2. A School Is Not a Toaster - Why Systems Fight Back
When linear reforms meet loopy reality.
Cold open - Thursday, 8:43am.
A new bell schedule adds seven “precious literacy minutes” before morning tea. The email said it would be seamless. Breakfast club opens on the old time, the bus arrives on the old time, kapa haka practice collides with the new time and the device trolley is booked by two classes because the timetable template updated in one folder but not the other. Mr Patel greets five late arrivals and two anxious ones. The attendance report will later attribute those minutes to “student lateness.” The policy fixed the clock. The clock broke the morning.
The policy move - The logic of levers.
When systems look messy, tidy minds reach for levers - synchronise start times, standardise pacing, align assessments, tighten “fidelity to programme.” The theory is mechanical - inputs, process, outputs. Pull harder and you get more output. From a podium, the model is persuasive. Fewer moving parts, clearer comparability, efficient scaling. The metaphor underneath is a toaster - feed in bread, apply heat, get toast.
Classrooms are not toasters. They are small ecosystems - weather, rituals, families, buses, bodies, histories. Pull a lever and something else - attendance, anxiety, whānau routines, teacher bandwidth, moves as well. The tidy model works right up until it meets people.
Human impact - Two notes from the edges.
Talia is ten, the eldest of three. She gets her siblings ready because Mum works the early shift. Seven minutes sounds trivial in a memo. In Talia’s house it’s the difference between a calm goodbye and a sprint. She now arrives late three days out of five, begins with a demerit and sits in phonics with a racing heart. She reads more. She likes reading less.
Wiremu is the caretaker. He used to open the hall at 8:30 for breakfast club. The new roster says 8:20. His second job ends at 8:05 across town. He hustles, the gate opens late and three parents quietly decide it’s easier to keep kids home one morning a week until the change “beds in.” The attendance dashboard doesn’t have a field for “logistics.” It just counts.
For Mr Patel, those seven minutes were his relational triage - a kōrero with the boy who didn’t sleep, a check-in with the girl who lost her reader, a quick whisper to the SENCO about a new fidget strategy. Now the day starts with a script. He still does triage - just later and over the top of a lesson he’s “delivering.” The pacing is aligned. The people are not.
Systems lens - Why linear reforms meet loopy reality.
Education behaves like a complex adaptive system - relationships, feedback loops, delays, local variation. Straight lines bend. Three dynamics do most of the mischief -
Delayed feedback. Today’s tightening looks like efficiency; next term it shows up as fatigue, absenteeism and behaviour. By then the lever has been bolted on.
Adaptation (and gaming). Raise the stakes on a single proxy and the system learns to please the proxy - test prep expands, “off-schedule” learning contracts, timetables flex around the metric rather than the children.
Context dependence. The same move helps one hapori and hurts another. A “single right way” ignores buses, marae calendars, shift work, language and the thousand other threads that make school work here.
In complex settings you don’t “roll out” solutions - you probe. Small, safe-to-fail trials. Learn fast, scale the parts that travel, retire the parts that don’t. That path feels slower. It is faster than three years of repair.
Evidence snapshot - Patterns that keep repeating.
When systems centre a narrow proxy (standardised scores, instructional minutes), orbiting behaviours decay toward it. The U.S. under NCLB saw score bumps with collateral damage - arts time down, science squeezed in primary, reading taught as test rehearsal.
England’s focus on threshold grades prompted teaching to the border, not the learner. Conversely, where breadth-with-depth is protected and teacher agency backed -Finland’s phenomenon projects, Scotland’s capacities plus moderation, systems flex without breaking.
Post‑COVID, several high performers shifted to blended learning and lighter stakes (Singapore’s removal of mid‑year exams in P1–P2, reforms to ranking culture). None of these moves were anti‑standards, they were anti‑standardisation - a crucial distinction.
NZ now - Designing with the weather, not against it.
Aotearoa can do tidy without doing brittle. If the goal is lift in foundational literacies and numeracies (it should be), the means must respect how learning and communities actually work.
Name a few purposes, then probe. Set a small set of national purposes -literate, numerate, bicultural, critically curious and invite clusters of schools to pilot pathways that meet them. Make the learning from pilots public property.
Use mixed measures. Pair light sampling tests with portfolios and moderation. Let numbers inform, let exemplars persuade. What you value, show.
Ring‑fence time. Protect collaboration, induction and IEP time so it can’t be “borrowed” by compliance. Capacity is not a memo - it’s hours.
Design for the margins first. UDL by default, assistive tech on, bilingual pathways visible. When the timetable honours the edges, the middle thrives.
Build networks, not edicts. Subject/phase hubs, cross‑school design sprints, open repositories of tasks that travelled well in low‑decile and high‑decile contexts alike.
These are not romantic gestures. They are system hygiene - the boring enablers of resilient excellence.
What to stop doing (with a smile, but please stop).
Pretending comparability equals fairness. It equals comparability. Fairness requires context.
Using “fidelity” as a synonym for “obedience.” The programme serves the learner, not the other way around.
Treating attendance, behaviour, or “engagement” as moral qualities rather than design feedback. If kids are fleeing, the room needs redesigning.
Meanwhile, the toaster metaphor.
Toasters are great because bread is predictable and kitchens are controlled. Schools are closer to sourdough starters - alive, local, a bit feral and fussy about conditions. You don’t set a starter to 180°C for four minutes and call it dinner. You feed it, watch it and adapt.
Closing beat - Meanwhile, in Room 12…
At 8:43, Mr Patel starts on the dot. He also bends the script. The phonics opener uses words from a short article on the smoky haze kids noticed on the way to school. Students build explanations with sentence frames. Two are late. They slide into roles that were held for them. The attendance graph won’t notice the small redesigns, the reclaimed minutes, the steadier breathing. The class will.
After school, the timetable committee meets. Someone suggests rolling back the seven minutes. Mr Patel shrugs. “Or,” he says, “we keep the minutes and return the judgement.” The room goes quiet. Complex systems are allergic to simple answers. They hum with good ones.
If you’d like to share your thoughts or discuss further, feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear from you. +64 275 665 682 john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz