How Did Education Become Such a Dark Place to Lead In?

by Rebecca Thomas

No thought control.

I keep thinking back to the beginning — before the light dimmed, before leading felt like walking through shadow.

There was a time when schools glowed with hope, when leadership meant lifting others, not just holding on.

But somewhere along the way, the light began to fade.

The alarm bells started softly — in policy, in tone, in silence — and we didn’t yet realise they were warning us of what was to come.

How did education, once a place of purpose and promise, become such a dark place to lead in?

How did educators, once so full of hope and humanity, become so crushed, so trampled under the weight of politics?

When did the quiet corruption begin to seep into our classrooms, our funding streams, our very language?

For some of you, it began with the mobile phone ban — the first sign that those in power didn’t truly understand our classrooms, or our kids.

Then came the bold attendance targets and achievement data demands.

Most of us laughed. Good luck with that, we said.

We thought they were simply oblivious — detached from what it really takes to get our tamariki through the door each day. We didn’t yet realise this was only the beginning of their hunger for control — of our data, our rolls, our autonomy.

I was working in one of the first organisations to feel the sting — financially and philosophically.

One of the first to spot the anti -Te Tiriti winds on the horizon.

Our PLD company, once holding the contract to serve Te Tai Tokerau, carried the heartbeat of Russell Bishop’s mahi — promoting culturally responsive practice, weaving literacy and numeracy through a te ao Māori lens, igniting the fire of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories in our schools.

We helped design localised curriculums and learner profiles, gathered student voice, and celebrated the mana of each community’s story.

Back then, our principals were content — proud, even.

Their curriculums reflected their whānau and iwi, their whenua, their values.

The talk wasn’t about attendance rates or data; it was about relationships.

It was about how to build stronger bridges between schools and hapū.

Our tamariki were happy to be back after the long pandemic silence, and wellbeing pulsed through every classroom.

The heartbeat of education was gratitude — and joy.

So much joy.

It infected Steve and me so deeply that we wrote books about it — books that captured the laughter and light of PLD when it was still about people, not metrics.

But then the rumblings began.

The company got wind that its workstreams were being squeezed — that the new PLD world would be one of less joy, less choice.

A prescription was coming: sleek, standardised, one-size-fits-all.

Money and support would no longer stretch to the North.

The PLD landscape was shifting into survival mode — and only those who marched to the Minister’s drumbeat, who rolled out the Ministry’s slides and slogans on cue, would remain.

And as the money moved, so did the meaning of our mahi.

The Great Shift: From Mahi to Monopoly

Structured Literacy was the first to command the monetary monopoly.

At first, we understood why. 

There were genuine successes — pockets of brilliance where teachers filled long-standing gaps in their knowledge, and tamariki began to make visible gains. It was meant to be an extra top-up for kaiako — a strengthening, not a takeover.

But then it became mandatory.

And with that mandate came $67 million — a figure proudly published in the 2024 MOE Budget.

Money has a way of changing the air around good ideas.

What began as support soon became surveillance.

The language shifted from empowerment to enforcement.

And suddenly, the joy that once lived in literacy was gone — replaced by compliance checklists and contracts.

The next wave of funding was sent offshore, bound to the glossy promise of new Maths Resource Books.They arrived in a blur — if they arrived at all.

Schools received boxes without guidance, stacks without context.

No PLD accompanied them, no local translation, no invitation to shape or adapt.

Some resources went missing, others sat unopened in shipping containers, waiting for clarity that never came.

And we asked — quietly, at first — do these even match the curriculum?

The curriculum that, at this stage, felt more like an enigma than a map.

Then came the drafts — the early versions of the English and Maths curriculum.

We were already primed for Understand – Know – Do.

We were told it would echo the rhythm of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories — that Te Mātaiaho and the Common Practice Model would hold the pedagogy steady beneath it all.

Ah yes, the Common Practice Model — born alongside Russell Bishop’s Leading to the North-East, that beautifully human approach to learning through relationships and responsiveness.

The Ministry had once promised to gift 5,000 copies of his book — two to every school in Aotearoa — to help leaders and teachers deliver learning with fidelity, equity and love.

A gesture of respect.

A signal that relationship-based teaching would remain at the heart of our national identity.

