.

Student achievement is improving.
Record investment.
Rapid progress.

The message is always the same: things are getting better.

But there is a widening gap between the story being told publicly and the reality being lived in schools. And that gap matters — because when success becomes something to be performed rather than earned, children’s learning stops being the true measure of whether policy is working.

How the illusion of success is created

The illusion of success in education is rarely built on outright falsehoods. It is built on something more subtle and far more effective.

Success is constructed when:

• activity is presented as impact

• early or partial indicators are treated as settled outcomes

• narrow measures are used to support broad claims

• speed replaces rigour

These techniques are politically powerful. They reassure voters that problems are being fixed, standards are being restored, and the system is back on track.

But reassurance is not the same as improvement.

What’s being said, and what it obscures

When political claims are unpacked rather than taken at face value, a consistent pattern emerges. Each one offers reassurance, but only by narrowing what counts as success.

The claim:

“Student achievement is improving thanks to curriculum changes, such as structured literacy.”

Why it feels reassuring:
It suggests decisive action, a clear solution, and evidence that long-standing literacy problems are already being fixed.

What it leaves out:
System-wide achievement gains take years to emerge. Phonics data measures a narrow sub-skill, not reading comprehension or long-term literacy achievement, and cannot yet support causal claims at scale. Multiple variables influence outcomes, particularly in complex classroom environments.

What schools are actually experiencing:
Early decoding gains do not equate to sustained improvements in reading, especially without clear alignment across curriculum, assessment, and support structures.

The claim:

“13,800 unique users accessed a maths practice tool in just four weeks.”

Why it feels reassuring:
It signals momentum, uptake, and parental engagement, suggesting support is reaching homes quickly.

What it leaves out:
Usage data does not indicate depth, duration, or quality of learning. Platform access is an engagement metric, not evidence of improved mathematical understanding or achievement.

What schools are actually experiencing:
Engagement metrics are being rhetorically elevated into proof of impact, despite no clear link to curriculum progress or classroom learning outcomes.

The claim:

“Tutored students made two years’ progress in just 12 weeks.”

Why it feels reassuring:
It sounds transformational, implying a fast, effective solution to entrenched achievement challenges.

What it leaves out:
How “years of progress” are defined, what assessments were used, whether gains persist over time, and whether results can be replicated or scaled across the system.

What schools are actually experiencing:
Short-term gains in tightly controlled interventions are common and do not automatically translate into sustained achievement once students return to regular classroom conditions.

The claim:

“Māori and Pasifika students made the biggest gains overall.”

Why it feels reassuring:
It signals equity progress and suggests that long-standing disparities are being addressed.

What it leaves out:
The difference between relative gains and absolute achievement levels, the sustainability of progress, and whether broader structural barriers have been meaningfully reduced.

What schools are actually experiencing:
Relative gains in short-term trials do not equate to closing systemic equity gaps, particularly without long-term resourcing and consistent learning support.

The claim:

“These results show the Government is committed to lifting achievement and closing the equity gap.”

Why it feels reassuring:
It converts intention into proof, allowing commitment to be inferred from selected results.

What it leaves out:
Whether those results reflect sustained improvement, system readiness, or changes in everyday learning conditions for students and teachers.

What schools are actually experiencing:
Commitment is better measured through long-term clarity, alignment, workforce support, and learning conditions than through pilots, announcements, or early indicators.

None of these claims are meaningless. But none of them justify the certainty with which success is being declared.

What schools are dealing with right now

While these success narratives circulate publicly, schools are starting the year in a very different position.

Many are working with:

• incomplete curriculum documentation

• unclear assessment expectations and benchmarks

• uncertainty about required or endorsed assessment tools

• maths resources that do not clearly align with the curriculum teachers are expected to deliver

At the same time, the learning support funding announced in May 2025 has not meaningfully shifted conditions for schools facing a rapidly growing number of students with additional needs. For many, there has been little to no change in access to specialist support or resourcing, despite the scale and urgency of need.

These are not minor implementation issues. They are foundational.

Achievement does not improve in systems where expectations are unclear, resources are misaligned, and teachers are asked to deliver certainty to learners while navigating uncertainty themselves.

Why this is happening now

Context matters.

As the country enters an election year, the incentives around education policy change. Complexity becomes inconvenient. Caution starts to look like weakness. Uncertainty is something to be smoothed over rather than acknowledged.

Election years reward confidence, clarity, and good news - even when the underlying work is unfinished.

This is when early indicators are most likely to be presented as outcomes. When pilots become proof. When selective data becomes reassurance. Not necessarily because policymakers don’t understand the difference, but because voters are rarely given the time or space to interrogate it.

Why reassurance is so tempting

It’s also worth acknowledging why these narratives land so easily.

Families are under pressure. Cost-of-living stress, employment insecurity, housing challenges, and uneven access to health care all compete for attention and emotional energy. When life feels precarious, there is a natural desire - even a need - to believe that something is under control.

Education becomes one of those places.

Hearing that schools are being “fixed” can offer genuine relief. It suggests that while families are holding together uncertainty elsewhere, at least their children’s education is on a stable path.

That response is not naïve. It’s human.

Schools, families, and teachers are not standing outside the system waiting for it to be finished. They are inside it, relying on it every day. It’s like being asked to wear a pair of socks while they are still being knitted. You need them now. They’re not finished. And pointing out the loose ends doesn’t make the cold go away.

