“There is enough overwhelming evidence to demonstrate that our Māori, Pasifika, migrant and ethnic learners are not safe from racism within the New Zealand education system, with no foreseeable change,” writes Dr Ara Alam-Simmons. (Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller)
Training teachers and school leaders to be culturally responsive is only part of the solution to reducing racism in schools, Ara Alam-Simmons writes.
New Zealand’s education system has spent more than a decade talking about culture, relationships and unconscious bias. Considerable policy attention has been given to cultural responsiveness within the sector.
Since 2011, teachers have been guided by Tātaiako, the cultural competencies framework for Māori learners. The 2017 Our Code, Our Standards (and an upcoming update) requires teachers to recognise Māori learners as tangata whenua and to manage their own assumptions fairly. Tapasā, introduced in 2018, is a cultural framework that supports Pasifika learners.
And, in 2021, the Teaching Council launched Unteach Racism, a national campaign intended to challenge racism in education. The resource was for voluntary use by teachers. In 2026, the council launched another resource focused on fostering belonging, relationships and cultural confidence.
Despite such policy and initiatives, Māori and other racialised learners continue to face racism, exclusion, discrimination and unequal treatment within the education system.
Ministry of Education figures are difficult to dismiss. New Zealand Schools stood down 25,167 learners in 2022, the highest number in more than 20 years. And Māori learners were stood down or suspended at twice the rate of Pākehā learners.
A 2026 study of wellbeing survey data from more than 108,000 primary, intermediate, and secondary school students found that 20 percent of learners, particularly Māori, Pacific, and Asian students, reported experiencing discrimination related to their culture or family each month.
An analysis of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) data that examined the social, disciplinary, and structural disparities affecting young learners found that 24 percent of Māori 15-year-olds reported experiencing discrimination, compared with 15 per cent of Pākehā students.
There is also data set upon data set that reveals the racism experienced by Māori, Pacific, migrant and ethnic learners in schools. Both the Ministry of Education and Tertiary Education Commission admit to racist educational outcomes that privilege some groups of learners over others.
The consequences of such conditions can be unsettling. There’s the recent case of a 22-year-old who threatened to kill people at two West Auckland schools. The individual used to attend one of the schools and claimed they were “being bullied and humiliated by teachers at the school . . . and being made to feel like a second-class citizen for being Chinese”.
It’s important to acknowledge that not all ethnic and migrant learners do well in the system. This is a myth.
So what’s going on?
Over the years, I’ve received a great deal of professional development on cultural responsiveness and cultural capability through the various roles I’ve held in education. This training has been valuable. Cultural knowledge and strong relationships with your learners are important. As teachers, we need to understand our learners, respect their identities, and create learning environments where learners feel recognised.
But these approaches fall short when they also treat inequity as fundamentally a problem of individual attitudes or interpersonal relationships. They may encourage teachers to be more culturally aware while leaving untouched the systems that determine who is believed, who is disciplined, whose knowledge is valued, and who is judged to be capable.
This is where cultural competence, without a structural analysis, becomes a central limitation.
Reflecting again on my own professional learning experiences, I often found training reduced to a lesson about “relationships”. The focus often centred on learners’ supposed disengagement rather than on the institutional conditions that shape their experiences.
This shift in focus is significant, given that culturally responsive teaching has three dimensions — high expectations, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is about understanding power, history, and how institutions reproduce racial inequality. Yet this last dimension often disappears during implementation.
The issue is not that any of the policies and initiatives are worthless or that schools lack awareness, as Dr Mahdis Azarmandi, a senior lecturer at Canterbury University, recently reminded us at the Anti-Racist Futures in Education conference. Rather, schools have adopted the language of inclusion, belonging, and cultural capability without confronting the systemic structures that continue to produce unequal outcomes.
Parents who’ve been brave enough to raise complaints of racism with their child’s schools say that schools will often respond by pointing to their cultural celebrations, their cultural school council, the fact that their board chair is Māori, that they have professional development sessions on culture, and that they’re engaged in bicultural education (whatever that means).
They also point to the diversity of their students, their “brown” teaching staff, and how they honour Te Tiriti as evidence that there’s no racism at their school. But they don’t undertake any form of power redistribution in their school boards, leadership positions, or accountability processes.
Schools offer up every defence without ever naming race, whiteness, or institutional power.
This is an example of racial silencing. This doesn’t only mean avoiding the word “race”, but also refers to denying or minimising the meanings and effects of race.
The Aotearoa Education collective, led by a group of Pākehā educators and researchers, recently published a report outlining what a “vision of education in Aotearoa” ought to include. Their report emphasises belonging, wellbeing, identity, achievement, and the knowledge and capabilities young people need for life. There is no mention of race, racism, anti-racism, or the need to address it. This is not only a further example of racial silencing, but also of whiteness as a system in action.
So how can teachers and school leaders understand what racism is and what it does?
Te Whāriki is the national early childhood curriculum, a document where words such as “racism” and “anti-racism” are also completely absent. Early childhood teachers surveyed frequently defined racism as intolerance of other cultures or as individual discrimination based on appearance, beliefs or identity. While that definition isn’t entirely wrong, it’s incomplete.
It makes racism appear to be a matter of personal unkindness rather than a pattern embedded in policies, routines, and institutional decision-making.
The Teaching Council’s own research supports this. Teachers demonstrated some understanding of racism between individuals, but were less familiar with how it operated through systems and processes. In other words, the language of racism was present, but its structural meaning remained underdeveloped. Structural meaning is an understanding that a system can organise access to power, resources, credibility, safety and opportunity.
There is enough overwhelming evidence to demonstrate that our Māori, Pasifika, migrant and ethnic learners are not safe from racism within the New Zealand education system, with no foreseeable change.
What we need as a sector is not another training programme that schools can complete if they want to and then set aside. We need racial literacy.
Racial literacy is a tool for diagnosis, feedback and assessment. It helps people and institutions to recognise how race and racism shape decisions, policies, outcomes, structures and systems, and trace their effects.
For example, a school might examine why Māori or African diaspora learners are referred for learning support at different rates from Pākehā learners. This helps educators understand the impact of making those decisions and identify what needs to change. In assessment, this can help schools evaluate whether a policy, curriculum, or school practice reproduces or reduces racial inequity.
Racial literacy asks: How is race shaping this decision, this policy, or this outcome?
When applied to discipline, recruitment, promotion, curriculum content, student achievement, and complaints procedures, this question requires schools to examine who is excluded, who is trusted, whose testimony is questioned, and whether the same behaviour receives different interpretations depending on the student’s ethnicity.
This differs from cultural competence and unconscious bias training. Cultural competence asks teachers to know their learners better, and unconscious bias asks teachers to examine their own thinking.
In my experience, school principals have been key to decision-making that has brought about structural changes in their schools.
Our school leaders have a choice. They can continue performing conditional inclusion, the easy path that preserves power and protects white supremacy. Or they can take genuine steps towards structural transformation, the difficult path that redistributes power and bends towards racial justice.
Dr Ara Alam-Simmons is a teacher, facilitator, cultural producer, and researcher. Her work includes anti-racist education, South Asian diaspora and Māori solidarities, and community arts.
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