There is a diplomatic challenge that all tumuaki principals encounter from time to time during their ‘leadership of learning’ career. In essence, it is to balance one’s professional obligations as a senior schooling system public servant against those of a servant leader in one’s local education community. The challenge becomes most acute when government ministers, prompted by those who have their ear, act on the belief that mandating prepackaged silver bullet policy solutions from the centre inevitably produces what they envisage as common sense change and improvement on the ground.
According to those who currently have the Minister of Education’s ear, scientifically flawed teaching and curriculum leadership practices are to be found throughout our staffrooms and classrooms. Lobbyist folklore also has it that these problems became endemic following the mergers of the craft-focused, liberal arts flavoured teachers’ colleges with their inquiry-focused, research flavoured university Education faculties during the 1990s and 2000s. The preferred political solution now being rolled out is a modernised apprenticeship or internship entry route to teaching, offered competitively by a mix of public and private providers, subject to tight central control of initial teacher education and prioritisation of structured curriculum basics and the science of learning. This is an approach that inevitably shifts even more workload, expectation, and, ultimately, accountability for outcomes onto tumuaki principals. Evidence from overseas suggests that such approaches contain multiple ‘fishhooks and broken glass’.
To be fair, depending on one’s personal educational values and beliefs, silver bullets can be fired from the Left or Right ends of the ideological spectrum. At one polar end, policies place too much faith in local education professional expertness, capacity, initiative and resilience, at the other end, too little. At one end, targeted marketplace incentives magically provide for schools’ curriculum, pedagogy or assessment policy support needs; at the other end, only a permanent commons of professional advisers and resources will suffice. At one end, essential curriculum ‘basics’, at the other end, optional learning area ‘frills’. At one end, ‘objective’ standardised achievement tests and ‘rigorous’ written examinations, at the other end, ‘subjective’ records of learning. At one end, the inalienable rights of the child, at the other end, the insatiable needs of the economy. At one end, a mass-produced, globally homogenous, fast-food, drive-through experience of imported education policy; at the other end, a slow-food movement that is mindful, equitable, locally sourced and sustainable. More complicated still is that, despite their often-contradictory emphases, Left and Right schooling politics both claim to be about promoting greater fairness. Which policy horses should tumuaki principals put their money on in 2025? Or is ‘each way’ the smart bet?
Every experienced tumuaki principal knows that for any given school or kura context, the ‘golden mean’ of thoughtful local practice lies somewhere between these various abstract policy extremes. More experienced principals (and teachers) are also schooling policy veterans – they have usually ridden on official policy change merry-go-rounds many times before. As a 2023 ERO report, Preparing and Supporting New Principals found, however, a difficulty the country faces right now is the high and increasing proportion of relatively inexperienced school principals in the system. The headline findings from the report include that in 2022, 860 or 37 per cent had been a principal for less than five years. Two fifths were principals of small and very small schools, and 22 per cent came to their role from a ‘non-leadership pathway’. Only a quarter felt prepared or very prepared for the role overall when they started (although this rose to 81 per cent after four to five years). Less than half are confident in their ability to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and only 20 per cent report being prepared for working in partnership with Māori. Only 23 per cent rated their wellbeing as high or very high.
Our national school tumuaki principal workforce is undergoing significant turnover and renewal at precisely the point in the current political–electoral cycle when multiple, major curriculum, pedagogy and assessment prescriptions have been imposed on the sector simultaneously, and at pace – a political gambit known as ‘flooding the zone’. So, the diplomatic challenge, and accompanying dance, for tumuaki principals is how best to navigate a tsunami of system level policy polarities and contradictions while at the local level encouraging a pragmatic balance of intentional schooling routines and practices that nourishes ākonga, whānau and kaiako daily.
And all this in the knowledge that when the government changes, key education policy will likely reverse direction too. One can only feel sorry watching highly experienced, respected and dedicated Te Mahau officials obliged by virtue of their master–servant relationship to unquestioningly turn 180 degrees and proclaim that an education policy that yesterday was unambiguously black is today most certainly white. Much as the Minister and Secretary of Education might like tumuaki principals to dutifully make the same unquestioning u-turn, local obligations and loyalties often call for a more nuanced, diplomatic dance.
Other than learning in the ‘school of hard knocks’, though, what blend of knowledge, skills and dispositions might assist tumuaki principals in this dance, and how should this commitment to moral and ethical leadership be nurtured across the schooling system? In its final 2019 report, one of the recommendations of the Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce was that in order to assure the quality diversity and professional expertise of kura school leadership, a national Leadership Centre be established within the Teaching Council, that the Centre develop national eligibility criteria and guidelines for tumuaki principal appointment and performance review, that regionally based leadership advisors would work with each principal and their board of trustees, within and across schools, and that there would be broader incentives to lead kura schools in ‘complex contexts’.
The recommendation aimed to ensure every kura school would have a ‘highly effective’ tumuaki principal and that our system would become a learning ecology that develops leadership at all levels of kura schools and at system level itself. The bare essence of the recommendation was incorporated in the subsequent Education and Training Act 2020, section 167, requiring the Minister of Education to issue eligibility criteria relating to appointment of principals (this was the Ministry of Education’s preferred option).
In the event, no multi-purpose national Leadership Centre was established within the Teaching Council. A more modest national Leadership Advisory Service with 21 regional appointees was established in 2023 within Te Mahau, the support and services arm of the Ministry of Education, on a ‘for principals, by principals’ model. It was also the Ministry of Education that in 2022 invited PPTA, NZEI and the Mātauranga Iwi Leaders Group to each identify a ‘drafter’ to help develop the eligibility criteria, supported by a wider sector working group and inclusive of consultation with the sector. The final drafts of the criteria for appointment to principalship (of English medium schools, and schools with rumaki reo, kura kaupapa Māori, kura a iwi, and kura motuhake) were approved by Minister Tinetti in July 2023, for immediate ‘soft launch’ and adoption by Boards of Trustees from March 2024 (METIS No.: 1310502).
In addition to maintaining the requirement to have a full practising teacher certificate, the key eligibility competencies are expressed as four pou: Leader of people, Vision for learning, Tikanga Māori and Leader of operations, with each pou having both experience and commitment criteria.
Feedback from Te Akatea-led consultation with Māori medium on the draft criteria led to the addition of a specific eligibility requirement for a tumuaki principal in any setting to be anti-racist and to develop a culture that is free from discrimination and bullying. And so, to the tip of an iceberg: the erasure of six everyday kupu Māori in At the Marae. Is this reading wars, culture wars or immanent racism, discrimination and bullying? Where do our more than one third of new principals stand on this moral and ethical challenge, and what will their diplomatic dancing look like?