Te Tiriti is the Foundation, Not the Add-On
By Cheryl Mitchell – Teacher; EdD (Waikato University)
The Government has announced that school boards will no longer be required to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The argument is that the Crown will hold the obligation centrally while schools pursue equitable outcomes. But Te Tiriti has never been about where the duty sits administratively; it is about where it is lived.
In schools, Te Tiriti is lived in relationships: who feels recognised, who feels safe to speak, and whose knowledge is allowed to lead. When schools uphold Te Tiriti, the work begins with whakawhanaungatanga, reciprocity, mana-enhancing relationships, and the understanding that learning is collective as well as individual. These are not extras; they are the conditions under which learning travels.
From my recently completed EdD study of a Year 11 interdisciplinary STEM programme centred on Māori wāhine, I saw Te Tiriti in action, with co-construction, shared purpose, and relational accountability shaping the day to day. Students described their most meaningful gains as making friends and bonding better in the class, and they consistently framed success as belonging, recognition, peer connection, and identity affirmation. Qualifications still mattered, but they mattered because relationships sustained engagement long enough for learning to travel. Consequently, class indicators such as attendance, retention, and achievement relative to earlier baselines, trended upward.
Alongside those gains, the EdD narratives were clear about what still constrains learning for Māori wāhine. Participants discussed how experiencing racism and stereotyping, and the emotional and cognitive work of carrying identity in unsupportive environments, constrained participation and progress. Subject silos limit who is recognised as a legitimate science learner, and assessment checkpoints can turn misrecognition into risk. Where Te Tiriti-aligned practice held, whānau-formatted relationships and teacher recognition buffered those pressures, belonging kept students in the learning long enough for progress to show. Remove the expectation to honour Te Tiriti and those buffers thin. Local knowledge is sidelined, students self-edit to stay safe, and participation contracts. The harms are not new, only less contestable when the relational commitments that legitimise Māori ways of being are no longer expected as part of the work.
This is what Te Tiriti looks like in pedagogy. Students are not required to leave parts of themselves at the door; learning does not require assimilation as the price of success. That is why removing the Te Tiriti requirement for school governance is not symbolic but structural. When Te Tiriti is not actively upheld, schools do not default to neutrality; they default to the dominant culture, with belonging and identity affirmation treated as incidental. The result is a narrowing of who gets to succeed.
The question is not whether a clause sits with boards or the Crown. It is whether schools are structurally expected and supported to honour Te Tiriti in daily practice. If we want equitable outcomes in Aotearoa, the answer is not more testing or a narrower curriculum. It is to protect the conditions that make learning possible, protect the relationships that hold students in community, and honour Te Tiriti where learning happens, in classrooms with young people, in real time.
Te Tiriti is not an addition to schooling. Remove the obligation to uphold it and we do not create neutrality; we create absence. And absence has always been filled by inequity.