by Cheryl Lacey, DGSJ, Cheryl Lacey, ©2026
(Mar. 30, 2026) — School education systems are at a tipping point.
In the UK, independent schools are closing at a rate of two per week. To survive, attracting international students has become big business. Yet many schools spend more on brokers and international travel to secure these students than they actually earn once the students are enrolled.
New Zealand, like many countries, faces a severe teacher shortage. Low pay, heavy workloads, and burnout have been widely cited as major factors, yet there is little sign of relief.
In the United States, a 2025 analysis suggests that more than 365,000 unqualified citizens across 48 states were employed as teachers to address similar staff shortages.1
Australia is under the same pressure. Some graduate teachers start on $78,000, a figure one state government cites as proof it values educators. But pay varies across the country, and professional recognition is measured less by skill or achievement than by adherence to the collective system.
Merit-based pay doesn’t exist, leaving individual performance largely invisible.
Could this be intentional?
Consecutive governments, touting free markets and democracy, seem to have structured the system in ways that devalue individual teachers, favouring collective models.
Workplace conditions negotiated with the support of unions frequently raise ‘overtime’ as a point of contention, yet teachers are salaried, they are not on an hourly wage. Their conditions already cover planning, marking, and other non-teaching responsibilities and factors in the nine-month work year and 12-week flexible leave arrangements negotiated decades ago.
One must also wonder, if non-qualified people can supervise or even teach students, how can the value of professional teachers ever be measured or negotiated?
With little competition and no reward for merit it seems more and more likely that education systems are built around collectivist principles.
Have consecutive governments in many countries been working in sync to shape education systems this way?
There is only one way to find out.
We must begin asking some fundamental questions:
What is education?
What is its purpose?
And what is its desired outcome?
Being curious and courageous enough to ask these questions will reveal a path forward to these foundational questions that must be answered.
What is the constitutional and legal framework of our country?
How do we ensure it is taught and applied with truth and integrity?
Only then can educators gain the recognition and respect they have long sought, while education is rightly understood as the responsibility of every citizen.
Read the rest here.