Kia ora koutou, nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Ko Ken Wilson taku ingoa. Whakatauki.
Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now the glory and the dream?[1]
My wife of 53 years died in December last year. I have since acquired heart issues, my hip needs replacing, and I am to be made redundant at 75 in this year’s budget.
I am in a reflective, if unforgiving, mood as I take what may be my farewell to a cause I have dedicated my life to – to support and make a better New Zealand public education system – because this is the way we make our democracy, how we make our citizens and where we begin to build the values that will become the unique cultural imprints of our nation.
But I am lifted from my melancholy musings by recognising that this morning’s keynote, the ECE presenter before me and the five presenters of this morning’s workshops are all ASTs I have assessed and reassessed. Visible confirmation and affirmation of the National Criteria and the professional paths that being an AST in a Kāhui Ako opens.
I regard the decision to repeal the IES policy and to defund its operational arm, the Kāhui Ako model, as a catastrophe. A catastrophe for the teaching profession, particularly for classroom teachers.
In my view, this decision:
- a) It is a gratuitous insult to the professionalism of teachers, made more disgusting because so many principals colluded in the undermining of that professionalism;
- b) This decision will put the creation and spread of stunning resources, improved teacher effectiveness and effective practices that have a direct impact on increased student progress and achievement back 10 years or more;
- c) This decision will put individual schools back into chains – the great freedom brought by Kāhui Ako staffing, release time, pay and career options will be gone – control will go back to the centre;
- d) This decision will extinguish the emergence of a learning infrastructure that is emerging across the motu – one with a direct focus and aligned and integrated response to the identified needs of students in the Kāhui Ako, from ECE to Year 13.
The Ministry has played a furtive and dishonest hand in this process. In its advice to the Minister there is not a single mention of the Investing in Education Success policy (IES) that created Kāhui Ako as its operational arm. I’m not at all confident that Ms. Stanford knows there is such a policy.
IES was a sound policy. Kāhui Ako were an innovative stroke of genius and are on their way to revitalising the structure, operation, and focus of the compulsory education system and the early childhood sector.
Defunding Kāhui Ako is an insult to the professionalism of teachers and their aspirations to be more effective and to have a career as an outstanding classroom teacher and mentor of colleagues for classroom teachers.
Resistance is possible and required and we should use the time until January 2026 to prepare.
Kāhui Ako are a deeply profound innovation. The only true innovation in my 50 years in education.
What is innovation?
Innovation is the creation of knowledge and its application that has never existed before. Words (discourses), actions, tools, behaviours and mental models of this new world have to be invented. Existing power relations and privileges are of no advantage. True innovation is very rare; innovation in education is extremely rare (we still use cohorts as did the Prussians). Innovation driven from the ground up is even rarer, and yet, here in the Kāhui Ako model, we have just that, a stunning innovation whose power to transform the compulsory education sector is so vast that few could imagine, contemplate or tolerate it.
In 2015, nobody knew what a Kāhui Ako was or could be. But the imagining had begun and was hinted at in the Guidelines, Criteria and the Research papers put together in the remarkable collaborative effort that began to operationalise IES.
And the Ministry – what did they do about this innovation? The Ministry never bothered to imagine anything. As fast as it could, it completed the establishment phase and moved on to the next fad. By around 2017 the Ministry had abandoned the nurturing of Kāhui Ako.
The genius of the Kāhui Ako model and its resourcing
The IES policy was made in an authentically collaborative process. Kāhui Ako were designed to be consistent with sound, long-established educational theories of adult learning and organisation transformation, by the innate educational professionalism of the parties in the working group.
Kāhui Ako have succeeded where there are layers and layers of ZPDs. Understanding practice from inside sound long-tested education theory is the bedrock of my insistent assertion that Kāhui Ako is the most innovative intervention in the compulsory education sector in my lifetime.
The OECD notes that reducing the ‘great disconnect’ and addressing ‘the awkward relationship between learning research, on the one hand, and educational practices, on the other, … confronts education professionals, leaders and policy makers with major challenges.’[2] No OECD system had, at the time, found the means to reduce the great persistent disconnect.
No disconnect here, we have found a way to situate research and best practice in private classrooms. I am often astounded to find that I am largely alone in grasping why this accomplishment is so momentous and what it promises classroom teachers and my grandchildren.
CHAT (Cultural Historical Activity Theory) says an activity system is organised around a collaboratively generated motivation towards a goal or outcome. Without that process and motivation, schools will not collaborate as if they remain in a Kāhui Ako. The forms may persist, but once the collective motivation goes, it all ends.
