Over the last 12-18 months, I have been having ongoing conversations with the Maori stakeholder manager in my organisation over how we might collaborate to set up a deliberate tuakana-teina framework for the structure of our internal staff training and within apprentice training environments. As the learning and development manager I have influence and indeed a mandate to make recommendations to nudge our current service-delivery and support mechanism in this direction.  This aligns with my beliefs about the role of education in supporting the sustainability of Maori culture.

For reasons mentioned within the blogs it will not be difficult to get the organisation to agree it’s a great idea. The issue will be generating resources (including time) and this will be left to a small pool of people who will do a lot of really great work, but on top of other existing workloads.

This will need to be taken over the line with full-buy in of every regional manager to ensure that their teams have the time to fully understand what this will look like and how it fits our purpose and that it will better support the learning of all apprentices as well as Maori.

Otherwise, the risk is it will just be another one of those things that the field team is currently experiencing as an onslaught of change. At worst, resistance will also come from those who do not have an accurate understanding of NZ history and it will be seen as tokenistic. So it has to be introduced in the right ways, and by the right people (not necessarily me)

I’ve written this post to anchor this idea for myself. Thus far our conversations have not led to the creation of a distinct proposal to revise our service delivery model but that may just be around the corner in the new year. If I had time I was going to unpack this more in this blog to give more details of how I think this could be done so I could take this into conversations in 2021 with the 2 other managers in the organisation who also want to give this legs. (Both of course are Maori).