Listening to Our Children: Returning to the Heart of Te Mātaiaho
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
By Rebecca Thomas
We stand at a crossroads. One path leads back to hope, vision, and trust. The other leads to silence. Our tamariki are waiting to see which we choose.
Listening to our children is something we say we do, but how often do we truly honour their voices? Surveys and exit tickets are a beginning — but they are not listening. They are not enough.
If we are serious about building a future our young people deserve, we must start where Te Mātaiaho taught us to start: With the kaupapa. With the vision. Not the content.
Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of this. We have leapt headfirst into rigid content — maths and literacy — as if they alone could mend the hurt our education system carries. But when we rush to content without standing firmly in our kaupapa, we lose sight of the people we are meant to walk alongside. We forget that our children live in a world radically different from the one we grew up in — and their needs are changing faster than a curriculum document can be printed.
The problem with any static curriculum, no matter who designs it, is that it cannot breathe. It becomes a cage instead of a vessel for growth.
The original Te Mātaiaho (March 2023) understood this.
It wasn't a political stunt — it was a promise: to evolve, to respond, to weave learning alongside and with our young people.
We Must Remember the Pou That Held Te Mātaiaho Together:
#1 MĀTAIRANGI – The Guiding Vision
Mātai ki te rangi, homai te kauhau wānanga ki uta, ka whiti he ora.
Look beyond the horizon, and draw near the bodies of knowledge that will take us into the future.
Te Mātaiaho placed exploration and possibility at its centre — demanding we honour the past, yes, but fix our gaze firmly on the horizon ahead. The new curricula we have been presented with pull backwards, fearing the future instead of embracing it.
#2 MĀTAINUKU – A Call to Action
There has never been a more urgent call than now. Our young people tell us every day — through words, through behaviour, through silence — that they are struggling. Mental health concerns are not hypothetical. They are real, raw, and present in every classroom across Aotearoa.
#3 MĀTAITIPU – A Vision Shaped by Young People
Where is their voice now? This new rushed curriculum was not built on the aspirations of our ākonga. It was built on fear — fear of "failure" on international rankings, fear of "falling behind." We are governing through anxiety, not through hope.
#4 MĀTAIREA – Supporting Progress
Progress is not a standardised test. Progress is the growth of a child's mind, heart, and community spirit. Rolling out assessments at speed does not build progress — it erodes it.
#5 MĀTAIAHO – Weaving Learning Across Areas
Where is the weaving now? STEAM, local curriculum, interdisciplinary exploration — all of it, discarded. The siloed "maths" and "literacy" documents we are being handed do not reflect the living, breathing knowledge our tamariki need to thrive.
#6 MĀTAIOHO – School Curriculum Designed Locally
The promise was autonomy. Now we find ourselves no longer consulting our communities, but informing them of decisions made elsewhere, far removed from the needs and dreams of our whānau.
#7 MĀTAIAHIKĀ – Connecting to Place and People
When the curriculum is dictated from above, local knowledge becomes an afterthought.
Our doors are closing; our relationships are fraying.
The warm, localised curriculum that once breathed life into learning is being suffocated by external mandates.
This Is Not Just a Curriculum Issue
This is a kaupapa issue. A trust issue. A listening issue.
Our tamariki are speaking.
Not through the polished responses on a survey form — but through their disengagement, their anger, their silence, their resistance.
Every behaviour is a communication.
Are we brave enough to listen?
What Our Young People Are Telling Us
When you really listen, beneath the noise and routines of school life, you start to hear it:
Learning often feels disconnected and dull.
Tamariki are hungry for experiences that take them outside the four walls of the classroom — for learning that feels real and alive.
Some quietly avoid their work, escaping to the edges of the room, not out of laziness, but because the learning doesn't feel meant for them.
Long stretches of teacher talk leave them wondering when their voice, their thinking, their agency will matter.
They question the relevance of what they are asked to learn.
They are teaching themselves through YouTube, TikTok — building skills in ways our curriculum refuses to acknowledge.
Distraction becomes easier than engagement; tapping on devices becomes a quiet form of protest.
True happiness at school often happens outside the rules, not within them.
Many carry a deep, unspoken belief that adults don't understand — or don't want to understand — what life feels like for them.
When they struggle, they turn to their friends, not their teachers. Trust feels too broken to risk.
This is the real voice of our young people. A voice asking — pleading — for us to listen with compassion and courage.
The Broken Promise of Vision
We keep hearing the government’s promises — "We will come back to the kaupapa of Te Mātaiaho once the curriculum content is written."
But can you imagine it?
Imagine telling your whānau, your community, the people who entrust you with their tamariki:
"We’ll come back to your hopes and dreams later — once we, the experts, have already decided what your children must learn."
No school grounded in authentic partnership would ever treat its people this way. No school with integrity would ever start with content and hope the vision somehow catches up.
Yet this is what is being demanded of us.
We, once trusted as local curriculum designers, now told we are unworthy of that role. Stripped of agency. Silenced in our own classrooms.
Told we must wait for others — those who sit in academic towers, detached from the lived realities of our young people — to decide what matters.
And who are these others? Hurtful academics, driven not by the voices of ākonga and whānau, but by political ambitions, international rankings, and outdated ideas borrowed from overseas systems that have already failed their own children.
The audacity of it. The cruelty of it.
They erase our voices, then dare to say we were never capable of designing curriculum to begin with.
But we know the truth.
Curriculum is not a bureaucratic exercise. Curriculum is whakapapa. It is hope, and belonging, and future, stitched together with the aspirations of our communities and our children at the centre.
We were doing this work long before it was mandated. And we will continue doing it — no matter who tries to rewrite the story.
The Cost of Losing Our Way
Once, we stood at the edge of something extraordinary. Through the original Te Mātaiaho, we had the blueprint for a curriculum that was living, breathing, and brave. We were weaving futures with our young people at the centre — recognising their voices, their needs, their dreams.
Now, that future is slipping away.
Agency is being stripped from us, piece by piece, replaced by compliance and control. We are being led to believe that this is our failure — that our teachers lacked the knowledge, that we must be rescued by prescriptive content written far from our classrooms.
But we know the truth.
We were never failing.
We were evolving, responding, staying closer to our ākonga than almost any education system in the world. We were listening when others were dictating. We were growing when others were standardising.
We were so far ahead. And now, heartbreakingly, we are so far behind.
This was never about politics. This is about people.
And it is our young people who will bear the weight of this loss.
Not in protest.
Not in anger.
But in silence — as their voices are erased, their agency denied, their futures shaped without them.
If we do not fight to remember who we were — who we are — we risk becoming complicit in their silencing.
It is not too late.
But we must choose: Will we continue down the path of fear, or will we return to the path of hope, of vision, of trust?
Our tamariki deserve nothing less.
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