The principal is the thermostat of the school, not the thermometer. A mentor doesn’t just teach you how to read the temperature; they show you how to set it to ‘hope’ when the halls feel cold.
Todd Whitaker, 2011
Whilst tucking into my hot cross buns and awaiting Cyclone Vaianu, I am reflecting on how deeply I had to dig into my reserves of hope and positivity last term. Ngā hau ki te uru, and particularly ki te tonga have been blowing hard and feeling pretty ceaseless.
Weathering this storm is tough on our hapori. The cheapest petrol in Whāngarei is well over $3 a litre and requests for help with kai are common on community Facebook pages. When the external climate is a gale of rising costs and new curriculum and assessment, the principal’s role is to act as a windbreak against ministerial policy shifts that arrive like sudden squalls via press conference before the official charts are even drawn on Tāhūrangi.
Despite the current weather system, being a tumuaki is still an amazing job with incredible variety and opportunity for creativity. It should therefore give us all pause to read that NZCER’s National Survey of Schools (quoted earlier in this magazine) found that less than one in five primary school teachers are interested in becoming principals, and that the longer someone stays a teacher, the less likely they are to want to become a principal.
Responding to the need for practical mentorship
Into this gale, the Ministry is launching a new mentoring model. The Aspiring Principals Programme for 2026 aims to fix the one-size-fits-all failures in the consultant-led model that were identified by ERO’s 2023 report, “Everything Was New”: Preparing and Supporting New Principals.
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73 percent of new principals felt unprepared for the job, struggling with aspects like financial management, property maintenance, and HR disputes.
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Small and rural school leaders felt the one-size-fits-all pathway ignored their unique challenges.
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Māori-medium leaders felt the programme didn’t understand and address the cultural and community complexities of their roles.
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Participants consistently rated online modules and theoretical workshops as the least effective elements, citing a lack of real-world application and face-to-face connection.
The new Aspiring Principals Programme aims to address these concerns but, like many current initiatives, it feels like it’s being built on the runway during a storm. It sets out an expectation of approximately five to seven hours of mentoring per term, which “includes regular check-ins, shadowing blocks, and milestone inputs [using] a mutually agreed mix of face-to-face and virtual settings.” Principals receive $5,000 as an allowance for taking on a mentoring role, noting that “where travel is required, the Ministry will not be reimbursing associated costs”. It is ironic that this unfunded travel model creates a geographic penalty for rural leaders, further isolating those who need connection the most.
Reflecting back on my own experience as a teaching principal in a rural school in the Manawatū, I know the courage it takes to ask the hard questions and talk about the feelings of isolation. That trust is not built without time and relationship.
I was privileged to be mentored by Shona Oliver of Central Normal School and Brya Dixon at Marton Primary, both of whom travelled an hour each way for in-person hui and welcomed me into their own kura. In my Professional Learning Group (PLG), all but one of us are in the last 10 years of our principalship journey. We have considerable expertise to share and, most importantly, are actively mentoring our DPs to support their leadership too.
Significant support like this is needed to navigate the transition to principalship, captured in the ERO report by a beginning principal’s quote: “You move from being ‘one of the team’ to being ‘the person at the top’, and that creates a social distance that many find difficult to navigate.”
Exploring co-leadership as a potential solution
Recently, I observed two newly retired colleagues taking on a short-term principalship on a job-share basis. They wondered why there is no commonly used model of job-sharing or co-leadership to transition experienced principals out and beginning principals in.
In research spanning 20 years, Dr. Marian Court from Massey University has looked into ways to move away from the “heroic soloist” model of principalship toward a more sustainable, distributive model. She researched New Zealand primary schools implementing dual leadership, a formal partnership between two people recognised as equal leaders.
The benefits for the co-principals include significant reduction in isolation and stress. Court’s research found that having a peer on equal footing to process complex personnel or board issues increased overall job enjoyment. For the kura, the result was better decision making. Two perspectives lead to fewer “blind spots” and conjoint decision making often leads to more robust, stable outcomes for the school community.
Court’s work naturally creates a model of succession planning which could allow an experienced principal to move into a part-time role – to share the journey with a new leader. The senior principal provides “institutional memory” and a safety net, while the new principal brings fresh energy and new ideas, creating what Court calls a “warm handoff” rather than a disruptive leadership change.
ERO’s report found the percentage of new principals is rising (up to 37% in 2022 from 27% in 2014). This may sound positive on the surface, but it points to a principal workforce that is losing many of its most experienced leaders.
In the long term, if we want to grow the number of teachers that aspire to be principals from 18%, we must stop asking individuals to be “heroic soloists” in a hurricane and start looking at how we can facilitate more “warm handoffs” like Court champions. Perhaps this model of dual leadership – with two sets of hands on the tiller, even just temporarily – can help to equip teachers stepping into principal roles, and attract more to step into it.
References
Court, M. (2004). Talking back to the ‘heroic’ principal: The co-principalship as an alternative to the soloist model of school leadership. School Leadership & Management, 24(2), 171–188.
Education Review Office | Te Tari Arotake Mātauranga. (2023, July 13). ‘Everything was new’: Preparing and supporting new principals.
Li, M., Dong, J., & MacDonald, J. (2025). Aspirations for principalship – The role of school culture and teaching beliefs. NZCER.
Whitaker, T. (2011). What great principals do differently: Eighteen things that matter most. Eye On Education.