The danger comes when the need for warmth becomes a reason to stop noticing that the socks are still unfinished.

Why the illusion persists

At the heart of all this is a tension we rarely name plainly:

That mismatch is crucial.

Education is one of the most fraught portfolios for any politician who needs short-term wins to remain politically viable. Not because education isn’t important, but because genuine educational improvement is slow, cumulative, and uneven. Truly successful changes take years to embed. Their impact emerges as children move through the system, cohort by cohort, over time. That is how policy impact is properly measured.

But that pace does not align with political reality.

Politicians cannot wait for children to grow. They operate within election cycles, public mood shifts, and constant scrutiny. In that environment, being seen to act decisively and confidently becomes essential to survival. Announcements, pilots, early data points, and claims of momentum become ways of signalling competence and relevance.

This is not about bad intentions. Many education ministers genuinely want to be transformational. But the desire to improve education cannot be separated from the equally real need to be successful in the eyes of the voter. When those pressures collide, there is a powerful incentive to collapse process into outcome, movement into impact, and promise into proof.

That is how the illusion of success takes hold. Not because improvement isn’t wanted, but because waiting for real evidence can look like failure.

The line we shouldn’t ignore

Education cannot be rushed to meet political timelines without cost.

If we judge success by how convincingly it can be described today, rather than by what is changing for children over time, we will continue to mistake reassurance for results.

And the most uncomfortable truth of all is this:

The changes that genuinely transform education often arrive too slowly to win elections, but they matter too much to be replaced with an illusion.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

In 2025, the P-BLOT™, a tool I co-authored as a component of my doctoral studies, was named as one of the 100 most impactful global innovations in HundrED’s 2026 Global Collection. As a result of this, I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust.

If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

As the old year turns over, there is always a moment. A pause. A breath.

For many of us, that moment becomes a space for reflection. A time to consider what we want for the year ahead. Often, those hopes begin with the personal: more time, more energy, more ease. And these are all good and worthy things.

But in this new year, when so much in the world feels uncertain, perhaps the more urgent question is not What’s in it for me? but What’s in it for us all?

Recently, I came across a quote from early childhood educator Lilian Katz that felt especially timely:

“Each of us must come to care about everyone else’s children.
We must recognise that the well-being of our own children is intimately linked
to the well-being of all other people’s children…”

It stayed with me.

Because right now, in so many corners of our public and political life, we are being encouraged to think smaller. To protect our own patch. To look after ourselves first.

But human flourishing has never worked that way.

We are connected. The wellbeing of our children, our families, our communities and our futures depends not only on individual effort, but on the strength of the systems we share. When we invest in the common good, we all benefit. When we turn away from those being left behind, we weaken the social foundations that support us all.

One place where this is especially visible in Aotearoa is in our education system.

For generations, our approach to teaching and learning was guided by a belief in equity, creativity and care. It was not a perfect system. But it was one that prioritised people. It recognised that the purpose of education was broader than economics. It was a commitment to the idea that every child matters, and that teaching is one of the most important and impactful roles in our society.

That vision is now under pressure.

Schools are struggling. Teachers are leaving. Resources are stretched. Policy decisions are narrowing what it means to teach and learn. And a once bold, world-respected system is being quietly dismantled.

What is most concerning is how easily this is being framed as someone else’s problem.

If you do not have children at school, you may be told it does not concern you. If your own child is doing well, you may be told it is not your fight. If your school seems unaffected, you may not feel the need to tune in to the wider issues facing schools outside of your area.

But this affects all of us.

When teachers are overworked and undervalued, we lose the people who hold communities together. When education is reduced to numbers, we lose the thinkers and innovators our future depends on. When public systems are weakened, those with the least lose the most.

And eventually, we all lose something too.

We are a nation of problem-solvers

In Aotearoa, we often speak of the Number 8 wire mentality. That quiet ingenuity. That willingness to adapt, to make do, to find a way forward with whatever is at hand.

But this spirit has always been about more than practical solutions. It reflects something deeper. A national character shaped by creativity, resilience and care. A refusal to accept that things must stay as they are. A belief that we can always ‘get on with it’, often with some quite ingenious, out of the box style thinking.

This has long been part of who we are.

It shows up in our science and our stories, in our activism and our art. It lives in the way we solve problems not just with tools and invention, but with vision, courage and heart.

This is the Aotearoa where:

• Sir Ernest Rutherford split the atom and opened a new chapter in human understanding

• Kate Sheppard led the charge for women’s suffrage, making New Zealand the first self-governing country to grant women the vote

• Dame Whina Cooper walked from Te Hāpua to Parliament at the age of 79, leading the Māori Land March and calling the country to honour its promises

• Sir Āpirana Ngata worked tirelessly to protect and revitalise te reo Māori and uplift Māori culture through education and the arts

• Bill Gallagher turned a home-grown invention into a global farming solution with the electric fence

• Peter Beck reminded us that rockets do not only belong to superpowers, launching a private space company from Aotearoa

• Moana Jackson reshaped our understanding of justice through a lens of tikanga and mana

• Kristine Bartlett, a care worker, changed the future for thousands of women by taking an equal pay case to the Court of Appeal and winning

We are not strangers to bold ideas.
We are not newcomers to social imagination.
We are not too small to lead.

We also have a collective spirit that demonstrates just how important ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ is to Kiwis.

