Of major international significance is how education systems can address the seemingly immutable nature of education disparities within modern Western nations between the children of the majority cultures and indigenous populations, migrant groups and other minoritised peoples.

Te Kotahitanga is a comprehensive school reform project that seeks to promote pedagogic change that is supported by structural and institutional school-wide change.  It is funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and was designed by and is implemented by a research and development team at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. The aim of the project is to reduce educational disparities between New Zealand’s indigenous population and the children of the European-descended majority population.

Research into the project has  shown, through the use of multiple indicators, that for two separate time periods (Phase 3, 12 schools implementing the project from 2004 to 2006 and Phase 4, 21 schools implementing the project from 2006 to 2009), that as Te Kotahitanga teachers improved in their use of the project’s Effective Teaching Profile, simultaneously, Māori students, who had been in project schools for three years, made very large improvement gains in national examinations in both phases; Phase 4 schools replicated the gains made by Phase 3 schools at the same stage of the project’s implementation. (Bishop et al., 2007; Bishop et al., 2011).

However, these gains did not remain into the fourth and subsequent years in all schools in either phase because of differences in implementation that saw schools being divided into two distinct groups and this difference beginning to impact upon student outcomes in the less effective implementing schools by the third year of the project. This differentiation is associated with changes in the professional development project from the third year on and the diminishing funding provided for the employment of in-school project facilitators by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

The professional development approach changes after the third year from it initially being a relatively well externally-funded, externally-driven, prescriptive approach to being primarily a school-funded, internally-responsive approach. The funding model for the project is one where it is expected that all schools will reprioritise the use of their operational funding to cover the cost of this task themselves once they have been funded to initiate the project in the frist three years. Schools struggle with the funding model in 2 ways.  Firstly, funding provided for schools to employ project facilitators diminishes after year three, and as a result, many schools have problems providing sufficient funding from their own resources to provide sufficient facilitators to continue to support their staff effectively. The second area where schools struggle with the funding model is with the requirement that the schools take over funding the facilitators’ positions on an ongoing basis once the external project implementation support is completed in their schools. This causes problems for many schools because such funding is not currently part of school’s funded positions and must be found from operational grants or from sources other than the government grants.

Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Cavanagh, T., & Teddy, L. (2007). Te Kotahitanga Phase 3 whanaungatanga: Establishing a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations in mainstream secondary school classrooms. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Wearmouth, J., Peter, M., & Clapham, S. (2011). A summary of Te Kotahitanga: Maintaining, replicating and sustaining change in Phase 3 and 4 schools, 2007-2010. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Bishop, R., O’Sullivan, D., & Berryman, M. (2010). Scaling up education reform: Addressing the politics of disparity. Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press. Goren, P. (2009). How policy travels: making sense of Ka Hikitia – Managing for Success: The Māori Education Strategy, 2008-2012. Fullbright New Zealand. St John, M. (2002). The improvement infrastructure: The missing link or why are we always worried about ‘sustainability’. Paper presented at the second annual conference on Sustainability of Systemic Reform, Center for School Reform at TERC, Cambridge, MA. Vernez, V., Karam, R., Mariano, L., & DeMartini, C. (2004). Assessing the implementation of comprehensive school reform models: A working paper. RAND Education. WR-162-EDU.