Agency is, at least, two sided. I see it as the degree of freedom and opportunity – the “capability”, to use Martha Nussbaum’s term – you have as principal or tumuaki to act within your school community and in the schooling system as a whole. ‘At the time of writing’ (a necessary qualifier in this era of ‘flood the zone’ Ministerial mandates), Section 130 of the Education and Training Act 2020 sets out the legal basis for principalship:
- A school’s principal is the board’s chief executive in relation to the school’s control and management.
- Except to the extent that any enactment, or the general law of New Zealand, provides otherwise, the principal –
(a) must comply with the board’s general policy directions; and (b) subject to paragraph (a), has complete discretion to manage the school’s day-to-day administration as they think fit.
These are essentially the same conceptions of executive principalship, and of the governance-management interface established in 1989. Yet, I suspect very few principals or tumuaki would claim that being a chief executive today is the same job as being a chief executive in 1989 when Tomorrow’s Schools began.
Boards do not just set general policy directions these days, and principals do not really have complete discretion to act as they think fit within those general parameters. There is a basic tension in the Act. On the one hand, a Board has complete discretion to perform its functions and exercise its powers as it sees fit. On the other hand, the Act today prescribes one paramount objective and multiple supporting objectives that Boards are legally obligated to meet.
This tension has arisen in large part due to the burgeoning ‘hands on’ control of schooling exerted by the Minister, both directly and indirectly, through the Secretary of Education and the Chief Review Officer, together with the power to appoint persons of the Minister’s liking to other influential schooling sector roles, for instance the Chair of the Teaching Council.
In 2026, the 1989 aspirational vision of genuinely autonomous, self-governing schools is mythical. This is particularly so for our schooling communities that are socio-economically challenged. These schools and kura are far more likely to be labelled ‘of serious concern’ in terms of the now paramount yet narrow objective of student achievement (as opposed to success), and consequently subjected to a range of statutory interventions by the Secretary or Minister.
One way of looking at the tension-ridden challenges of principal and tumuaki agency in 2026 is through the English philosopher Gillian Rose’s metaphor of working in ‘the broken middle’. I am still getting to grips with Rose’s intentionally difficult thinking and writing (I lean heavily on Kate Schick’s excellent book, Gillian Rose: A good enough justice) but this metaphor in particular seems useful when thinking about our current schooling environment and the dilemmas facing principals and tumuaki.
Rose writes about the ‘diremption’ or the brokenness between the law and ethics, between the universal and the particular, between the individual and the institutional, between freedom and unfreedom, and between thought and practice. By diremption, she means a violent sundering or ripping apart.
Such language may seem a little over the top for our purposes but I strongly suspect that the endemic stress and burnout we hear so much about may indeed be experienced as a kind of psychological and spiritual feeling of being ripped apart by contradictory demands and expectations. Principals and tumuaki must navigate in the broken middle between what the law says and what their personal and professional educator ethics demand, between the theory of principal and tumuaki freedom to act and the unfree actuality of often being directed what to do in micromanagerial detail. They must balance the increasing obligation to enact one-size-fits-all system-wide policies and the imperative to exercise local discretion to ethically mediate or even resist certain policy mandates for the sake of ākonga and whānau. They must untangle one’s statutory role as a senior system leader from the responsibilities to one’s local relational networks in the school staffroom and neighbourhood whānau whānui.
The Education and Training Act in general, and for our purposes Section 130 in particular, are about good intentions. Of course we all want and expect the Board to advocate for and represent the school community’s interests, and for the principal to be capable of ensuring these are enacted in the everyday social relations and activities of ākonga and kaiako. Unfortunately, real life is not like that for everyone. The current Minister of Education has decided that a ‘grip it up’ style of personal intervention is called for in multiple aspects of education law, regulation, and policy. Together, with the detailed prescription of core teaching and assessment practices, these are all deemed politically necessary to address the ‘basic’ issue that we all care desperately about. This basic issue is the normative ideal that all ākonga should succeed at school, yet the actuality we continue to face decade after decade is that too many still do not.
Some principals and tumuaki see autonomy, equal opportunity, and enhanced pedagogical professionalism in the so-called ‘science of learning’ plus ‘knowledge rich’ approach that now dictates our curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment planning and practice; others see only unfreedom, paint-by-numbers prescriptions, and a loss of the progressive craft of relational, inquiry, and culture-oriented learning and teaching. In Rose’s terms, the way forward is not to be found in opting for one over the other, however, but in and through doing the work of leading and learning in the broken middle.
Using Rose’s metaphor, our current broken middle is a space where principals tumuaki, or at least those who work in higher EQI settings, must struggle continually to provide a sense of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment purpose, as well as direction and leadership for their community of colleagues, children, and whānau. It is a struggle because the broken middle is where we encounter the gap between theory and actuality, and have to choose whether or not to do the hard work of learning from dealing with the gap.
One such gap will surely emerge over time between the magical promises of structured literacy and mathematics proponents, and the actuality of what happens when fundamentalist direct instruction pedagogies are proselytised unquestioningly by their disciples in the form of gimmick-infused PLD rituals (e.g. ‘work it’, ‘chin it’, ‘clear it’, ‘park it’). The Government fully expects that these rituals will be faithfully reenacted for three hours each day in classrooms by kaiako. But principals, tumuaki, and kaiako have had little or no opportunity to critically reflect and arrive at a considered professional judgment about the costs and benefits of changing one’s hard-won teaching repertoire (the ‘practicality ethic’) or to constructively challenge the assumptions that underpin them.
Yet, precisely because they are ‘chief executives’, principals and tumuaki still have sufficient freedom and opportunity to decide how they navigate the broken middle of curriculum today. Adopting Rose’s language, one may not be able to mend the brokenness between ‘cognitivist’ and ‘constructivist’ conceptions of how children learn best, but one can negotiate the philosophical and the political distances between one-size-fits-all and one-size-fits-one. They can do this by attending to the dialectic relationship between these two contradictory conceptions of learning and arrive at something new that is more suited to their unique context.
So, Rose calls for a ‘speculative negotiation’ of the broken middle. For our purposes, this is a call is to work towards a deeper comprehension of the actuality of learning and teaching in schooling. Neither direct instruction nor a learner-centred approach in their pure forms, but something else that emerges from critically reflecting on the contradictions between them. Rose describes this struggle as ‘taking the risk of coming to know’. This involves principals and tumuaki in an ongoing occupational struggle to comprehend the ways in which abstract theories of how children learn always rub up against the complexities of concrete classroom experiences, and how the supposed polar opposites of cognitivist and constructivist views of learning ‘constitute, and are constituted by, one another’. More challenging still, says Rose:
At the heart of speculative politics is an insistence that we come to understand our own complicity in creating and upholding harmful social and political structures, engaging in critical reflection that gazes inwards, as well as outwards.
Right now, this strikes me as possibly the most vital and hopeful dimension of professional agency in 2026, when our schooling policy world has been turned upside down.
As principals and tumuaki navigating 2026, you are uniquely well placed to:
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create the conditions in which ākonga, kaiako, whānau and boards are prepared to take the risk of gazing inwards as well as outwards following the sundering or ripping apart of Te Mātaiaho 2023;
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encourage the school community to reject the ‘easy way’ of unquestioning acceptance and implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum 2025;
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learn instead to live with the inherent anxiety of the middle where there are no easy answers, but where the school community is always searching for a good enough and just enough schooling experience for ākonga and whānau.
The question of how and if you can take these actions on will, however, depend on finding your freedom and opportunity.