Towards Reconceptualising Leadership: The Implications of the NZ Curriculum

TLRI Report

Wayne Freeth University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti University of Oulu, Finland

This case study explores the challenges for school leadership posed by the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) (2007), and investigates some implications for practice. The study is situated within the wider Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project, ‘Shifting the Conceptualisation of Knowledge and Learning in the Integration of the New New Zealand Curriculum in Initial and Continuing Teacher Education’ (Andreotti, Quinlivan, & Abbiss, forthcoming) which examines shifts in educators’ understandings of knowledge and learning in the implementation of the NZC in nine settings within initial and in-service teacher education.

The theoretical framework of this project draws on the work of Gilbert (2005) with reference to the ‘knowledge society’. Gilbert challenges long-held views about education and knowledge, making a distinction between knowledge conceptualised as a noun and a verb. In her outline of the differences, knowledge conceptualised as a verb is something we do something with, rather than something we have; it is linked with performativity rather than truth, and it is more like an ‘energy’ than building blocks that can be accumulated. This has several implications for the area of leadership. Knowledge conceptualised as a noun tends to enable autocratic and bureaucratic styles of leadership, while knowledge conceptualised as a verb may enable democratic, distributed and transformational styles of leadership, which are necessary for the effective implementation of the NZC, particularly in terms of the principles of inclusion and community participation in the co-construction and the co-ownership of the curriculum. Another important aspect of the NZC that is emphasised by the conceptualisation of knowledge as a verb is the role of teachers as leaders in the construction of the curriculum and in responding to the needs of diverse students.

Future Focused Learning

Future Focused Learning in Connected Communities Report

Media Reports

Time to Change the Way we Judge Schools   John Langley  February 2008

Schools get most of their money from two broad grants. The first is a base grant that supposedly covers the delivery of the curriculum, resources, professional development and school administration.
The second is a decile grant based on the socioeconomic status of the students in the school. The lower the socioeconomic status of a school the more money it gets.

There is simply no alignment between funding as an incentive and the performance of the school.

So, what do we know already? What does current research tell us? We know that what makes the difference in terms of an effective education for our children are the quality of our teachers and the environment in which they work.

let us have a sensible discussion about what any "base" grant should be in relation to what is expected to be delivered.

scrap the decile fund. Replace it with a funding system based on three criteria - maintenance, improvement and innovation.

let's pay teachers more. It might be useful to increase the salary package of teachers by 15 to 20 per cent and make the last 10 per cent of that based on the achievement of those they teach.

Those who have always succeeded continue to do so and those who are disadvantaged continue to be. It is time to stop bickering about the small ones. Our teachers and learners demand - and deserve - nothing less.


Scathing Report for Decile 10 School    March 2012

Chelsea Primary School

Decile Calculations

Education Counts

Census information is used to calculate the decile. A school provides its student addresses and these are used to determine which areas its students come from. It is not the general area around the school that is used to calculate the decile, but the specific meshblocks where students live.

The student addresses are assigned to the smallest Census areas, called meshblocks. A meshblock contains around 50 households.

The number and percentage of students from each meshblock is determined and the meshblock is examined against five socio-economic factors.

Household income - the percentage of households with equivalent income (ie adjusted for the number of adults and children in the household and the age of the children) in the lowest 20 percent nationally. Households with a member who is unemployed are usually not included in this group nor are all households supported by a benefit (since more than 20 percent of families are dependent on a benefit).

Occupation - the percentage of employed parents in occupations that are at skill levels 4 or 5 (of the 1 to 5 levels of the Australia and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations ANZSCO). These include all labourers, all machine operators and assemblers, and others who work in occupations at these lower skill levels irrespective of the sector/ type/ profession involved.

Household crowding – the percentage of households with an equivalised crowding index greater than one. This index is the proportion of household members per bedroom adjusted for the presence of children under 10 years of age, every two of whom are assigned to share a bedroom; couples, and others are each assigned their own bedroom.

Educational qualifications - the percentage of parents with no tertiary or school qualifications.

