A: Jo Robson: Refreshing your Achievement Challenge/Progress Aspirations – from page to stage

This interactive and practical session will guide you through a process of strategic thinking and effective implementation of your updated plan. In alignment with current national priorities, we will consider how to innovate, whilst empowering your teams to work collaboratively. This approach will help streamline your efforts and ensure that you stay focused on your main objectives. We will explore how Kāhui Ako successfully communicate this with their wider Kāhui Ako community.

B: Mark Osborne: Developing Dream Teams

A dream team is one that is able to achieve more than the sum of its parts, and for many kāhui ako, a key challenge is to bring together teams that are able to work together and thrive. This workshop will look at a four step process to create teams that are: high in relational trust and psychological safety; have the skills to be able to engage in robust professional conversations; and driven by high levels of internal accountability.

C: Kylie Horgan(Lincoln High School/Leader Ngā Matapuna o Ngā Pakihi Community of Learning | Kāhui Ako) : Breaking Barriers, Building Futures

Max’s Story – Full of Potential, But Facing Challenges

Max was 10 years old and full of big ideas. Back home, he loved maths and science—he could take apart a broken radio and put it back together with ease. But in a new country, everything felt different.

Lessons weren’t taught the way he was used to, and some words in his schoolbooks were unfamiliar. His parents wanted to help, but they weren’t sure how the education system worked. Max was smart and curious, but he didn’t know how to navigate the path ahead.

Max isn’t alone. Many students faced similar achievement challenges—adapting to new learning environments, overcoming barriers, and finding pathways that match their skills and dreams.

That’s when we asked: What if we, as a Community of Learning, could do something different? What if we could anticipate these challenges early and create a learning community where students like Max had the right support, at the right time, in the right way?

The COL2040 Project

Schools have long tackled achievement challenges without wider community support, expected to manage complex issues alone. As pressures grow on health, social services, and family support, schools are increasingly the go-to for more than just education—addressing wellbeing, equity, and social challenges. But in a rapidly changing world, reacting isn’t enough—we need to anticipate barriers and rethink how as a community we prepare our learners for the future.

COL2040 was our answer—a community-driven initiative led by Ngā Mātāpuna o Ngā Pākihi Kāhui Ako, designed to identify key challenges and opportunities shaping learning from 2025 to 2040.

By uniting educators, students, whānau, and community voices, we strengthened our ability to address achievement challenges at a systems level—both now and in the future.

Using a three-phase approach—understanding “What Is,” envisioning “What Could Be,” and designing “How We Get There”—we infused foresight tools into strategic planning. This approach enabled us to clearly define key outcomes, identify leverage points, and establish measurable indicators to track impact and drive meaningful change.

This session explores the power and potential of Kāhui Ako in tackling achievement challenges, the insights we gained, the barriers we uncovered, and how the infusion of foresight tools can transform strategic planning for future-focused education and communities of learning.

D: Jo Robson: Enhancing Leadership Through Effective Coaching

To get the best from your ASLs and WSLs, we will explore effective coaching principles, and how these can grow your leaders’ capability for continuous improvement. As they lead collaborative inquiries, workstreams, steering groups etc, we will engage with practical tools designed by Leading Learning, to successfully implement effective coaching in your Kāhui Ako.

E: Mark Osborne: Leading Change

This workshop will draw from Mark’s PhD research to provide a range of practical tools to support leaders as they implement change. We’ll use a change leadership framework to explore how to create momentum for change, how to remove potential barriers to change, and how best to engage with resistance to change if it emerges. Although these principles can be applied to any change project, specific attention will be given to the curriculum refresh as a context.

F: Sharon Keen (Casebrook Intermediate): Tōtaranui Kāhui Ako Attendance and Engagement Intervention

The K.A. was granted MOE funding, under the Regional Response Fund, to support Attendance and Engagement across our school.  It was decided to work only with the 5 Primary and 1 Intermediate. We allocated the responsibility for developing and monitoring the intervention to one of our Lead Principals and one Across School Teacher.

We started with developing expectations on attendance for Classroom Teachers, Parents/Whānau and Students.  Targets groups were then identified in each Kura and funding allocated based on their student numbers.

We set up weekly data collection and monitoring processes and engaged local Youth Workers to work with the target students.  Each Kura had a dedicated attendance person who was funded.

The result was a greater understanding and awareness of our individual school attendance patterns and provided us with clear systems to follow.  This resulted in an over all improvement but as we all know it takes time to change ingrained behaviour.

Sharon will share our expectations and systems and discuss the successes and pit falls.

G: Te Tai Whanake ki Tauranga Moana : Iwi Engagement 

Join Clayton Parai and Shiralee Hohaia as they share their journey over the last 5 years working collaboratively with Iwi as ASLs in the Tauranga Peninsula Kāhui Ako.

Part of this journey includes Te Tai Whanake ki Tauranga Moana, a website launched in 2023 and Te Pae Taumata.

Te Tai Whanake ki Tauranga Moana is a ground breaking space that sees Ngā Iwi and Ngā Kura o Tauranga Moana, working together to enable the sharing of narratives from the perspective of each iwi.

Te Pae Taumata, a bi-annual hui for Kaumātua and Tumuaki to come together to help schools build meaningful connections and relationships with hapū and iwi.

We look forward to sharing our journey with you.

H: Melinda Iles (Mid Bays Kāhui Ako) : From Consensus to Classroom: Implementing Structured Literacy Across Mid Bay

Join us as we share the journey of the Mid Bays Kāhui Ako in adopting and implementing a structured literacy approach across our diverse school community. From the initial realisation that change was needed to gaining collective buy-in and successfully delivering structured literacy practices across five primary schools, one intermediate, and Rangitoto College, this session will explore the key steps, challenges, and successes along the way. Presented by Melinda Iles, Lead Principal of the Mid Bays Kāhui Ako, and Lauren Hare, Across School Leader for Literacy, this workshop will provide valuable insights for school leaders and educators looking to drive meaningful literacy change at scale.

I: Darcy Fawcett (Director, Sound Data): Using assessments and statistics to ‘prove’ the impact of school and Kahui Ako initiatives on learning

This interactive workshop will explore how school and Kahui Ako leaders can use pre- and post-assessments and research-level statistics to evaluate and ‘prove’ the impact of their initiatives on learning.  We will first explore statistics that use the same assessment for pre- and post-testing e.g., using e-asTTle and a t-test to evaluate whether an initiative cohort made significantly more progress between Term 1 and 4 than expected.  We will then explore statistics that use different assessments for pre- and post-testing e.g., using e-asTTle, NCEA Qualifications and an ordinal logistic regression to evaluate whether an initiative cohort made significantly more progress from Year 7 to Year 13 than expected. Each exploration will consist of a presentation, a practical investigation using teacher-friendly dashboards, then a discussion of actual school usage. This workshop aims to inspire school and Kāhui Ako leaders to use assessments and statistics to evaluate and ‘prove’ their own initiatives.

Round table discussion

Case studies shared in groups