8. NZ Now?
A Better Bargain or Another Bad Trade
Cold open - Boardroom, 6:58pm.
The trustees have biscuits, the principal has a headache and the agenda has the word “simplify” three times. A parent asks if “back to basics” means less te reo and fewer trips to the awa. A teacher answers softly: “It depends what we call ‘basic.’” Everyone stares at the biscuits like they might offer guidance.
The policy move - Tidy promises in a messy country.
Aotearoa is hovering between two impulses -
tighter national direction (clearer progressions, more checks, prescribed programmes) and
the long NZ tradition of local curriculum, professional trust and community voice. The sales pitch for the first is certainty - for the second, belonging. If we get it wrong, we’ll standardise the parts that should flex and ignore the parts that should be standard.
Human impact - What the trade‑offs feel like in real rooms.
Room 5, Ōtara. A decodable‑only diet lifts early ticks but dulls vocabulary and knowledge for multilingual kids who arrive rich in ideas. The basics show up - the meaning doesn’t.
Year 10, Southland. Wood tech doubles as physics when the teacher has time to plan with science. Timetables that chase comparability kill that meeting, kids lose the subject where they felt clever.
Year 3, Whanganui. The local history unit only exists because kaumātua visit. A “coherence map” replaces it with a generic transport pack. The class learns about motorways, not the river they walk past daily.
Everywhere. Teachers spend Sunday marking what a dashboard can read, instead of planning work only humans can. Morale drops, then rolls downhill.
Systems lens - What a ‘better bargain’ must do.
We don’t need ideological purity. We need design that admits complexity -
Standardise the signal, not the script. The country needs a common picture of progress (literacy, numeracy, te ao Māori capabilities), shared exemplars and light sampling. It does not need page numbers due on Thursdays.
Invest in judgement. Quality lives in teacher decision‑making moderated in networks. Without time and exemplars, “judgement” is just hope with good intentions.
Protect breadth as the engine of depth. Children read more when books mean something - they write better when they have something to say, they calculate more precisely when the numbers belong to the world they see.
Design for the margins first. If the timetable works for neurodivergent and multilingual students, it will work for most others. That’s equity as engineering, not equity as slogan.
Receipts - What’s already in our hands.
Local curriculum rights (and obligations) that let learning look like here.
Kāhui Ako / networks that can spread tasks and moderation faster than memos.
Assessment for Learning traditions - success criteria, exemplars, student voice.
Bicultural foundations that make identity safety a design requirement, not a poster.
Digital access sufficient for portfolios and shared repositories of moderated work, if we stop burying that work in private drives.
Where we’re brittle - name it, then fix it.
Paperwork creep. New guidance arrives to simplify the old guidance and both stay. Cure - sunset clauses and page budgets (if you add 10 pages, retire 10).
Professional time poverty. Collaboration, inquiry and moderation live after hours. Cure - ring‑fence weekly blocks in the timetable and collective agreements.
Assessment monoculture. One proxy gets overweighted, then teaching learns its shape. Cure - mixed evidence—sampling tests plus portfolios/exhibitions plus moderated tasks. Publish exemplars.
Fidelity theatre. Compliance walks that reward choreography over learning. Cure - replace some walkthroughs with co‑planning and lesson study; look at student work, not just teacher moves.
The bargain - Guardrails we can sign, tomorrow.
Clarity with room to breathe. Publish concise progressions and annotated student work in English and te reo. State plainly - teachers will adapt to context, leaders will defend that adaptation when it’s principled.
Time you can point to. 90–120 minutes a week, protected, for team planning and moderation. Non‑negotiable. No borrowing for compliance.
Mixed measures, light stakes. National sampling for system signal; school portfolios and exhibitions for local truth. Use numbers to ask questions, not to issue verdicts.
Edges first. UDL by default; translanguaging normalised; assistive tech considered infrastructure. Stop pulling kids from arts/te reo for “catch‑up.”
Open source excellence. Fund shared, high‑quality tasks and units that travelled well in diverse contexts. Make them public property. Credit and pay the teachers who created them.
What to stop doing (kindly, urgently).
Selling comparability as fairness. It’s useful; it’s not justice.
Calling obedience “fidelity” when integrity would do.
Treating belonging as a Friday add‑on. It is Tuesday, 10:15am, inside the reading lesson.
Confusing a louder microphone with a better idea.
Meanwhile - the better bargain in practice.
A coastal cluster decides to pilot “mixed measures, light stakes.” Year 8 students curate portfolios - communities attend exhibitions - schools upload annotated exemplars to a national bank. Sampling tests run quietly in the background.
Teachers co‑mark across schools - moderation notes become resources. A principal tries to “borrow” the planning block for a review meeting. The union rep points to the agreement - the meeting moves. Capacity rises because the clock does.
Closing beat - Choose with your eyes open.
We can have tidy memos and untidy learning, or slightly untidy memos and alive learning. The basics matter, so do the lungs that carry them. If we must simplify something, simplify bureaucracy.
Keep the curriculum as complicated as the country it serves and when the biscuits come back next month, let’s have a better answer for what “basic” means. Reading the river, writing the letter, counting the cost and knowing which one matters first this morning.
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