But somewhere along the way, that promise was lost — drowned out by contracts, consultants, and imported frameworks that mistook compliance for coherence.

Dust on the Shelf

Those 5,000 copies of Leading to the North-East — the books that were meant to reach every school, every kaiako — never made it to the classrooms they were promised to serve.

They ended up in a photocopier room somewhere deep inside the Ministry, collecting dust.

You had to ask for them — from Down the Back of the Chair, the Ministry’s own resource portal, as if they were surplus stock.

Imagine that — a book about leading with heart and humanity, tucked away like an afterthought, hidden behind the machinery of bureaucracy.

What would it have hurt to simply send them out as promised?

We all know the answer.

Leadership that empowers teachers doesn’t fit neatly into a system that prefers obedience.

It was around this time that spaces like DisruptED were humming.

Alive with book swaps, Niho Taniwha models, shared resources, deep kōrero, and laughter.

Professional learning still felt like an act of community — not a commodity.

Teachers were learning from each other, sparking ideas, reclaiming joy.

It was messy, hopeful, human.

The kind of space that reminded you why you became an educator in the first place.

But joy and justice don’t survive long in systems built on silence.

The Train Wreck Years

A far cry from those days of sharing books and laughter, we now find ourselves wading through conspiracies, OIAs, petitions, and the relentless churn of hurt and harm.

What once felt like collaboration has become a battlefield — each report, each leak, each agenda another wound in the body of education.

And still, the train kept moving.

Only now, it was a train wreck in motion.

Assault after assault.

Policy after policy.

We were told — you are not curriculum designers.

As if our years of inquiry, reflection, and relationship meant nothing.

Parts of the Education and Training Act quietly vanished and reappeared, rewritten in language that stripped teachers and boards of power.

Board obligations were redefined around attendance targets and achievement metrics —as though the heart of schooling could be measured in percentages and pie charts.

Localised curriculum — gone.

NELPs — sidelined.

Te Tiriti — under constant siege.

Politics took the wheel.

Education became a vehicle for control, not transformation.

Teacher and leadership autonomy — once our proudest claim — began to dissolve.

But resistance rose too.

Little pockets of it at first — teachers forming collectives, leaders whispering in corridors, networks beginning to speak out.

A battle of wills began: the sector versus the system.

And as the corruption deepened, so did our resolve to call it what it was.

The lies grew louder, yes — but so did the truth-tellers.

We can no longer trust the Ministry.

Nor ERO.

And definitely not our Minister.

We are told our defiance is noise — as if speaking truth to power were an act of rebellion, not responsibility.

The Ministry has become unrecognisable as an ally.

It’s too busy chasing a tidy 7 out of 10 from the Minister, too busy pleasing power to remember purpose.

It stopped caring.

It became so entangled in spin and self-preservation that even it can no longer recall which lie it last told.

So here we are — educators, once partners in trust — now left to dig through Official Information Act requests like archaeologists of integrity, excavating fragments of truth from the rubble of bureaucracy.

Instead of being treated as trusted professionals, we are left to field the media, to verify the stories that should have been transparent from the start.

Why Am I Writing This?

Because I remember what it felt like when trust still lived here.

When the Government, the Ministry, and educators stood shoulder to shoulder — not in perfect harmony, but in shared purpose.

When PLD teams wrapped around their schools like whānau, nurturing difference, celebrating autonomy, and protecting the mana of local voice.

I write this to mark the distance between then and now.

To show how control crept in where collaboration once stood.

To remind us that it’s not nostalgia — it’s truth.

Our kids were happier.

Our schools were settled.

Our communities thrived.

And we all looked forward to what was ahead —because we believed that education, at its best, was built on trust, joy, and the shared hope that every child could rise with dignity.

They can dismiss our defiance as noise, but they cannot unteach us what we know about love, or erase the power of collective memory.

We have seen what real education looks like.

It breathes in whanaungatanga.

It grows through local curriculum, through laughter echoing down hallways, through the faces of tamariki who feel seen.

So let’s keep speaking — not as rebels, but as guardians of truth.

Let’s rebuild the spaces they tried to standardise.

Because, in the future, education will not be written by ministers or consultants — it will be written by those who still believe in the mana of every learner, and the promise of every voice.