The start of Term Four 2025 was a rough one.
This “new new curriculum” landed unannounced in our inboxes. I got into a grump, sent the Ministry a bill for my wasted printing costs of the “Final” hard copy, and then found the changes that had been made to Te Mātaiaho. The language that spoke to diversity, inclusion and belonging had been erased. Our commitment to Te Tiriti and Te Ao Māori had become the literal decorations on the page.
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So I did what many principals do when we are trying to process something big. I wrote about it in our newsletter. On October 30, 2025, I said:
Last week was quite a ride for our teaching team, and we really appreciate your support on Thursday as many of us in the public sector walked off the job. The media conversation since has, unsurprisingly, been full of mixed messages. It reminded me of our last newsletter about the complexity of teaching. Our communities are diverse, layered, and full of colour. That richness is what gives life to the tapestry of who we are. The complexity of those threads is incredibly important. The last thing we want to do is simplify those threads so much that we end up with a flat, two-tone checkerboard instead of something woven with depth, pattern, and meaning.
Unfortunately, there is a growing belief that if we simplify learning into tidy steps, all children will learn the same way. This idea is influencing the curriculum changes currently being introduced. It is based on parts of neuroscience being taken without the cultural and developmental context needed to understand them. The two pieces of science the Minister refers to as the “Science of Reading” are how the brain moves information into long-term memory and orthographic mapping, which helps us store letter-sound patterns. These processes are real and important, but knowing how to sound out a word is not the same as understanding it.
Here is a simple example. The Minister recently celebrated “improved reading results” from a phonics test. But the test measured sound recognition and recall, not comprehension. Many of us can read this whakataukī from our New Zealand Curriculum | Te Mātaiaho aloud:
Mātai aho tāhūnui, Mātai aho tāhūroa, Hei takapau wānanga e hora nei.
Most of us can decode the words of the whakataukī, but not everyone will understand the meaning. Meaning-making is where true learning lives. It does not move in straight lines or tidy levels. It grows through our identity, our whānau, our reo, and our relationships. It is the richness and spice of learning that gives colour, texture, and life to the tapestry.
This is the part that has been removed from the newly released curriculum: the parts that honour diversity, inclusion, community, partnership, belonging, and the complexity of who we are. Those threads matter. They are what make learning real, human, and connected. The name Te Mātaiaho was gifted to our New Zealand Curriculum with purpose and intent. “Mātai” means to study deliberately, examine, and observe, and “aho” describes the many strands and threads of learning. When we remove those rich threads we are no longer upholding the meaning of the name or the gift it represents.
And so, no matter what changes at a national level, here in our kura we will continue to teach and lead in ways that honour the whole child, their culture, their identity, their voice, and their mana.
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At the time, I was mad. So, I turned off my social media and decided to ignore the Ministry and Ministers for a bit to calm down.
The next day they announced they would be removing Te Tiriti from the Act, and I had no idea until Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 12:57pm, when my phone rang.
It was my presiding member, and she was fuming. In her own words, with a little polite paraphrasing, the message was very clear: “They are not taking Te Tiriti away from us. I am going to write a statement from the Board.”
Surprisingly, hearing this news did not worsen my mood. I actually felt better, because I was not alone. My PM, tangata tiriti, wāhine toa, was angry and I was not alone. She did not see Te Tiriti as my sole responsibility as Māori, but our shared solution as partners. While she was forcefully expressing herself, I just sat there smiling.
What followed was a robust, respectful email conversation with the rest of the Board. We talked about our responsibilities as a Crown entity. We talked about political neutrality. We talked about what it means to stay in our governance lane while still making a statement about our position and what we hold dear and sacred as Te Tiriti partners.
On Wednesday, November 5, 2025 we published, on our school Facebook page, a statement of ongoing commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi regardless of changes in legislation which ended with:
… Apanui School will continue to uphold Māori rights as tangata whenua and to enact Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a living, practical foundation of all we do. This is not only our legal responsibility but also our moral and educational one. We stand firmly in this position.
Ngā manaakitanga ki a koutou
Alexandra Pickles (Tangata Tiriti), Presiding Member – Apanui School Board
The next day, one of our parents, who is also a science teacher at Whakatāne High School, approached me to let me know that she was going to discuss publishing a similar statement with their Board. Our other small-town schools quickly followed suit, and then the wonderful Tania Waikato reposted our high school’s statement and the Te Rārangi Rangatira movement exploded.
Our kura across the motu have taken a stand to disrupt the course of a government agenda. That is no small thing. They are disrupting the notion that what is “legal” may not always be “right”.
Our history is littered with laws that were used by those in power to suppress and assimilate the wealth of others as their own. The Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, the Education Ordinance Act 1847, the Native Schools Act 1867, the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 are just a few examples of law devastating us as Māori. Banning books, language suppression, discrimination, and abuse have been, and can be, legalised into existence. Teachers beating my father for speaking te reo Māori in the playground was a legal right of teachers in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Those were not accidents. They were deliberate choices about whose knowledge, language, and existence should dominate.
As an unforeseen consequence of the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms, Boards today have the power to publicly state their position when governments make decisions that affect their communities. They can choose to act as more than just Crown agents. They can choose to act as kaitiaki who keep the threads in the weaving, even when the pattern on the official template changes.
Our Board members are aunties, uncles, parents, grandparents, community leaders. They coach the sports teams, run the raffles, sit at tangihanga, stand on the sideline in the rain. They are part of the same fabric as the kids they serve.
In a moment like this, it is their duty to disrupt this process, because silence is agreement.
Silence says that we will adapt, we will go along, we will not rock the boat.
Silence reassures those pulling out the threads that nobody really minds.
Silence tells our tamariki, especially those most affected, that their rights are negotiable.
Disruption, when it is grounded in aroha and whakapapa, is the opposite of that. It is an act of care. It is saying:
We care too much about these tamariki to keep doing things that harm them, just because that is how it has always been.
We care too much about our staff to pretend that a flattened, compliance driven version of the curriculum will feed their professional souls.
We care too much about Te Tiriti to treat it as a slogan we dust off on Waitangi Day and ignore in our decision making the rest of the year.
When I disrupted early childhood norms by keeping my baby with me at school, it was because I cared deeply about my son and my whānau. When we disrupted behaviour systems by introducing Jiu Jitsu and focusing on relationships, it was because we cared about those kids’ futures.
Now, in speaking out about Te Tiriti, I am disrupting because I care about what kind of education system my mokopuna will inherit.
I want to finish where I always seem to finish these big kaupapa – with my Dad.
He was, without question, the biggest and most inspiring disrupter in my life. He pushed against the limits placed on him as a Māori boy who was punished for speaking his own language. He challenged the quiet, everyday racism of our systems simply by insisting on existing in them, fully himself.
I want to end by sharing with you a piece of advice he consistently gave me throughout my life, and through all the times I told him various parts of my job as principal were feeling too hard.
He would just hold my hand and say,
“You know what to do my honey.”
Because I did. And you do too.
You know when something is not tika, even if it is technically allowed.
You know when a policy is pulling threads out of the cloak instead of strengthening them.
You know when your silence would feel like agreement.
So, my wero (challenge) to you is this:
- Disrupt your thinking. Just one little thought.
- Let that thought grow into a conversation, a question at your Board table, a brave sentence in your next newsletter.
- Follow your heart and your professional knowledge.
Ka pū te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi.
The old net is cast aside, while the new net goes a-catching.
We are the new net now. What we choose to catch, and what we refuse to let slip through, will shape the futures of our tamariki.
