Doing away with Kāhui Ako insults teachers’ professionalism and their aspirations to be more effective, writes Ken Wilson.

I regard the Government’s decision to repeal Kāhui Ako (communities of learning) as a catastrophe for the teaching profession, particularly for classroom teachers.

This recent Budget decision will put back by at least a decade the creation and spread of stunning resources, improved teacher effectiveness, and practices that have a direct impact on increased student progress and achievement.

It will put individual schools back into chains – the great freedom brought by Kāhui Ako staffing, release time, pay and career options will be gone. Control will go back to the centre.

Kāhui Ako were established about 10 years ago to encourage and enable deliberate acts of collaboration between schools so that best teaching practice becomes universal. They were an innovative stroke of genius, on their way to revitalising the structure, operation, and focus of the compulsory education system and the early childhood sector.

Defunding Kāhui Ako is an insult to the professionalism of teachers and their aspirations to be more effective and to have careers as outstanding classroom teachers and mentors of colleagues for classroom teachers.

Innovation in education is extremely rare. Innovation driven from the ground up is even rarer, and yet, here in the Kāhui Ako model, we have just that, a profound innovation whose power to transform the compulsory education sector is so vast that few could imagine, contemplate or tolerate it.

And the Ministry of Education – what did it do with this innovation? As fast as it could, it completed the establishment phase and moved on to the next fad. By around 2017 the Ministry had abandoned the nurturing of Kāhui Ako.

The Kāhui Ako New National Appointments Panel published four reports on the impact and progress of Kāhui Ako. We surveyed experienced leaders and across- school teachers and recorded their suggestions for improving the model. Do you think the Ministry consulted the Panel at all? What are the chances that the Ministry paid any attention whatsoever to those informed and considered views? The answer to both is nil – not a skerrick.

Kāhui Ako were designed to be consistent with sound, long-established educational theories of adult learning and organisation transformation. No OECD- identified disconnect between research and best educational practice here - Kāhui Ako found a way to situate both in private classrooms. I am often astounded to find that I am largely alone in grasping why this accomplishment is so momentous and what it promised classroom teachers and my grandchildren.

As if overturning the core of Tomorrow’s Schools (where each school is essentially a self-managing island) were not enough of a shock, the Kāhui Ako design team agreed to establish an independent quality assurance mechanism using a rigorous assessment process applied by very experienced teaching professionals.

Fit for purpose, robust, readily accessible and understandable sound mathematical tools with high utility for the assessment of student progress and achievement are available and in use in a growing number of Kāhui Ako. And they were invented, and are being improved, by a former Kāhui Ako across-school teacher from Gisborne Boy’s High School. Sound data may very well be our best defence against the next iteration of imposed national standards or assessments that are of little or no use for classroom teachers or principals.

Education Minister Erica Stanford doesn’t seem to have learned that Kāhui Ako was one part of a larger policy or that any were succeeding. She saw the $118 of lazy money and went for it.

The Ministry could not provide frank advice about the virtues and values of Kāhui Ako because it had done nothing to gather any evidence in nine years. No research itself after an initial round, no commissioned research, and certainly no longitudinal research. A disgraceful indictment. More truly appalling is that the Ministry saw Kāhui Ako as having no educational benefit for students, teachers and the system as a whole.

The glory that could have been a reviewed, refreshed and reinvigorated education system has been sacrificed through the extinguishing of Kāhui Ako, a world-leading innovation, something more substantial, powerful and precious than many of us even imagined, or frankly, are likely to see again. And who did this to classroom teachers? A choir of colleagues, largely principals, who cheerfully entered a Faustian bargain to sacrifice professionalism for resources.

Ken Wilson MNZM is a former secondary teacher, union negotiator, education consultant and education commissioner. He is a member of the Kāhui Ako New Appointments National Panel.

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