95bFM The future of Kāhui Ako up in the air
17 March, 2025
Interview by Castor Chacko, adapted by Vivek Panchal
With the future of Kāhui Ako unknown, the University of Auckland’s Camilla Highfield recommends working towards a similar scheme, while improving flaws many have with the current scheme.
Recent government leaks are showing that the future of the Kāhui Ako government programme is up in the air.
The programme allocates additional salary bonuses to educators endorsed by the government as being of great teaching quality, to ensure they continue to work in their schools and communities.
However, the history of Kāhui Ako is controversial due to being inconsistently implemented.
Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland, Camilla Highfield, told 95bFM’s The Wire that despite these inconsistencies, the programme has shown some positive outcomes.
“In some Kāhui Ako, it's been really functional.”
“Teachers have worked really effectively both within and across their schools. They've done lots of different interesting initiatives.”
However, she says evidence of improvement within the programme is anecdotal.
“In other areas, there's been really dysfunctional relationships and some schools haven't wanted to be involved, or felt that they didn't have anything to contribute or didn't want to contribute. So it's been very variable right throughout New Zealand.”
With speculation the government will scrap the initiative, Highfield says introducing a new programme with the same benefits as Kāhui Ako, while fixing its flaws with more research and evaluation, would be more beneficial.
“[The government] could start by looking at what evidence we have in the research that has been done, and do a literature review of what we've got and understand what aspects of the programme have worked well, and what are the things that have meant there's been failure or communication breakdowns.”
“That would be a really good start.”