The path forward will ask for this same spirit. Not just in labs or courts or protest lines, but in staffrooms, boardrooms, homes and classrooms. In the quiet, everyday decisions we make to care, to speak, to include.

Because when we make things better for others, we make things better for us all.

What’s in it for us all if we don’t?

If we do not shift the conversation toward collective care, the consequences will not be immediate. They rarely are. But they will come.

We will see trust continue to erode.
We will see public systems strained past their capacity.
We will see more children fall through the cracks.
We will see more good teachers walk away.
We will see wider divides between those who can afford opportunity and those who cannot.

And we will find ourselves asking how we became a country where so much talent was overlooked, so much potential unfulfilled, and so much care withdrawn.

When we centre only ourselves, we make our lives smaller.
We become more anxious. More protective. Less connected.
We create a future where wellbeing depends on privilege, not principle.

And we pass that future on to our children.

So, as 2026 begins, the invitation is simple. Not easy. But simple.

Turn back toward each other.
Ask different questions.
Use your voice.
Keep your eyes open.

Build the kind of world you would want any child to grow up in.

Because the future is not something we wait for.
It is something we quietly create.
In the values we live by.
And the care we choose to extend beyond ourselves.

Not just for our children.
But for all children.
Not just for our good.
But for the good of us all.

An Invitation To You, the Reader:

If this has stirred something in you, share it. Or start a conversation in your workplace, school or community about what “what’s in it for us all” could look like where you are. Change does not begin with everyone. It begins with someone.

“Take care of our children. Take care of what they hear. Take care of what they see. Take care of what they feel. For how the children grow, so will be the shape of Aotearoa.”
— Dame Whina Cooper

On the last official day of the school year, while teachers are closing classrooms, shutting laptops, and limping toward summer, an email lands from the Minister of Education.

It is warm.
It is grateful.
And it is overflowing with numbers.

Not just any numbers. Encouraging numbers. Winning numbers.

We are told that phonics achievement has leapt from 36% to 58%. That students in a maths trial made up to two years’ progress in just 12 weeks. That even those not in the trial made gains of up to a year. That the Ministry itself says expectations were exceeded.

It’s a victory lap, complete with festive sign-off, delivered precisely when scrutiny is least likely.

If the tone feels oddly familiar, it’s because this style of communication isn’t about education at all.

It’s about political performance.

The Trump Playbook, Education Edition

Donald Trump didn’t invent selective data, but he perfected a way of talking about it:

• Pick a narrow metric

• Announce it loudly

• Use superlatives instead of context

• Cite unnamed authorities

• Declare victory early

• Move on quickly

Sound familiar?

Translated into Trump-speak, the Minister’s email might read something like this:

“Nobody’s ever seen phonics like this before. Tremendous phonics. Up from 36 to 58 percent. People said it couldn’t be done. The Ministry? Shocked. Totally exceeded expectations. Our maths? Incredible. Two years of progress in 12 weeks. Could’ve been more, honestly. We’re winning so much at education you’re going to get tired of winning.”

Satirical, yes.
Unfair? Not really.

Because no serious educator would present data this way without caveats, especially when:

• phonics ≠ reading

• assessments have changed

• cohorts are selective

• “up to” hides variation

• timelines are compressed

• methodologies are unexplained

This isn’t transparent reporting.
It’s headline engineering.

“Up To™”: The Most Important Phrase in the Room

“Up to two years’ progress.”
“Up to a year of gains.”
“Exceeded expectations.”

These phrases aren’t lies, they’re political tools. They invite the reader to imagine best-case outcomes while quietly ignoring distributions, baselines, and outliers.

Trump used this constantly:

“Many people are saying.”
“Record numbers.”
“The best ever.”

Which people?
Which records?
Compared to what?

In this email, the data is presented as settled fact rather than provisional evidence. The debate is closed before it begins.

Same Script, New Audience: Parents

On the same day, the Minister appears in a video speaking directly to parents:

“Great news for parents. You told us that you wanted to be able to help your children with their mathematics more at home… You told us that you wanted to help out more at home and we’ve delivered.”

No data this time.
Just reassurance.

A new maths practice tool, delivered via an international platform, will be available next week. It’s aligned. It’s practical. It will help children feel good about their abilities.

Enjoy.

This is the same messaging architecture, just tuned for a different audience.

To teachers: “The data proves it’s working.”
To parents: “You asked. We delivered.”

Different language. Same move.

• Declare success

• Present decisions as inevitable

• Skip the messy middle

• Keep the story positive

The Politics of “You Told Us, We Delivered”

“You told us, and we delivered” is a powerful phrase. It implies consultation, responsiveness, and closure, without ever explaining:

• what alternatives were considered

• who made the decision

• how procurement occurred

• why this platform, not local solutions

• how success will be evaluated

It turns a complex policy choice into a feel-good transaction.

Trump did this constantly:

“The people wanted it. I listened. We delivered.”

Once framed this way, questioning the decision sounds like opposing parents, or children, or success itself.

That’s not engagement. That’s narrative insulation.

Timing Is the Tell

None of this arrives mid-year, alongside published methodologies.

It arrives:

• on the last day of term

• at the start of the holidays

• just before parents log off

By the time schools return, the story is already set:

The reforms are working. The tools are here. The debate is over.

Trump rarely waited for full evidence before declaring victory. The victory was the message.

