by Rebecca Thomas
As schools prepare for the 2025 academic year, the Ministry of Education offers compliance checklists and guidelines. While these lists may serve a purpose, the real question for schools is:
Will your strategic plan be built to serve these tick boxes, or will it reflect the unique vision, values, and voices of your community?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of listening to a diverse range of school leaders who understand the need for these new mandates, but don’t want them to drive the direction of their school.
It is true that there are some schools who are focused on meeting these requirements to prepare for ERO visits, and it might be the start their school actually needs. Others, however, are looking deeper—creating strategic plans that honour their community’s needs and aspirations.
Neither route is wrong, or right, or better than another's commitment, their commonality is their response to a need.
But can we have both types of plan in one place; visionary and compliant without overwhelming our teachers or losing sight of what matters most?
A strategic plan rooted in love and commitment to students and whānau is not about simply following mandates. It’s about reimagining education as an act of connection and empowerment.
One school shared their 2025 targets with me and asked if their plan—designed without a direct focus on the MOE’s prescribed frameworks—would jeopardise their accountability during the next ERO visit. Their targets?
Teachers transforming their interactions to improve student achievement.
Middle leaders coaching and mentoring teams to embrace the qualities of North-East Teachers.
These goals focus on culture, relationships, and long-term impact. They go beyond data points to create inclusive, relational practices that help every student thrive. How could this be wrong?
Attendance with a relational lens
The MOE’s 2025 expectations for attendance are clear:
Use revised codes.
Report attendance data daily.
Respond to absences and explore the STAR (Stepped Attendance Response) framework.
But this school has chosen a different approach. Instead of treating attendance as a compliance issue, they view it as a relational one.
By monitoring patterns, they ask powerful questions:
Are our relationships with students encouraging them to show up?
Is bullying or misunderstanding around neurodiversity affecting attendance?
Are there hidden barriers in how we engage with students and their whānau?
Through regular North-East meetings, staff collaborate to address disengagement patterns, problem-solve together, and celebrate successes. Their focus is not on tracking numbers but on fostering connection and belonging.
Breaking free from deficit thinking
The heart of this school’s plan lies in rejecting deficit thinking—the narrative that students need “fixing” through rigid programs or compliance-driven structures. Instead, they focus on fostering agentic, relational practices:
Sustaining Positive Practices: Team discussions embed inclusive approaches across diverse cohorts.
Tracking Patterns of Disengagement: School-wide systems enable early intervention and shared problem-solving.
Empowering Reflective Practice: Coaching and mentoring help teachers reflect on their interactions, aligning them with the North-East framework.
Their energy isn’t on implementing mandates but on building systems that deliver meaningful, lasting change for students and whānau. These systems are all co constructed and built by the people who will be using them, in order to reach ownership where the system becomes business as usual.
Here’s the truth: MOE expectations and school strategic plans are two different things.
The former is about meeting external requirements. The latter should be about transforming lives.
When schools prioritise love, relationships, and connection, their plans transcend checklists. They create environments where communities feel safe, valued, and empowered to succeed—not because of mandates but because of the commitment of their educators.
This isn’t about ignoring compliance. It’s about ensuring that compliance doesn’t define the heart of our work.
This is education reimagined. This is learning as connection. This is our promise.