7. Proof It Can Be Different
Finland, Scotland and the power of trust, time and complexity.
Cold open - A corridor with coats, 8:12am.
In a small school near Turku, a teacher wheels a trolley of cardboard, tape and sensors into a room that smells of snow and cinnamon buns. Today is “city water” day. One group designs a flood barrier, another scripts a radio bulletin, a third models flow rates with buckets and stopwatches. The literacy plan lives inside the project, not beside it. Nobody asks whether this is “reading” or “science.” It’s Tuesday.
The policy move - Trust as infrastructure, not vibes.
Finland and Scotland didn’t abolish standards, they reframed them. Finland’s national core lays out concepts, progressions and transversal competencies. Teachers design locally with time and training to do so. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence names four capacities - successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, effective contributors and expects schools to make those real, not rhetorical.
In both places, professional judgement is treated as infrastructure - built, maintained and audited through moderation and networks. Light national checks exist - the heavy lifting is collective craft.
This isn’t a fairy‑tale. It’s a well‑designed mess that takes time seriously - time to plan together, to iterate, to moderate student work, to learn from the school down the road. The reforms didn’t promise a neat graph next term. They promised sturdier graduates next decade. (Opinion - more governments should try thinking in decades.)
Human impact - Three windows into the work.
Window 1 - The novice with a net.
Eeva, a first‑year teacher, co‑plans with a veteran every Thursday. They bring student work, argue about what “good enough” looks like and shamelessly steal each other’s tasks. When Eeva’s new writing scaffold flops, nobody files a deficit report. They tweak it, test it in two classes, then publish the template to the cluster. Failure is tuition.
Window 2 - The kid who came alive.
Hamza, newly arrived, speaks three languages and little Finnish. In a phenomenon project on urban heat, he films elders in his apartment block and overlays captions in Finnish and Arabic. His vocabulary grows because his voice matters. Attendance lifts. He stops practising invisibility.
Window 3 - The assessment without a drumroll.
In a Scottish secondary, S4 students exhibit interdisciplinary projects around local problems. One group redesigns a bus route and models cost; another documents a river walk, weaving ecology and poetry. Teachers moderate with exemplars and judgement. There’s a test later. It feels smaller because the learning feels larger.
Systems lens - Design choices that resist brittleness.
Three features repeat where the work sticks -
Ring‑fenced time. Collaboration, enquiry and moderation are not “nice extras after school.” They’re timetabled, paid and protected. Capacity is not declared; it’s scheduled.
Moderation networks. Teachers don’t grade in silos. They meet across schools, compare student work, calibrate standards and swap tasks that travelled well in different contexts. This grows judgement and spreads quality faster than edicts.
Mixed measures. Sampling tests give system signal - portfolios, performances and exhibitions show the learning a number can’t. Because evidence is plural, gaming is harder and breadth survives the accountability season.
Receipts with nuance - the good, the grit, the adjustments.
Finland. Master‑level teacher preparation, high‑trust culture, phenomenon projects, lighter testing, strong special education baked into the day. Grit - workload crunch, uneven implementation across municipalities. Adjustment - investment in peer‑learning networks and clearer national exemplars for transversal competencies.
Scotland. The four capacities, literacy/numeracy across learning, emphasis on moderation and practitioner enquiry. Grit - periods of bureaucratic bloat and documentation spirals. Adjustment - streamlining guidance, rebalancing senior phase assessment, renewing “breadth with depth” rather than “paperwork with hope.”
(Bonus) British Columbia. Competency‑based curriculum with proficiency scales; reporting that privileges progress narratives over single marks. Grit - early parent confusion. Adjustment - clearer exemplars, student‑led conferences and better translations for multilingual families.
None of these systems abandoned basics. They embedded them where attention lives - in meaningful contexts with room for thought, talk and making. They standardised outcomes and exemplars, not every step on the way there.
NZ now - Translate, don’t transplant.
Aotearoa already owns the ingredients - local curriculum rights, tikanga and reo as living knowledge, Kāhui Ako/learning networks, an assessment‑for‑learning tradition and a public who knows education should look like here. We don’t need to cosplay Finland, we need to honour our strengths and add missing scaffolds.
A practical blueprint (we could start tomorrow).
Protect the hours that grow quality. Ring‑fence weekly blocks for team planning, enquiry and moderation. Stop raiding these hours for compliance. Write them into collective agreements if we mean it.
Build assessment lives around student work. Keep light sampling tests, but centre portfolios, exhibitions and moderated tasks. Publish national banks of annotated student work - across deciles, regions and languages, so “what good looks like” is public property.
Network by design, not chance. Fund cross‑school subject/phase hubs and design sprints that produce shareable tasks and units, especially from schools serving diverse communities. Pay teachers for the IP they contribute - require that IP to be open.
Design for the edges first. UDL as default - bilingual pathways visible - assistive tech standard. If a task works for neurodivergent and multilingual learners, it probably works for everyone.
Teach teachers like professionals. Induction with co‑planning and co‑teaching - coaching that looks at student work rather than compliance, career pathways that don’t require leaving the classroom to lead.
What to stop mis‑naming (gentle eye‑roll).
Calling templates “consistency” when they’re actually fear.
Calling league tables “transparency” when they’re really theatre.
Calling obedience “fidelity” when integrity would do.
Meanwhile, a Tuesday in Taranaki.
A cluster of schools runs a shared enquiry on coastal erosion. Year 4 measure dunes, Year 7 interview surfers, seniors model policy trade‑offs. Reading and writing are everywhere because ideas are everywhere.
The moderation meeting smells like fish‑and‑chips and sounds like disagreement, the useful kind. A teacher new to town brings a task from Scotland and tweaks it with a local hapū educator. They argue about what “effective contributor” means here.
By the end, they have exemplars in English and te reo and a shared sense that this is what the four capacities would look like on this coast.
Closing beat - The mess worth having.
Trust isn’t the absence of checks. It’s the presence of competence, time and shared standards you can point to in student work. Complexity isn’t an excuse for drift, it’s a design brief. The tidy reform promises you a line that goes up next term. The better reform gives you graduates who can read a river, write an argument and build a fence that holds.
It is slower, then suddenly faster. It looks like work because it is and on Tuesdays, it smells faintly of cinnamon and wet coats - because real learning is local, a bit messy and alive.
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