Writing this piece in early October, I can only guess the outcome of the General Election. By the time you read it, you may well be already despairing about what our political leaders have in mind for education, particularly primary education, over the next three years. Let me briefly share your concern and then perhaps cheer you up a bit.
Sharing your concern, I would suggest that trouble is probably ahead whether we have ended up with a National-led coalition or a Labour-led one. A risk with National is that a damaging reform will become a cornerstone policy that will be pursued come hell or high water (as with National Standards). A risk with Labour is that it will continue its interminable processes of modifying previous education policy but then still come up with something highly flawed (think Curriculum Refresh).
To cheer you up, let me remind you that policymaking is never a purely top-down process. Policymakers in an education agency such as the Ministry of Education might wish to say ‘jump’, but principals and teachers rarely ask how high. Rather policy goes through processes of translation and re-interpretation at the school level. To use the academic term, policy is always enacted rather than simply implemented.
One form of enactment is to resist bad policy in various ways and let’s recall at this post-election moment that New Zealand primary principals and their regional and national lead organisations have shown themselves to be very good at such resistance. I was reminded of this recently when I was asked to contribute a chapter to a new book on school leaders and their resistance.
The book, Resistance in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration is an international collection of 15 chapters being edited by Amanda Heffernan, Pat Thomson and Jill Blackmore and published by Routledge early next year. My chapter is called ‘Educational leadership in trying times: Primary principals’ resistance in New Zealand’. It makes a valuable contribution to the overall book because it is full of practical examples of what principals can and do get up to when unhappy with education policy.
Part of the chapter puts on record the response of primary principals to the National Standards policy from 2009–17. I won’t go into all the limitations of the policy here, but rather focus on the quite remarkable opposition by educators, much of which was led by, or involved, primary principals.
The NZEI hosted expert forums and organised a nation-wide bus tour to promote opposition to the National Standards in local communities. The NZPF set up an ‘Our Principals’ website to show professional opposition to the National Standards and set up a Facebook page dedicated to critiquing them. Both organisations refused to attend the National Standards launch and withdrew from the Government’s Sector Advisory Group.
As well as activity in national organisations, regional principals’ organisations were active in opposing the National Standards. Some boycotted National Standards training or reporting. Others issued press releases and open letters of opposition to the policy. Also strong in some regions, the Boards Taking Action Coalition (BTAC), a coalition between principals and Boards of Trustees announced that 225 schools would not set National Standards-related targets and then later delivered school charters without the required targets. Individual principals also began to use the media, both old and new, to voice their opposition to the policy. Some even posted on a forum on a Ministry of Education website for education leaders, colonising it as a space to express their concerns about the National Standards.
All of these activities were highly public interventions intended to impact public opinion. As the years went by and the National Standards policy became embedded, there was less such activity, but this did not always mean that principals had come to accept the policy. Rather resistance often moved to less public forms of contestation such as token and fabricated enactments of the National Standards policy in schools.
In the end it was the change of government in 2017 that saw the removal of the National Standards. But the confidence of the incoming Labour Government and its coalition partners to so quickly throw out the policy was undoubtedly due to unwavering resistance to National Standards from educators, especially primary principals.
Another part of the chapter looks at the activities of a small group of experienced Auckland principals, the so-called ‘Concerned Principals’ group. These principals were unhappy with the ‘Investing in Educational Success’ policy announced in 2014, the policy that eventually led to Kāhui Ako, Communities of Learning.
The Concerned Principals were also unimpressed that the then NZPF president had quickly endorsed the policy without recognising the damage it could do. They set out to mobilise fellow principals across the country to oppose the policy in a process that one in the group described as ‘push-back leadership’. There were various setbacks but eventually the Concerned Principals got the result they were looking for. A primary leaders forum secured a vote of no-confidence in the policy and the NZEI and NZPF put out a joint press release to that effect. It was the strength of this resistance, a far cry from the initial stance of the NZPF, that allowed the NZEI to put forward its alternative plan and have it taken seriously by the Government. The rest, as they say, is history.
To sum up, education policy can and has been resisted by primary principals in Aotearoa, with many fine examples to draw on. Clearly resistance of any kind is a serious matter, something to be considered carefully before taking action. But it is not the case that compliance is always good, ethical leadership. We can all learn a lot from how principled principals have taken action against flawed policies in our recent past.