The fundamentals are simple – devolve to the school, and particularly the community (read Boards of Trustees), control over the key decisions about running the local school, and leave overall steering of the ship of schools to the Ministry (curriculum, major policy initiatives). In one sense it has worked: New Zealand retains its high place on the league tables of world rankings (via PISA, PIRLS, and TiMMS), although our overall achievement rates have barely changed since Tomorrow’s Schools. The suggestion in this chapter is not to move back to the old system of mother-ministry and uncleregions controlling the details; the suggestion is to devise a new metaphor to move New Zealand schools to capitalise on the successes and remedy the failings from our experiences with Tomorrow’s Schools.

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand License.