The Google Doc that feels locked
Imagine a Google Doc that holds your school’s curriculum and key priorities. In most schools, that document is alive. People copy it, comment on it, reshape it, and improve it. Some stay close to the original, others take it further, but the work gets better because professional judgement is in play. Now imagine that same document with quiet restrictions layered over it. Edits are visible. Changes are noticed. Variations raise questions. Nothing is explicitly forbidden, but the message is clear enough. You can edit, but you’d better think carefully before you do. That subtle shift changes everything. Not immediately, but over time. Confidence narrows. Risk-taking becomes measured. Innovation slows, not because people lack ideas, but because the environment makes those ideas feel costly. That is the difference between an editable system and a restrictive one.
By leadership agency, I’m talking about the capacity and authority for principals to exercise informed professional judgement in the interests of their learners, their staff, and their communities. It is not something that sits outside the system. It operates within it, alongside national direction and expectation. But it recognises that education cannot be reduced to a script.
At its core, it is about stewardship. Holding responsibility for decisions that are complex, contextual, and often without a single right answer. When leadership agency is intact, principals interpret policy thoughtfully rather than mechanically. They hold the intent of national change, but shape it in ways that make sense for their context. They make decisions that are principled, evidence-informed, and grounded in what they know about their learners.
Without that agency, plans still exist. Expectations are still set. But the work becomes thinner. It looks aligned, but it is less responsive. Less connected. Less likely to shift outcomes in any meaningful way. There is a tendency, particularly in periods of reform, to misinterpret leadership agency. It is not resistance. It is not a lack of accountability. It is not inconsistency. It is certainly not principals doing as they please. In reality, it does the opposite.
Leadership agency is what allows coherence to exist without it becoming compliance. It ensures that implementation is not just consistent, but considered. That decisions are not only aligned, but understood. A tightly controlled system can look effective. It can produce order, alignment, and visible compliance. But those things, on their own, do not lead to better learning. Judgement is what turns intention into impact. Remove that, and you are left with activity that looks right but does not necessarily make a difference.
We cannot expect agency in classrooms if it is not present in leadership
The current moment in education is defined by pace and reform. Curriculum refresh (cough rebuild), major shifts and an overhaul in assessment, increased expectations around consistency and visibility, attendance-driven policies, a year-by-year ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum, not to mention ongoing workforce pressure. None of these are minor, and none of them are arriving in isolation.
In that environment, it is understandable that systems reach for control. Greater prescription can feel like clarity. Increased oversight can feel like assurance. But there is a line. Cross it, and what you gain in consistency, you begin to lose in professional judgement.
We have known this for some time in relation to teacher agency. When teachers feel trusted, when their expertise is recognised, and when they see their leaders exercising judgement, they are far more likely to do the same. The same dynamic applies here. Where leadership agency is strong, teacher agency is real. Inquiry has substance. Innovation is not something that sits on the edges; it is part of the work.
Where leadership agency is constrained, things shift. Compliance begins to stand in for thinking. Risk-taking becomes cautious. Professional conversations narrow because the space for genuine decision-making has reduced. The downflow impacts our tamariki. Student agency does not disappear overnight, but it becomes harder to sustain. It starts to sound like rhetoric rather than something students consistently experience.
What is emerging is not a single policy or a single change. It is the cumulative effect of many policies and many changes. A little more prescription here. A little more visibility there. Mandate this, and mandate that. A slightly lower tolerance for variation. A slightly stronger emphasis on consistency of approach, wrapped up in ‘science’ and sold as a prepackaged Kool-Aid – just tear off the tab and drink!
Each of these can be justified. Together, they begin to reshape the work. The role of the principal starts to tilt. There is more system management and less space for educational leadership. Decisions are made more carefully. Not always because they are complex, but because they are visible.
That is when the system starts to feel like that restricted document. You can still edit. But you are more aware when you do. Over time, that awareness becomes hesitation. And hesitation is not a strong foundation for innovation, or for agency, at any level.
Agency in schools is layered. Students experience agency when their teachers have it. Teachers are able to exercise it when their leaders do. And leadership agency itself is shaped by the level of trust within the system. These are not separate ideas. They sit on top of one another.
When principals are trusted to make decisions, teachers tend to respond in kind. They take ownership. They engage in inquiry. They adapt their practice based on what they see happening for learners. When that extends to classrooms, students experience learning differently. There is more voice. More ownership. More engagement that is genuine rather than constructed.
When one layer weakens, the others feel it. An editable system allows that layering to hold. A restrictive one interrupts it.
Kicking the tyres of curriculum change
This has played out very directly for us at our kura, Beach Haven Primary in Auckland.
During term one, we made a deliberate decision to work with the draft curriculum in a practical way. Rather than waiting for everything to be finalised, we chose to use it properly. Not lightly, and not without discussion, but deliberately, following the intent provided by the Ministry as closely as was practical.
The driver was straightforward. Feedback on these drafts needed to be provided at pace, and responding based on a reading of the document and a hunch that there were significant problems of practice within it did not feel sufficient. If we were going to contribute, it needed to come from actual use. From our user experience and our feedback, we needed to highlight the problems of practice that we encountered. So we treated it as a trial. A ‘test drive’ if you like.
Teachers planned from it, taught from it, and tested it against the reality of their classrooms. Not to get it perfect, but to understand it. It was not smooth. There were parts that landed well straight away, and parts that did not. There were moments of clarity, and moments where teachers had to stop and work out what something might look like in practice. There were assumptions that held up, and others that did not. It required nuanced professional judgement at every step. It also required a level of comfort with uncertainty. That is not always easy, particularly when the broader system signals a preference for clarity and consistency.
As the term progressed, patterns began to emerge. There were clear insights. Areas where the curriculum enabled deeper learning and stronger engagement, and areas we had to change that ultimately impacted or reshaped how we teach inquiry. It led to less flexibility. The draft structure was the opposite of inquiry. Collaboration between teachers and classes decreased, learning became teacher-led rather than student-driven, and teaching felt contrived. It impacted the operation of the whole school, including our culture of whānau, because learning was disparate and disjointed. Instead of operating across phase teams and in whānau groupings, it felt like there were six distinct teams across the school, all working in their own year group silos, rather than collaborative groupings.
Opportunities for tuakana–teina had to be forced. This privatised teaching practice rather than deprivatised it, which contradicts the best practice identified in New Zealand research on effective inquiry learning.
The overwhelming conclusion was that composite and multi-level classes would find it nearly impossible to cover numerous achievement objectives that did not connect across year levels without contorting practice into impractical arrangements. The concern was raised that such an approach could lead to streaming. Integration is possible but not easy, and lacks authenticity because teachers need to manufacture connections that are not natural but forced. It saps the joy of teaching and removes the fun from learning.
While the draft might be marketed as “easier to deliver”, it feels disconnected, desperate, and lacking cohesion. A cynic could argue it deliberately reduces inquiry learning and student agency in favour of a cut-and-paste curriculum model that assumes students are a one-size-fits-all group. Ever met a standard, national group of tamariki? Such a thing does not exist.
By the time feedback was submitted, it was grounded, specific. It reflected real experiences, not general impressions. But the most significant shift was in confidence. Teachers felt more certain about what they were working with because they had used it. There was a stronger sense of ownership and a clearer understanding of what would need to change moving forward. That did not happen by chance. It happened because there was enough leadership agency to decide to engage in that way, and enough trust in the staff to make it worthwhile. That is the link that matters.
The evidence we keep coming back to
Leadership agency creates the conditions for teacher agency. Teacher agency shapes what students experience. Remove the first, and the others become harder to sustain.
None of this is new, nor is it abstract. Across research into effective systems, the message is consistent. Improvement relies on professional judgement. It relies on inquiry. It relies on the ability to respond to context. It shows up in everyday decisions: how policy is interpreted before it reaches staff; if time is protected for inquiry when things are busy; the willingness to take a considered risk and to stand behind it. It is the implementation of a coaching culture to foster a ‘done with, not done to’ way of being in your kura. It is also in the quieter decisions: what gets prioritised; what gets left; how boards are engaged in understanding not just compliance, but judgement; where lines are drawn when something does not serve learners as well as it should.
At times, it involves pushback. Not loudly, but clearly. Over time, these decisions shape culture. They signal what is expected. They signal whether people are trusted to think. That is how agency becomes embedded, or eroded.
Aotearoa New Zealand has long relied on professional trust within its education system. The ability for schools to respond to their communities has always depended on principals being able to exercise judgement in context. That has never meant the absence of direction. It has meant direction that allows for interpretation.
This builds directly on the earlier argument about innovation. The conditions that allow innovation to occur are the same conditions that allow leadership agency to exist. Right now, those conditions feel more fragile. The question is not whether principals are capable of exercising judgement. That is well established. The question is whether the system continues to make space for it. Because when that space narrows, the impact is not contained. It flows into classrooms. It shapes how teachers work. It shapes what students experience.
When the document becomes restrictive, even experienced professionals begin to hesitate. And when hesitation replaces confidence, improvement slows. If we want a system where learners are genuinely engaged and able to take ownership of their learning, then the same must be true for those leading it. Editable systems are not about looseness. They are about trust, judgement, and responsibility.
Perhaps this is the point that sits underneath it all. We cannot ask for agency in our learners, encourage it in our teachers, and then quietly constrain it in our leaders. If we do, we create a disconnect that no amount of policy or structure can resolve.
Agency does not cascade by instruction. It grows through example. So the question is not simply what we expect from our principals. It is what we are prepared to trust them with. Because in the end, the strength of the system will not be measured by how tightly it holds, but by how well it enables the people within it to think, to adapt, and to lead. That is the work. And right now, it matters more than ever.