Kia ora koutou, I am new to this community. I have joined to share my disgust at the catastrophic decision to toss out everything that is, that has been, and that might have been accomplished by Kāhui Ako had its potential, its emerging impact and its possibilities as a radical educational innovation be recognised by those whose role is to do so.
In this post, I provide the community with a little of my contribution to education over the last 50 years. I do this so that you will have some perspective on how the views I will express have formed, and so that you may make your own assumptions about whether those views have any merit.
My last teaching role was HOD English at Rongotai College. I went to PPTA to work on Professional Matters, just in time for Tomorrow’s Schools, the State Sector Act, a new Education Act and a Ministry turning away from the sector; professional matters went out the window in the face of Agency and Public Choice Theories.
I had been on the PPTA Executive earlier and had represented secondary teachers on these professional bodies:
The Secondary and Technical Teachers Disciplinary Board
The Teachers’ Court of Appeal
The Classification and Appointments Appeal Board.
I was a member of the body that reviewed the Secondary Staffing Formula in 1983.
At PPTA, I managed discipline and competence and briefed lawyers on behalf of teachers. I was very familiar with the 1978 Marshall report on teacher registration.
But all that changed when my focus became negotiating the very first Collective Employment Agreement in the Codification exercise that took some two years of grinding, largely fruitless confrontation with the State Services Commission. I learned the entire CEA, which had some 150 odd pages off by heart so that not a single term or condition of service was lost.
A key outcome of the codification process was our loss in the Court of Appeal of the right to include staffing entitlements in the CEA. I will write about this critical lesson in a later post.
Around 1995, I worked with Anne Collins to ensure that teachers would be required to be registered and that no employer in the state education system could employ a person who was not a teacher. Teaching had been deregulated in 1991. Again, I will write about this lesson in a later post.
For 20 years I worked with Phillip Capper and Dr Roberta Hill in the Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd (WEB Research), acquiring then applying the principles and practices of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as Developmental Work Research (DWR) as a knowledge creation and intervention methodology in complex public and private workplaces. We worked with the University of Helsinki and the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition based at USCD on CHAT and DWR and led the world in applying DWR as a consulting methodology.
When WEB closed, I worked as an LSM and Commissioner for many years and managed the amalgamation of Wainui’s high schools.
These experiences and lessons are for me critical to preserving the professional status, mana and quality of teachers. My main passion has always been to do everything I can to ensure that teachers are highly qualified and knowledgeable about pedagogy at entry, that they steadily become accomplished practitioners in their classrooms and that they receive the respect, admiration and support they require and deserve for what they do for other people’s children they are entrusted with. My standards and expectations for the quality of teachers are high, yet governments do not share that determination, preferring easy, lazy options to solve supply and quality matters.
As a member of the New Appointments National Panel (NANP) since 2015I have had the considerable privilege of being in a quality assurance role. In the last 10 years, I have interviewed and assessed some:
469 Across School Teacher
176 Kāhui Ako Leaders
22 applicants for the Principal Recruitment Allowances (PRA).
I have worked with some 30 Kāhui Ako nationwide. There are usually 11 members of the Panel, and in those 10 years, we have all experienced and worked with what must be nigh on 8,000 leaders and ASTs and nearly all of the 220 Kāhui Ako. We have seen the lifting of the levels of accomplishment and leadership of the teacher workforce.
That is what sound evidence looks like and what is reflected in the four reports by the NANP. Curiously, our reports are dismissed because we know what we are talking about.
Forgive me if I become intemperate with critics who quibble about money and resourcing and have no evidence whatsoever for their criticism of Kāhui Ako other than gossip.
I have seen and experienced the vast, brilliant impact and resources Kāhui Ako people have created. And now a Minister, woefully advised by a Ministry that undermined and abandoned Kāhui Ako and the people therein around 2017, and who recently provided the Minister with her evidence-free opinion, is about to throw something profoundly important for the professionalism of all teachers out the window because she believes she can do so in the Faustian bargain that her Auckland echo chamber supports and is cheering her on to do – well not me.
I’m not intending to give critics of Kāhui Ako any time – they have no evidence and nothing to say. My focus will be on explaining why every primary and secondary classroom teacher must pressure their unions to oppose and preserve the Kāhui Ako model and its entitlements to make possible its now-emergent future impact on the system as a whole.
I will write on a number of topics from my long history in the field and I will post a considerable number of Memos, Cabinet papers, research papers and all manner of things. I will assert that not only was the decision to disestablish Kāhui Ako an educational catastrophe, but also that by its actions, the Ministry of Education has demonstrated that classroom teachers can have no confidence that the Ministry possess a fundamental and unshakeable understanding and commitment to supporting them in their efforts to be more effective. The Ministry cannot be relied upon to lead educational innovation or effectiveness. I will suggest an alternative in a later posting.
My long form papers can be found on the web page below.