6. One Size Fits Precisely No One
Equity by spreadsheet and the children it quietly erases.
Cold open - Monday, 9:17am.
The reading groups are colour‑coded like a traffic light. Green gets the nice novels, Orange gets short stories, Red gets decodables with ducks. Hemi sits in Red. At home he speaks te reo with Nan and English with his cousins. He can explain how eel traps work and why the awa shifts after heavy rain. Today’s book has three sentences and a cartoon pond. “Again?” he sighs. The group practises the word quack. Equity is declared. Eels are not invited.
The policy move - Equality by template.
When the call for “equity” hits the policy mill, it often emerges as uniformity, the same programme, same pacing, same test windows and the same “intervention” for any child who trips a threshold. It’s tidy and demonstrable. A dashboard can see it. A minister can announce it. It also assumes that fair means identical and that difference is a nuisance best ironed flat.
Human impact - four brief lessons in erasure.
1) The bilingual detour.
Sofia arrives with two languages and a backpack of stories. The phonics check treats her second language as noise. She’s told to “keep it English at school so you don’t confuse yourself.” She stops translating for her mum at the chemist because she’s learned that her language embarrasses adults. Reading levels rise; a family’s bridge lowers.
2) The autistic quiet.
Ari’s class runs on timers and claps. He can handle a quiet hum, he drowns under a call‑and‑response chant. The behaviour plan says “sit still, track the speaker.” No one mentions sensory load. He’s issued a sticker chart for compliance. His favourite subject is data - he learns quickly what the adults want measured and gives them that instead of questions.
3) The cultural crop‑dusting.
The local curriculum used to include a unit on the hapū’s history with the forest. A new “coherence map” swaps it for a generic “timber” module because the test includes a transport text. The word mana never appears. Students write about trucks on motorways. Kaumātua stop visiting because there is nothing to anchor kōrero to. The place goes invisible inside its own school.
4) The well‑behaved exclusion.
Poppy masks like a champion. She is dyslexic, witty and terrified of being “moved down.” The intervention block pulls her out of art on Thursdays because “that’s when we have space.” Her decoding improves - her joy thins. She is praised for resilience. What she needed was redesign.
Systems lens - Why sameness breeds inequity.
Complex systems thrive on variety. When we standardise inputs, we reduce the system’s capacity to respond to local conditions. Three mechanics explain the quiet harm -
Compression. Uniform pacing compresses the range of entry points. Learners at the margins - neurodivergent, multilingual, culturally distinct, are asked to shrink to fit the frame. Some comply. Some vanish.
Mislabelled signal. Struggle created by design (e.g., inaccessible text, hostile sensory environment) is misread as student deficit. The remedy becomes more of the thing that caused the problem.
Feedback blindness. Dashboards notice what they’re built to notice. They miss belonging, identity safety and whether a task treats students as knowers of their own worlds. Policy celebrates green arrows while classrooms lose colour.
Evidence snapshot - Inclusion that actually includes.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) - Planning multiple ways to engage, represent and express lifts outcomes for all and particularly for neurodivergent learners. It is cheaper than repair because it is design, not after‑the‑fact accommodation.
Culturally sustaining pedagogy - When students’ languages and cultures are centred (not sprinkled), attendance and achievement rise. Belonging is an accelerator, not a garnish.
Bilingual and translanguaging approaches - Treating home language as an asset accelerates English literacy rather than hindering it. Background knowledge travels on the road the child already has.
Rich tasks and portfolios - Performance assessments surface strengths that one‑shot tests miss, especially for students whose thinking shows better in making, speaking, or bilingual work.
None of this lowers standards. It raises access.
NZ now - Designing for the edges first.
Aotearoa has everything to do this well - Te Tiriti commitments, Māori‑medium pathways, communities that expect learning to look like here. If we want equity that isn’t cosplay, we have to move from equality of inputs to equity of design.
A practical charter -
Start with identity safety. Every class builds a mihi map - who we are, languages we carry, places that matter. Use those maps to plan texts, examples and guests. Belonging before benchmarking.
UDL by default. Plan the lesson with at least two ways in and two ways out -visual + text, hands‑on + talk, write + record. Assistive tech is not a special privilege, it’s normal.
Language is a right, not a reward. Invite translanguaging in notes, drafting and discussion. Provide bilingual glossaries. If a child thinks in two languages, the curriculum should too.
Timetables that stop stealing. Never pull students from the arts or te reo for “catch‑up.” Protect the subjects that keep kids at school. Catch up inside the day they want to attend.
Progress you can see. Pair light sampling tests with portfolios, exhibitions and moderated work. Let whānau see growth in forms that matter to them.
Co‑design beats consultation. Put students with lived expertise (autistic, dyslexic, multilingual) and local iwi at the planning table with teachers. Pay them in time or money. Publish what you build.
What to stop doing (with love, but stop).
Calling the same worksheet for every child “fair.”
Treating bilingualism as a hurdle to be overcome rather than a highway to be used.
Using behaviour charts to manage sensory overload.
Writing “parent engagement” plans that never leave English.
Meanwhile, back in Red group.
Ms Tan moves the ducks aside. She brings Hemi a short text about eel weirs on their river - two versions, one in te reo, one in English, with a tidy glossary. The decodable practice comes from those words.
The writing task is an explanation with diagrams. The exit ticket offers choices - oral, written, bilingual. Another child in Orange hears the korero and drifts over, curious. He has never seen his fishing trips counted as knowledge either.
At Thursday’s team meeting, someone notices that the “bottom group” didn’t feel like a bottom group this week. They were busy. They were loud. The pacing guide is behind by a page - the learning is ahead by a mile. The spreadsheet will not applaud. The children already have.
Closing beat - Equity, properly understood.
Equity is not making every child climb the same ladder at the same tempo. It is building a staircase with many steps and railings, so more of us reach the balcony and see the view. The spreadsheet can help count who got there.
It cannot decide which steps exist. That’s our job and if we do it well, the choir will have brass again and a waiata that sounds like home.
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