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Maybe it's the English teacher in me, but I can't help coming back to two fairy tales when I think about what is going on in education in Aotearoa at the moment. One fairy tale we seem to be currently living through, 'Chicken Little' and one fairy tale we could very dearly learn from 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. Part One: Chicken Little and Maths education in NZ - There's no crisis like a manufactured crisis! The fairy tale of Chicken Little, also known as "Henny Penny" or "The Sky is Falling," tells the story of a small, fearful chicken who is struck on the head by a falling acorn. Mistaking the acorn for a piece of the sky, Chicken Little believes that the sky is falling and sets out to warn the king. Along the way, Chicken Little meets other animals like Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, and Goosey Loosey, who join the journey to alert the king. However, they are eventually deceived by a clever fox, Foxy Loxy, who invites them into his...

The Principal Diaries - The Annual Plan and putting the plan into action!

January 09, 2019

It was an interesting process pulling together my first annual plan as Principal at Albany Senior High School. School Charters and Annual Plans are interesting beasts. To be honest, they appear to be box ticking waffle and weasel words which gather cyber dust in some virtual filing system. My belief was that a plan can be bloody useful, but only if it was actually designed to be useful. For that reason, I set about researching and reading as many as I could lay my hands on. What I found, for the most part, was (I thought) unnecessarily long winded and either attempted to capture so much in so much detail that they seemed insurmountable or so vague they read like paraphrased business as usual. In the end, the easiest approach was to go to The University of Auckland Centre for Educational Leadership to look at their resources and templates and have a crack of building something from scratch. The following is my attempt to craft an Annual Plan (this obviously doesn't include the br...

Curriculum changes, Education Act amendments and the art of misdirection

October 10, 2024

It is interesting that exactly when school leaders up and down the country are grappling with an onslaught of curriculum changes there is a fundamental change to our education system being proposed. I suspect the timing is in partly due to the pace the current government likes to operate at, but part of me also wonders that proposing such significant changes exactly whilst school leaders are being absorbed by curriculum updates could also be by design. Is this coincidence or is it a classic case of misdirection?? Did you you know that we have until Monday 14th October to respond to proposed amendments to the Education Act that will fundamentally change what we are legislated to focus on and prioritise within our schools. The way the proposals and questions are laid out strike me as minimising what an absolutely fundamental shift we are about to be hit with. For example the removal of "giving effect to Te Tiriti' as a primary objective being sold as a "move" desig...