Why This Should Worry Us

This isn’t about personalities or party politics.

It’s about what happens when education communication starts to prioritise confidence over clarity, optimism over evidence, and affirmation over explanation.

Education depends on:

• trust

• nuance

• professional scepticism

• long-term thinking

Not slogans.
Not victory laps.
Not end-of-term emails packed with uncontextualised wins.

When data starts talking like Trump, it stops informing and starts persuading.

And in education, persuasion without transparency isn’t leadership.

It’s theatre.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

I’m currently working alongside educators and systems in Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK, Nigeria, India and Singapore, sharing learning, supporting innovation, and advocating for what truly matters in education: people, purpose, and professional trust. If you’re interested in where I’m travelling, who I’m working with, or how this work might support your own context, here’s where you can learn more:

Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
P-BLOT™– Evidence-informed support for behaviour and learning
Connect on LinkedIn – Reflections, resources and current projects

When you spoke publicly about the profound impact one book had on your thinking - a book read on a summer holiday and powerful enough, apparently, to inform the direction of our entire education system - many educators across the motu paused.

Not because they begrudged you the inspiration. Inspiration matters. Books shape us all.

But because they recognised a gap.

A gap between the single, imported worldview that seems to be guiding your reforms, and the rich, diverse, deeply informed body of knowledge that already exists here in Aotearoa. Knowledge held by teachers, leaders, academics, iwi, whānau, communities, and decades of homegrown research.

So this summer, educators have done something characteristically generous:
they have put together a reading list for you.

Not as an act of defiance.
Not as a political stunt.
But as a genuine invitation.

An invitation to widen the circle of voices shaping your thinking.
An invitation to step beyond the narrow canon you’ve been handed.
An invitation to engage with the people who actually know this system, because they live it, breathe it, teach in it, research it, and entrust their tamariki to it.

And, by extension, we warmly extend this invitation to Associate Minister David Seymour, whose recent public statements suggest he too could benefit from engaging with the breadth, depth, and cultural grounding these texts offer.

These 27 books are not presented as a new canon. We are not asking you to swap one ideology for another. Instead, they represent a constellation of perspectives:
humanistic, bicultural, relational, critical, imaginative, place-based, trauma-informed, and deeply anchored in Aotearoa.

They speak to the complexity that your recent comments have tended to simplify.
They speak to the histories that your imported models overlook.
They speak to the children whose worlds cannot be captured by a single curriculum lens.
And they speak to the profession whose expertise deserves your trust.

This list is an offering. One made with sincerity, not sarcasm.
If one book helped shape your vision, imagine what 27 could do.

So here is our invitation:
Take these books with you on your summer break.
Read widely.
Read bravely.
Read with the willingness to be unsettled and expanded.
And allow the wisdom of Aotearoa’s educators to sit alongside the authors who first caught your attention.

Minister Stanford, Minister Seymour, we hope you enjoy the journey.

Here is your Summer Reading List, curated by the people who care deeply about the future you are now shaping.

Te Whāriki — Ministry of Education (Aotearoa New Zealand)

“A world-respected curriculum that sets children up to be capable, competent thinkers and learners… and is deeply grounded in the New Zealand context.”

It feels fitting to begin with our own taonga. Te Whāriki is not just an early childhood curriculum — it is a philosophical statement about who children are and what they deserve. Rooted in bicultural partnership and shaped by mana, whanaungatanga, and exploration, it places inquiry, curiosity, and identity at the centre.
Educators nominated it because it represents the kind of curriculum designed with — not imported into — Aotearoa.

A reminder that profound educational thinking already lives here, in our own soil.

Teacher — by Gabbie Stroud

“Teacher burnout. An autobiography.”

Stroud’s memoir has become something of a modern classic among educators. It’s raw, honest, and deeply human — a frontline account of what happens when a system forgets that teaching is relational work, not administrative output.
This recommendation arrived with just two words: “teacher burnout.”

Enough said.
A book like this isn’t just read — it’s felt. And right now, its relevance is painfully clear.

Lost and Found — by Ross Greene

“Education begins with the child... We need to understand where our students come from and what their reality is.”

Ross Greene’s work is a masterclass in compassionate teaching. Lost and Found pushes us to see behaviour not as defiance but as communication — an unmet need, an unsolved problem, a missing skill. Greene invites educators to meet children where they are, not where a curriculum expects them to be.

The nominator’s message says it best:
When we truly know our students, we design learning that moves forward from their lived reality — not from someone else’s idealised version of it.

Fish in a Tree — by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

“A fictional story that reveals the complexity of neurodiverse learners — and the many ways teachers adapt for them.”

Although written for young readers, this novel offers a profound window into the experiences of dyslexic and neurodivergent students. Through Ally’s struggles and strengths, Hunt shows how easily a child can be misread by a system that isn’t built with their mind in mind.
Teachers nominated it because it reflects the daily, unseen adaptation work they do — work that cannot be captured in linear curriculum sequences or policy soundbites.

Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! — by Dr. Seuss (completed by Jack Prelutsky & Lane Smith)

“A nice quick read for the minister. The message: trust the professionals.”

This playful, deceptively simple picture book celebrates schools that value creativity, individuality, and joyful learning. Diffendoofer School thrives not because it trains children to pass tests, but because its teachers are trusted to ignite curiosity.

Its nominator offered the gentlest of provocations:
A good, quick read — and a reminder that professional expertise matters.