The genius of IES is many things – wholly flexible staffing, no bulk funding, generosity towards other schools, and gifting entitlements. But those are superficial things, those are nothing without the trust arising from the collaboratively generated shared motivation; the goal of making the path of the student the most effective it can be for each and every student.
The genius of the New Appointments National Panel
As if overturning the core of Tomorrow’s Schools were not enough of a shock, the design team agreed to establish an independent quality assurance mechanism using a rigorous assessment process applied by very experienced teaching professionals.
The existence of this mechanism is astounding. I think it has endured because it fits into the cultural tenets and moral purpose of teachers. Panel members sound like teachers, we look like teachers because we will always be teachers.
This Panel has been in existence for 10 years and has published four reports on the impact and progress of Kāhui Ako. We have surveyed experienced leaders and across-school teachers and recorded their suggestions for improving the model. How often do you think the Ministry has consulted the Panel on anything at all? What are the chances that the Ministry paid any attention whatsoever to those informed and considered views? The answer to both is NIL – not a skerrick.
The genius of Sound data
Ms. Stanford has decided not to invest in bringing e-asTTle up to speed. NZCER is in the dog box because the Board refused to release the PAT data it gathers from the use of its many assessment tools in schools; it stood firm on its ethics. So, will the longitudinal data series available to researchers be thrown out the window? How will we know if anything Ms. Stanford has required of us is working if there are no time data series?
Fit for purpose, robust, readily accessible and understandable sound mathematical tools with high utility for the assessment of student progress and achievement are available and in use in a growing number of Kāhui Ako. And they were invented and are being improved by a former AST from Gisborne Boy’s High School. Sound Data may very well be our best defence against the next iteration of imposed national standards or assessments that are of little or no use for classroom teachers or principals.
How did Ms. Stanford come to think that she was doing a good thing?
Ms. Stanford doesn’t seem to have learned that Kāhui Ako was one part of a larger policy or that any were succeeding. She saw the $118m of lazy money and went for it.
She couldn’t know that her echo chamber had no evidence; she didn’t know they had only gossip, and so the momentum got underway. As a matter of fact, critics of Kāhui Ako have no research-based evidence whatsoever that the model is not working – none.
The Ministry could not provide frank advice about the virtues and values of IES and Kāhui Ako because it had done nothing to gather any evidence in 9 years. No research itself after an initial round, no commissioned research, and certainly no longitudinal research. A disgraceful indictment. More truly appalling is that the Ministry saw Kāhui Ako as having no educational benefit for students, teachers and the system as a whole.
Ms. Stanford is absolutely confident that, as she notes – and I quoted yesterday – the sector is hugely supportive of disestablishment and that – ‘were consulted for 15 months via principals’ meetings/conferences, etc. Huge support.’
At the PPTA Leadership conference, I was impressed with Ms. Stanford’s assured confidence and ready command of many of the sectors’ TLAs. I was also impressed with her energetic pursuit of her six priorities. But signs of an overweening confidence that her decisions must be correct emerged. Her rationale for closing Kāhui Ako was embarrassingly weak. Her evidence was all hearsay and gossip. Her mind was clearly made up around May or June 2024, and having her eye on the leadership prize, I am told, she is not for turning. The people and students of the education sector, now and for many years, are going to pay a dreadful and long-lasting price for her hubris.
So whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now the glory and the dream?
The visionary gleam for those who had it or acquired it as they came to grasp the unbounded possibilities of IES and Kāhui Ako to effect whole systems change has dimmed with the foreshadowing of a truly catastrophic decision to be announced in Budget 2025.
The glory that could have been a reviewed, refreshed and reinvigorated IES has been sacrificed by colleagues who should have known better and whose pusillanimous acquiescence to a Faustian bargain extinguished a world-leading innovation, something more substantial, powerful and precious than they even imagined or frankly, are likely to see again.
Finally, what now for me?
As for me, well, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. I had such great hopes for our public education system, a hope that came from the unlikeliest place, a National government. As a whole, I have been immensely proud of the professionalism I have seen in the nearly 700 of my colleagues, the people others call teachers. At last, we had something that was educationally sound, that was actually going to make the life of every single classroom teacher in their private practices more collaborative, effective, rewarding and intellectually and educationally satisfying.
My time as a passionate defender of the mana, status and expertise of colleagues over the last 50 years is coming to an end. I take some comfort from your being here and the existence of the Kāhuinga Arataki. I wish you, your ASTs and WSTs and all who have made their contributions over the last 10 years all the best and a steely determination to succeed for all that may come next. Thank you.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood – William Wordsworth
Ken Wilson Speech to Kahuinga Arataki Conference – click here to download the Word doc.