A Reminder Of What Has Been Stolen From Teachers

By Rebecca Thomas

The Island We Taught On

I don’t think people understand what has been lost, because what has been lost was never easily written down in the first place. It didn’t live in policy or frameworks or tidy progressions. It lived in the feeling of a day that unfolded the way learning is meant to — slow where it needed to be slow, expansive where it needed to be expansive, and always, always anchored in the lives of the tamariki in front of you. 

When I first came to teach in Aotearoa, I remember feeling like I had stepped onto something rare — an island, almost — where teaching hadn’t yet been tightened into something narrow and brittle. It was open, extremely human and relational and most importantly it trusted you. And that trust changed everything.

Fridays were Pie Day. 

Not the kind of thing you timetable into neat boxes or justify through a learning intention pinned to the wall, but something that grew naturally out of who we were as a kura and who our tamariki were. 

After karakia and kapa haka, we would start the morning out on the veranda, hands wrapped around thick rope, learning knots the way you’re meant to learn — by trying, failing, laughing, trying again. We did this as a whole school. There was something about the feel of rope through your fingers, the way learning sat in your body, not just your head.

From there we would move into maths. I say move because time and timetables became irrelevant. We responded when the children had had enough. 

The maths we carried out on Fridays, was a type of maths that made sense because it belonged to the world we were already in — measuring lengths of timber, collecting data from the garden, baking and adjusting quantities, sketching shapes that actually existed around us, drawing to scale because we had something real to scale from, even looking for evidence of Fibonacci hiding in the pinecones or petals of a plant. It had to be outdoors. That was the unspoken rule. Because why wouldn’t it be?

By mid-morning the day would stretch even wider. 

One group would head to the nearby lake, learning to sail — learning wind and patience and the quiet understanding that not everything moves when you want it to. The others would stay behind, warming pies, finishing what needed to be finished, moving at a pace that felt like their own. 

After lunch, we would swap. No rush, no panic, just a rhythm. This second group had chosen paddle-boarding as their sport of choice. The wobbling, the discipline, the giggling echoed through the gum trees.

By the afternoon, the whole school was alive with movement.

Tuakana–teina wasn’t something we talked about as a concept — it was just what happened. Older students planning games, teaching them, adjusting them on the fly, reading the younger ones and responding in real time. Teaching in its purest form, handed from one to another.

And then the bell would go, and still, the day didn’t end. 

We would gather the ones who wanted to come, and we would head to the beach. Whānau would meet us there, trucks parked up, bonnets warm with the last of the sun, smoked marlin defrosting slowly while kids ran straight into the waves. There is a particular kind of laughter that comes from children who have spent a whole day being seen, being trusted, being allowed to move and learn and belong — and it filled that beach. I can still feel it now, the salt on my skin, the pull of the tide, the quiet moment of floating on my back as the sun dropped, thinking over and over again, what a day… I get paid to do this… I can’t wait for next Friday. That feeling wasn’t a fluke. It was what education felt like when it hadn’t yet been squeezed into something smaller than it was meant to be.

I had come from a UK system where learning had already been narrowed, where success had been defined so tightly it left little room for anything else. Closed classrooms. Closed thinking. A constant sense that someone, somewhere, was watching, measuring, correcting. I knew how sickening it felt.

And here, in contrast, it felt like breathing again. Learning wasn’t reduced to statements or boxed into textbooks. It lived in the water, in the wind, in shared kai, in relationships that carried everything else. The kids were happy — not in a superficial, managed way, but deeply, unmistakably so. The staff were happy too, because we were allowed to be the kind of teachers we knew we could be.

And now, when I stand in classrooms, I feel that island shrinking beneath my feet.

It hasn’t disappeared all at once. That’s the thing people miss. It has been worn down slowly, piece by piece, by decisions made far from ground zero.

The language has changed first — statements, progressions, descriptors, tools, attendance management plans — layers of expectation that arrive not as invitations, but as demands.

Term 1 begins not with curiosity, but with translation. Taking what has been written and trying to make it live in front of thirty very real, very different tamariki. And if you are in a composite class, as so many of us are, that work multiplies. Multiple year levels. Multiple expectations. Multiple pathways that somehow have to be woven into something that resembles coherence.

So, do your best to make it work. You split your time. Some days Year 7 get you, some days Year 8. The rest work independently, not because that is what you believe is best, but because it is what the system has quietly required. Planning doubles. Marking doubles. Reporting doubles. The hours stretch, not in the joyful way a beach afternoon stretches, but in the begrudging way of something that keeps asking for more than it gives back. The laptop stays open longer. The evenings grow shorter. And still, it never quite feels like enough.

Around this, the machinery keeps moving. PLD days arrive in clusters — SMART, maths, literacy — each one asking you to do more, to track more, to align more, while the kind of learning many kura are crying out for — trauma-informed practice, inclusion, the deep relational work that actually changes lives — slips further to the edges. Schools stay open while this PLD happens. Relievers come and go, running between classes. LATs step up. Classes are split and merged and reshaped. And in all that movement, something feels wrong.

The tamariki feel it.

They feel the absence in small ways. The teacher who is a little less present because their head is full. The break time where the conversation doesn’t happen because there are books to mark. The lesson that feels tighter, more controlled, less alive. The slow release model I do, we do, you do with whiteboards super glued to chins. Relationships — the very foundation everything else rests on — begin to thin, not because we value them any less, but because the space to build them is being steadily taken from us.

And us? We change too, though we don’t always notice it straight away.

We come in tired. We smile, but not as often. We laugh, but not as freely. The parts of us that made this work feel like a calling begin to feel like something we have to protect, rather than something the system supports. The small, beautiful things go first — the shared kai, the spontaneous moments, the time to simply be with our students without the quiet pressure of what needs to be recorded next or assessed on the go.

To look at our tamariki and just see children — not wonder whether they are “proficient” or “emerging” in a phase that means nothing beyond the walls of policy.

Not be in the fight in a system that pits schools against each other in an imaginary race, all to prove someone was right, to prove someone was better.

There are still people fighting for what was lost and what was real. In universities, in offices, in policy spaces, pushing back, trying to hold onto something just and good within the system itself. But while that battle continues, classrooms are absorbing the impact. Real teachers. Real kids. Every single day. Eventually we become brainwashed, and forget what we ever used to be.

As I reflect on these two realities and yearn for the one I miss, I'm curious, where would you want your tamariki to be?

On that island as it was — wide, alive, held together by relationship and trust?

Or here, watching the edges pull in, learning how to survive a system that no longer feels like it was built for them, let alone a system that should be all about them?

Because I know where I learned the most about teaching.

Floating in the tide, salt on my skin, listening to children laugh in the fading light, already thinking about the next Friday, already knowing I would show up with everything I had.

Luckily, that version of me is still here, still remembering and still fighting.

But, if I am honest, I am scared because that island is smaller now and I’m trying so hard not to let it vanish from my memory.