A timely message, to say the least.

Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change — by Keri Facer

This is the book to hand anyone who thinks the future of education is a matter of simply rearranging the old pieces. Keri Facer invites readers to imagine schooling capable of responding to social change, technological possibility, and the real needs of the world our young people are stepping into. The educator who nominated it hoped it might crack open the Minister’s imagination — to show what becomes possible when innovation and social responsibility are held together, rather than set in competition.

A reminder that futures-thinking is a discipline, not a daydream.

The Rhetoric and the Reality — by David Hood

David Hood traces the actual history of NCEA: its intentions, its design principles, and where practice diverged from vision. For those who believe our current conversations about curriculum and credentialing need more substance than soundbites, this book provides an honest, evidence-based account. Its nomination came with the hope that we remember where reforms began — and why.

What Happened To You? — by Dr Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey

Bruce Perry’s neuroscience, woven through Oprah Winfrey’s storytelling, reframes behaviour not as misbehaviour but as a response to experience. Trauma, neurodiversity, culture, and stress all shape how children arrive in their classrooms, and this book makes that reality impossible to ignore. Its recommender highlighted the crucial truth that a dysregulated child cannot access the learning part of their brain — something our current policy rhetoric frequently forgets.

This is a gentle but uncompromising reminder that teaching begins with the child, not the content.

The Balancing Act — by Dominic Wyse & Charlotte Hacking

Recently published and deeply grounded in research, this book challenges the binary thinking that so often dominates literacy debates. Wyse and Hacking offer a more nuanced vision than “structured literacy vs everything else,” arguing for a balanced, evidence-informed approach. It was nominated as an antidote to oversimplification — and to show that there is credible, rigorous research beyond the narrow slice currently shaping policy.

Disobedient Teaching — by Welby Ings

Welby Ings writes from the heart of teaching, and sometimes from its wounds. Disobedient Teaching is a call to resist the narrowing of education, to keep hold of the radical, relational, creative essence of learning. The nominator suggested, with both hope and sting, that this book might help the Minister understand both the power and the fragility of good teaching — and what is at risk when policy ignores it.

Invisible Intelligence — by Welby Ings

Where Disobedient Teaching speaks to pedagogy, Invisible Intelligence speaks to humanity. Ings’ memoir of being functionally illiterate until age 14 is not just a personal story but a profound challenge to our assumptions about ability, knowledge, and success. This book turns its focus toward the students the system routinely fails — those whose strengths sit outside narrow definitions of achievement.

It was nominated because it centres ākonga in a way policy seldom does.

Building on Our Strengths — by Professor Stuart McNaughton

Written by Aotearoa’s former Chief Science Adviser for Education, this book offers a clear-eyed, research-grounded picture of what our system does well and where we need to improve. Rather than chasing imported solutions, McNaughton invites us to grow what is already strong. His voice is steady, measured, and informed — everything system reform should be.

Te Kauae Tuku Iho: Inheriting the Sacred Jawbone — by Maia Hetaraka

Drawn from interviews with kaumātua, this book traces both the harm done to Māori through education and the aspirations kaumātua hold for their mokopuna. It is a deeply relational, deeply Aotearoa-centred text. The nominator hoped it might help policymakers understand the emotional, cultural, and historical stakes of curriculum decisions — and envision an education system shaped by mana rather than deficit.

World-Centred Education — by Gert Biesta

Biesta reminds readers that education is not simply about producing workers, rankings, or measurable skills. His writing evokes the spirit of Sir Ken Robinson — expansive, humane, and outward-looking. Biesta challenges us to consider the world children are entering, and the responsibilities they carry within it. As a recommendation, it came with a simple message: this book would broaden any leader’s lens.

Freedom to Learn — by Carl Rogers

A classic text of humanistic education, Rogers’ work argues that learning is relational, emotional, and rooted in personal agency. The recommender framed it as essential reading for anyone shaping policy: a reminder that students are not vessels to be filled, but humans to be invited into learning.

Education, in this view, is not just pedagogy — it is a human rights practice.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed — by Paulo Freire

Freire’s influence on critical education worldwide cannot be overstated. This book asks us to confront the political dimensions of schooling: who benefits, who is marginalised, and how education can either reinforce or dismantle inequality. Its nominator highlighted its relevance to our current moment — when social mobility is promised, but often only for those already benefiting from the system.

A timeless text that sharpens the moral purpose of schooling.

Place-Based Education — by David Sobel

David Sobel’s work is grounded in the belief that meaningful learning grows out of connection to local places, communities, and ecosystems. His writing is accessible, hopeful, and deeply practical. It was recommended as an alternative paradigm to imported models — one rooted in responsiveness, belonging, and environmental wellbeing.

NZAEE even offered to talk through the ideas with the Minister. The door is open.

Ki Te Hoe! Education for Aotearoa — edited by Pania Te Maro & Robin Averill

This 2023 NZCER publication gathers research-based approaches to enacting Te Tiriti o Waitangi across the education system. The nominator suggested it as essential reading for any policymaker wanting to understand real classroom practice in Aotearoa — and to design policy grounded in equity, not ideology.

A kete of wisdom urgently needed in present debates.

Truth Needs No Colour — by Heather McQuillan

McQuillan’s dystopian novel imagines an Aotearoa stripped of colour, creativity, and agency — a world of standardised testing and grey uniformity. Teachers recommended it because it feels uncomfortably close to a version of education we could stumble into if we stop paying attention. For young people, it is a mirror; for adults, a warning.

