What If Trust Had Architecture?

by Rebecca Thomas

As we head towards November, I expect many of us have been thinking about trust.

Professional trust. Institutional trust. The trust that allows people to disagree fiercely about education while still believing that everyone around the table is there because they genuinely want something better for tamariki.

Lately, I have found myself in conversations where that trust feels increasingly fragile.

You hear it in the shared language: Who is connected to whom? Who wasn't? Who benefits from this decision? Who knew about it before everyone else? And, increasingly: Can we trust them?

I don't want to write about the people tonight. In fact, I think focusing on personalities might be part of the problem. Because when a profession begins searching for villains, perhaps we need to stop asking who we distrust and start asking why distrust has become so easy.

Education has always contained disagreement. It should.

We are a profession filled with people who care deeply about children, communities, knowledge, culture and the future. Of course we will disagree about how those things should be protected. Disagreement isn't the problem.

Distrust is different.

Distrust changes the question from “Is this a good idea?” to “What are they really trying to do?” It changes “Why was this decision made?” into “Who benefits from it?” It turns consultation into suspicion, reform into speculation and professional disagreement into something increasingly personal.

Once trust disappears from a system, even good ideas become difficult to implement. People begin habitually looking behind the curtain or under the mask. The expectation that something will be there persists. It festers. Eventually the suspicion itself becomes part of the system.

That is a dangerous place for education to reach.

I find myself increasingly uninterested in another investigation into who has done what wrong. I am much more interested in another question: What are we going to do about it?

Surely our responsibility is not simply to document the erosion of trust, but to build structures that deserve it. Perhaps, as time slips away from us, this is where we need to begin talking seriously about an Accord of Educators.

I am not talking about another organisation or echo chamber. Not another membership body or another group claiming to represent the profession. And definitely not another table where the same small collection of voices somehow becomes shorthand for education in Aotearoa.

An Accord would be something quite different.

It would be an agreement about how we agree.

A set of principles and safeguards for educational decision-making that endure regardless of who holds political power, who leads particular organisations, or who happens to have access to the rooms where decisions are being made.

Imagine if we agreed that meaningful educational reform should be developed with educators rather than delivered to them. That tangata whenua are not stakeholders to be consulted after the architecture has been designed, but partners in shaping it. That the voices of Māori communities are not gathered merely to validate decisions already made. That Pacific communities help determine what success looks like for their children. That evidence used to justify national change is visible, contestable and open to scrutiny. That conflicts of interest are declared. That consultation has the genuine capacity to alter an outcome. That classroom teachers have meaningful ways to influence the decisions affecting their classrooms. And that no government, organisation, academic institution, union, business or individual gets to claim ownership of education.

We, educators, are temporary guardians of something that belongs to our tamariki and those who come after them. Where the present model too often imposes solutions from above, an Accord could protect transformation from the ground up — iwi-led, teacher-empowered and community-owned.

Equity cannot simply mean becoming increasingly efficient at delivering the same system to the children for whom that system has historically worked least well. Sometimes equity requires permission to build something different. And this is where the idea becomes interesting to me.

I don't know exactly what an Accord of Educators should look like.

Perhaps none of us should.

In fact, perhaps its first important characteristic is that it doesn't look like a collection of people at all. It looks like principles, safeguards and agreed ways of working. Perhaps the strongest Accord would be one that nobody could own. Not the government, or a union. Not a university, business or political party. Not a particularly charismatic educational personality. Nobody gets to plant their flag in it, build their brand around it or quietly become its gatekeeper. Perhaps it should be deliberately difficult to capture.

Because if we are serious about rebuilding trust, we cannot simply construct another table and then spend the next decade arguing about who deserves a seat at it.

Instead, the Accord might establish the conditions under which we agree to work together. Some things could be non-negotiable. Tangata whenua are partners in shaping change. Conflicts of interest are visible. Evidence is open to challenge. Consultation must have the genuine capacity to change an outcome. Those most affected by change have meaningful ways of influencing it. And nobody gets to claim to speak for an entire profession.

But beneath those shared commitments, there should be enormous room for difference.

Perhaps that is where things become really interesting. Instead of another national working group sitting around another national table searching for the one answer that will somehow work for every child in every community, imagine dozens — perhaps hundreds — of local conversations happening across Aotearoa.

Hui shaped by place.

By whakapapa.

By iwi.

By community.

By the tamariki actually sitting in the classrooms we keep talking about.

The questions being explored in Te Tai Tokerau might be different from those being explored in South Auckland, Wellington or rural Southland. And even within those places, communities might arrive at very different answers. Perhaps that isn't inconsistency we need to eliminate. Perhaps that is knowledge. Kura, schools, iwi and communities could become places where ideas are developed, tried, challenged and evaluated honestly. Not pilots designed to prove that somebody's national policy works. Places designed to discover what actually does.

The Accord wouldn't tell them what the answer should be. It would protect their right to ask the question. And then it would create ways for what they discover to travel. Not upwards for somebody important to approve. Across. One community learning from another. Teachers learning from teachers. Iwi learning alongside iwi. Researchers contributing rather than controlling. Ākonga and whānau becoming creators of knowledge rather than the subjects from whom somebody else extracts it.

The role of anything national would therefore change too.

Instead of controlling the work, perhaps its job would be to connect it. To make learning visible and notice patterns. To bring communities together and ask difficult questions. To help ensure evidence is rigorous. And then to amplify what is emerging without immediately turning it into another mandated programme.

There could still be kaitiaki of the Accord, but perhaps even they should never become its owners. Their role could be temporary, rotating and deliberately limited: guarding the integrity of the process rather than deciding the direction of education.

And everything should leave footprints.

If thousands of educators, whānau and young people contribute to a national conversation, we should be able to see what they said. We should be able to see the themes that emerged. We should be able to see what changed because of them. And we should be able to see what didn't change and why. “We listened” should never again be enough. Show us where our voices went. Perhaps transparency like that is one of the ways trust begins to return.

The more I think about an Accord, the less I think it resembles an organisation.

Maybe it is closer to an agreement about how power behaves. A promise that regardless of who governs, who funds, who researches, who advocates, or who happens to hold influence at a particular moment, there are some ways of working together that we refuse to surrender.

Perhaps that is what the architecture of trust looks like.

Foundations we agree not to undermine.

Windows that allow us to see what is happening inside.

And enough space for different communities to build what their tamariki need.

Perhaps its greatest protection would be that it could never belong to any of us.

We would simply be its kaitiaki for a while.

Which brings me back to the question I started with.

Perhaps the question isn't: Who should lead it?

Perhaps it is: What would we have to promise each other so that education never reaches this point again?

That, to me, feels like a conversation worth having.