Income support - the percentage of parents who directly (ie not as a partner) received a Domestic Purposes Benefit, Unemployment Benefit or Sickness and Invalid's Benefit in the previous year. 

Social Class and Educational Achievement

Social Class and Educational Achievement: Beyond Ideology

Education's Inconvenient Truth Part 2

Educations Inconvenient Truth Part 2

My take on this article:
Schools de-emphasise the advantages of middle class zones and schools and could do a lot to help critical debate and remediation if this issue.

Teachers and principals can advantage the middle class in lots of ways in the day to day life of schools: in their use of language, in what they choose to teach about and assess, in their support for segregated and stratified school programmes, in their assumptions about student behaviours and world views, the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ and so on.

A key issue is simply where teachers and principals choose to work and hence take their own human resources.

Teachers tend to move to higher socio-economic schools in the first few years of their teaching lives and except when they are getting close to retirement, their subsequent moves are also more likely to be to higher than lower socio-economic schools.

principals get paid more by size of school and the large schools tend to be high decile schools.

by failing to raise middle class advantage in education as an issue, politicians and policymakers help it to be hegemonic, that is to appear natural and how the world should be. 

one key strategy for school improvement and leadership is to develop contextualised frameworks that highlight the differences and inequalities between schools rather than downplay them

the government could carefully open up public debate about the social costs of such a segregated education system and also be more honest with teachers and the public about the limits of school- based interventions.

However tight funding is getting across the schools sector as a whole, it is disturbing to see principals of high decile schools complaining in the media about the unfairness of extra funding going to low socio-economic schools. This shows a complete disregard for the myriad of ways their own schools gain advantage from the nature of their intakes, 

Educations Inconvenient Truth Part 1 The Middle Class Advantage

Education's Inconvenient Truth Part 1

My take on this article:

The middle class advantage, accentuated by zoning.

The moral responsibility of us all not to disadvantage other children by advantaging our own.

..... there is at various points public, practitioner and policy denial of the problem. 

This is partly because a lot of policy which advantages the educational prospects of the middle class occurs outside education, for instance in housing, and so people in the education sector tend not to look at it. Meanwhile, within education, concern about growing class inequalities comes up against competing and rather more celebratory discourses such as school improvement, educational leadership and teacher quality which also distract from the problem. 

It is much easier to talk in a disconnected way about an underclass, than to see ourselves creating the educational problems of the poor.


There are things which can be done if we can summon up the political will to do them. 

Also of interest is how the middle class ‘fails to register the social implications of its routine actions’ (Savage, 2000: 159).

In relation to Decile 8,9, 10 schools:
In part the preference for those sorts of schools reflect the ideological assumption of a relationship between high social status and quality but it also results from the importance of predominantly middle class schooling as a means of social reproduction or mobility.  

The fact that predominantly middle class schools are seen to offer positional advantage helps to explain why such schools are nearly always more popular than low socio- economic schools which have little positional value almost irrespective of what they do.


The key point to grasp is that these advantages of middle class schools are probably school-based but not school-caused, they needn’t reflect better teaching and management per se but probably stem directly from the other students in the school through peer group processes or stem from the way school policies and practices of many kinds are supported by high levels of student compliance, motivation and ‘ability’ which are in turn class-related.

Yet school zones are not what they used to be. They are now effectively drawn up by schools rather than Government and the Ministry of Education has only limited control over them. The working definition used is simply that a school has to be ‘reasonably convenient’ for its students; that is, a school that, taking into account a range of factors, a reasonable person would judge to be reasonably convenient.

it is not uncommon for being in the zone of a popular high socio-economic school to make a difference to asking price and to feature in advertising. 

while the government does provide equity funding of around $250m spread over 15 programmes and low decile schools get more of this funding than high decile schools, it is not clear that the former get nearly enough to compensate for the

poverty-related issues they face compared to the advantages brought by the student intake in high decile schools, nor their inability to raise local money 

At a personal level such middle class advantage raises an ethical challenge for all of us who are middle class parents: to recognise the line to be drawn between advantaging our own children and doing this at the expense of other people’s children (Kohn, 1998).