Sometimes fiction tells the truth more sharply than policy reports.

Teaching to the North-East — by Professor Russell Bishop

Bishop’s work remains foundational in Aotearoa. Teaching to the North-East centres relationships, trust, warmth, dialogue, and cultural knowledge as the heart of effective teaching. The recommender put it plainly: if the Minister truly wants to understand successful teaching, this is the book. It also came with a pointed reminder — experts begin by listening.

A book about connection, and about what happens when it’s missing.

How to Be an Antiracist — by Ibram X. Kendi

Kendi argues that every policy is either racist or antiracist — there is no neutral ground. This book would push any education leader to interrogate the impact of their decisions on those most marginalised. The nominator added that Kendi’s emphasis on self-awareness and continuous self-reflection is something noticeably absent in current reforms — and something urgently needed.

A courageous, confronting, transformative read.

Creative Schools — by Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken’s optimism and clarity shine in this book. He argues that creativity is not a luxury but a central engine of engagement and learning. The nominator highlighted its power to remind us that arts-rich education benefits all domains — attendance, curiosity, wellbeing, and achievement.

An inspiring vision of what schooling can be when imagination is not an afterthought.

Official Knowledge — by Michael Apple (3rd Edition)

Apple examines how certain knowledge becomes “official” and whose agendas it serves. The nominator saw this as essential reading for any policymaker attempting curriculum reform — especially one drawing heavily from far-right, neoconservative, and market-driven ideologies in the US. Apple offers both critique and hope: a reminder that change is possible, but only if we understand the forces shaping our “common sense” ideas about schooling.

A powerful counterbalance to imported conservatism.

Colouring in the White Spaces — by Dr Ann Milne

Ann Milne’s work is a cornerstone of culturally sustaining education in Aotearoa. She argues that thriving learning is rooted in culture, relationships, identity, and critical consciousness. The nominator framed it as essential for anyone wanting to understand how students actually learn here — not in theory, but in lived practice.

A book that refuses to allow Aotearoa to be painted with someone else’s palette.

Let the Children Play — by Pasi Sahlberg

Sahlberg’s work draws from the most successful education systems in the world — systems that prioritise wellbeing, play, equity, trust, and joy. This book challenges the narrow fixation on cognitive outcomes and reminds us that whole-child development is not an alternative to achievement; it is the foundation of it.

An uplifting, evidence-based argument for letting children be children — and watching learning flourish.

Mātauranga Māori — by Sir Hirini Moko Mead

This seminal text offers one of the clearest, most accessible articulations of what mātauranga Māori is — not as a curriculum “add-on,” but as a living, relational, philosophical framework that shapes how people think, learn, act, connect, care for one another, and understand the world. Mead describes mātauranga Māori as something woven through every activity people engage in; it is not a subject, but a worldview.

The educator who nominated this book shared deep sadness that the current ministerial framing of Māori language, knowledge, and culture has felt cursory — almost superficial — in ways that diminish the richness it brings to all of us, Māori and non-Māori alike. Their message to you, Minister, is an invitation rather than a reprimand:

Do not be fearful. This book will enrich your life. It will broaden how you see knowledge, education, and the diverse learners of Aotearoa.

If the goal is a genuinely world-class curriculum, then the wisdom in these pages is not optional — it is foundational.

An Invitation to Lead With Us, Not Above Us

Minister Stanford, Minister Seymour, if there is one message threaded through every book on this list, it is this: education is a shared endeavour. No single theory, no single ideology, and certainly no single summer read can capture the full richness of what it means to teach, to learn, and to belong in Aotearoa. These 27 books come from the hearts and hands of people who live this work daily. People who know its beauty, its struggle, its history, and its potential.

We offer them not as a challenge, but as a bridge.
Not as opposition, but as collaboration.
Not to sway you toward our ideology, but to invite you into the deep, diverse knowledge that already exists here. Knowledge grounded in our whenua, our cultures, our communities, and our commitments to one another.

If we are to build an education system worthy of all our tamariki, it will not be built from imported certainty, but from shared curiosity. We hope you’ll join us in that spirit - beginning, perhaps, by turning the first page of one of these books.

“Two years’ progress in 12 weeks!”
“Transformational gains!”
“We’ve turned maths around!”

These are powerful political claims. But political claims are not the same as educational truth.

This blog is a parent-friendly guide to understanding what’s actually happening behind the headlines — using two recent announcements as case studies:

1. The 2025 Year 7–8 maths acceleration trial

2. The phonics rollout

Both announcements highlight a pattern:
selective data presented as sweeping success, often without the context parents need to make sense of what is really happening in schools.

At the end of this blog, you’ll find a simple checklist to help you critically evaluate future education announcements — no matter which government is in charge.

Case Study 1: The 2025 Year 7–8 Maths Trial Announcement

“Two years’ progress in 12 weeks!” — but only if you zoom in very narrowly.

This week, the Minister announced results from a trial involving around 1500 Year 7–8 students who received small-group maths tutoring. The headline results were dramatic:

• Two years’ progress in 12 weeks for students receiving in-person tutoring

• 13–14 months’ progress for hybrid tutoring

• One year’s progress for online tutoring

• And most astonishingly:
  the control group also made “a year’s progress in 12 weeks”, which the Minister said was proof that the new curriculum and workbooks are “one of the most impactful interventions we can provide”.

But when you look at the underlying evaluation data — a very different picture emerges.

1. Students were only tested on four specific areas of maths

The trial focused on:

• basic facts

• place value

• rational numbers

• number-focused word problems

The evaluation explicitly notes:

“It is important to note that the e-asTTle test… tested the four aspects of maths covered in the 12 weeks of the intervention.”

Translation:

Students were tested on exactly the skills they had just practised intensively — nothing more.

Large short-term gains on drilled content are expected. They do not indicate two years of general mathematical learning.

2. “A year’s progress” is a label, not a broad learning outcome

In this trial, “a year’s progress” simply means a gain of 25–30 e-asTTle points.

The control group gained 27.76 points — conveniently within that band.

But this score gain reflects progress on those exact four skills.
Not geometry.
Not algebra.
Not statistics.
Not conceptual flexibility.
Not the breadth of the Year 7–8 curriculum.

Just those four drilled areas.

3. The control group was not a true “business-as-usual” group

The Minister framed the control group’s gains as proof that the new curriculum and workbooks are working miracles.

But the evaluation shows the control group received:

• the new curriculum

• new workbooks

• one hour of maths a day

• teachers who had completed PLD

• access to newly-developed resources

This is not a neutral comparison — it’s a supported intervention.

When you heavily emphasise specific content for 12 weeks and then test only that content, all groups should show gains.

That does not tell us anything about overall maths improvement.

Expert Commentary: What NZ’s Maths Education Specialists Are Saying

Professor Jodie Hunter, a respected mathematics education researcher at Massey University, said in an RNZ interview that the Minister’s claims are “problematic” because:

1. The trial only tested a very narrow slice of maths
She noted that the programme focused only on number (basic facts, number structure, rational number and proportional reasoning) while leaving out algebra, geometry, probability, measurement, and statistics — the majority of the curriculum.

2. The test used (e-asTTle) is tied to the older 2007/2008 curriculum
Meaning it does not reflect the new knowledge-rich curriculum the Minister is crediting for the gains.

3. The scale of the claims does not match the evidence
She emphasised that small-group tutoring is helpful — but claiming “groundbreaking” jumps across the curriculum is misleading when only a small set of skills were measured.

These points reinforce that the Minister’s narrative extrapolates far beyond the evidence.

Case Study 1.5: The Part No One Mentions — Three Maths Curriculums in One Year

Parents should also know that the curriculum landscape has been highly unstable in 2025.

Curriculum 1: Te Mātaiaho (the curriculum teachers had prepared to implement)

This curriculum was fully prepared for rollout and widely supported, but was removed at the start of 2025.

Curriculum 2: Knowledge-Rich Curriculum (introduced in January 2025)

Schools were told late in 2024 that they would be expected to implement the government’s new curriculum from Day 1 of 2025.

Curriculum 3: A refreshed refresh of the refreshed version released again without notice in Term 3

This mid-year version arrived without warning — the third major change inside a single school year.

Teachers spent 2025 navigating:

• contradictory expectations

• shifting documentation

• inconsistent PLD

• reworking planning multiple times

• uncertainty about sequencing and progression

So when the Minister attributes gains to “the new curriculum,” parents should ask:

Which one?
The version replaced in January?
The one released in January?
Or the one changed again mid-year?

The curriculum was too unstable to credibly claim it drove the results.

Case Study 1.6: Another Missing Piece — The Workbooks Don’t Align

The Minister celebrated that the control group made gains partly because they had access to new workbooks.

But teachers across the country report that:

• the workbooks do not align with any of the three curriculum versions

• sequencing doesn’t match

• key concepts appear too early, too late, or not at all

• some tasks contradict curriculum expectations

• teachers often have to rewrite or skip workbook content entirely

Attributing gains to “curriculum + new workbooks” makes little sense when:

The curriculum and the workbooks do not actually match.

This misalignment is another reason parents should be wary of sweeping claims about curriculum-driven impact.

Case Study 2: The Phonics Announcement

Another example of overstated political messaging

Last month, the Minister made similar claims about phonics, presenting the national rollout as the solution to New Zealand’s literacy challenges.

But as this blog unpacked (link below):

Aotearoa Educators Collective's Substack

When Phonics Isn’t Reading: Why Today’s ‘Literacy Breakthrough’ Doesn’t Add Up

This afternoon, the Minister of Education announced what she called a “transformational boost” in reading achievement, crediting the government’s mandated structured literacy programme and newly introduced phonics checks…

Read more

a year ago · 82 likes · 16 comments · AEC NZ

the announcement relied on narrow measures (decoding accuracy) while implying broader reading gains (comprehension, fluency, vocabulary) that were not tested.

Just like the maths announcement:

• limited data were inflated into national claims

• short-term results were framed as systemic transformation

• missing evidence was overlooked

• “the reforms are working” became the headline, even though the data was selective

The pattern is the same.

What Both Announcements Reveal About Political Spin

Across maths and phonics, the same strategies appear:

1. Narrow measures are framed as wide success

Testing four number skills becomes “two years’ progress.”

2. Short-term data becomes proof of long-term improvement

Even when long-term results are not available.

3. Curriculum and resources are credited without stable implementation

Despite confusion and misalignment.

4. The narrative reinforces political messaging

Not educational reality.

5. Critical context is missing

Curriculum instability, teacher workload, implementation inconsistencies.

Parent Checklist: How to Translate Political Spin in Education Announcements

Use this every time you hear “a year’s progress,” “transformational gains,” or “we’ve fixed it.”

1. What exactly was measured?

Full curriculum or just a narrow slice?
Announcements often present learning gains as broad improvements (“maths achievement is rising”) when the evaluation only measured a few targeted skills (e.g., basic facts or decoding).

Parents can ask:

• What specific skills or areas were tested?

• Does the test reflect the full curriculum — or only the content that students practised intensively?

• Is the gain being described actually the same as the gain being claimed?

Why it matters:
A gain on a tightly-aligned test is not the same as overall literacy or maths improvement.

2. Who was tested?

All students or a specific subset?
If only one group was tested (e.g., students who were already a year behind), but the Minister celebrates results as applying to “all New Zealand learners,” that’s misleading.

Parents can ask:

• Which students were included?

• Does the sample match the group the Minister claims is improving?

• Are results being generalised beyond the group actually studied?

Why it matters:
What works for a very targeted group may not generalise to the whole population.

3. Over what timeframe?

12 weeks? A full term? A year?
The timing of the trial makes a huge difference. Gains made during a 12-week intensive block (especially if it sits across holidays, transitions, or seasonal shifts) cannot be fairly compared to a year of standard schooling.

Parents can ask:

• How long was the intervention?

• When did it take place? (Gaps between testing periods matter.)

• Are we comparing short bursts of drilled practice to wider learning across an entire year?

Why it matters:
A short, intense block inflates results.
Schools cannot maintain that intensity year-round.

4. Do we have follow-up data?

Short-term spikes ≠ long-term learning.
Many interventions produce gains that disappear once the programme stops.

Parents can ask:

• Is there follow-up testing?

• Do the gains last 3 months later? 6 months later?

• Has the programme been proven to “stick”?

Why it matters:
Real educational improvement is sustained, not momentary.

5. What did the control group actually receive?

Was it truly “business as usual”?
Many trials have “control groups” that aren’t really controls. Sometimes they receive new workbooks, PLD, or curriculum changes — or a level of attention that boosts performance.

Parents can ask:

• Did the control group have the same conditions as normal classrooms?

• Did they receive new resources, extra teaching hours, or different expectations?

• Does the control group realistically represent the experience most children will have in regular classrooms?

Why it matters:
If the control group gets extra support, you can’t fairly compare them to the intervention.

6. How were the numbers framed?

Beware dramatic labels.
Terms like “amazing,” “incredible,” or “groundbreaking” are judgments, not evidence.
Phrases like “two years’ progress” come from statistical scales — not actual curricular years.

Parents can ask:

• What does “a year’s progress” mean in this context?

• Is the language descriptive or promotional?

• Are the numbers based on a test scale rather than real-year learning?

Why it matters:
Framing can turn modest results into political triumphs.

7. Who did the evaluation?

Independent researchers? Or the Ministry itself?
Internal evaluations can be rigorous — but they also serve political timelines.

Parents can ask:

• Was the evaluation carried out by independent researchers?

• Is the full report publicly available?

• Has it been peer-reviewed? I.e., have other researchers (who do not gain to benefit from the report) reviewed the information and support the same findings, or not?

• Is this early-phase data or a full final evaluation?

Why it matters:
Evaluations done inside the Ministry may lack independence — or be released selectively.

8. What’s missing?

Look for what isn’t being talked about.
Announcements rarely mention:

• teacher workload

• disparities between schools

• implementation difficulty

• resourcing gaps

• children with different learning profiles

• equity impacts

• variation between regions or schooling contexts

Parents can ask:

• What about students who don’t learn like others?

• Were neurodiverse, ESOL, or high-needs students included?

• Did all schools have equal time, staffing, or support?

Why it matters:
Averages hide deeper inequalities.

9. Is this being framed as “the solution”?

Grand claims often obscure complex realities.
Education rarely has quick fixes.
When something is framed as the answer — phonics, tutoring, new curricula — it’s usually political messaging.

Parents can ask:

• Is this being positioned as a silver bullet?

• Are other essential components being ignored?

Why it matters:
Simplicity sells, but reality doesn’t fit into a soundbite.

10. Does this align with what teachers are experiencing?

If teachers’ experience contradicts the announcement, pay attention.
Teachers are the closest observers of student learning — far closer than Ministers or communications staff.

Parents can ask:

• What are teachers saying about this programme or curriculum?

• Does this match what’s happening in your child’s classroom?

• Is implementation realistic and consistent?

Why it matters:
If the official narrative and classroom reality don’t match, the official narrative needs scrutiny.

Final Thoughts

None of this means the tutoring programmes or phonics initiatives are inherently bad.
Some may genuinely help.
Some already show promise.

But when narrow, short-term results are inflated into sweeping claims of system transformation, public trust erodes — and parents are left in the dark.

You don’t need to be sceptical.
You just need to be informed.

Use the checklist above.
Ask the right questions.
Seek the context.
And remember:

Thoughtful scrutiny isn’t about tearing down progress — it’s about ensuring policies truly support teachers and students. Asking for clarity strengthens our education system, not weakens it.

Curious about the work I do in education around the world?

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🎤 Professional Speaker Profile – Keynotes, consultancy and facilitation
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