Having consulted across both 2,300+ student metropolitan campuses to small regional schools with barely 100 students and less than ten teachers, one thing is clear: rural curriculum work isn't a scaled-down version of metro consulting. It’s an entirely different discipline. In a large school, reform is distributed across a whole team; in a small school, one person carries four roles. Any model that ignores that gap loads up the people with the least capacity to absorb it. What actually works? Starting with the school's values and culture instead of its gaps, building documentation collaboratively, and treating evidence as ongoing practice rather than an event.
"Thank you for understanding what it is like to work in a small school"
That's what a Primary Leader wrote to me at the end of an engagement supporting curriculum planning, documentation and VRQA preparation at a regional school.
"Thank you for understanding what it is like to work in a small school and helping us to get things in order. You really do know your stuff. I feel we are on a much better path — hopefully we can continue to build on what you have started."
The line that matters isn't the compliment. It's the first clause. Not thank you for the documentation or getting us through the review. Thank you for understanding the context, which should be the baseline of this work. It was clear that practical support, built the system for the reality of the school.
In a small school, the people leading curriculum are often also teaching and leading, managing multiple year levels, pastoral care, and responding to families and carrying a dozen other responsibilities. Some of these teachers are sharing a classroom to manage the leadership role, which from my own previous experience is another job in itself! Support needs to be useful within that reality, not another template to complete or a plan that sits on a shelf. It means working alongside teachers to identify what is already strong, prioritise the work that will make the greatest difference, and create clear, sustainable processes that your team can confidently carry forward.
The same brief, three completely different jobs
Across three regional primary and secondary schools, the brief has looked almost identical on paper: curriculum planning and mapping, documentation, evidence for regulatory review, and coaching for leaders and teachers. Yet it has never been the same job twice.
What changes is the context, and context is not simply background information to acknowledge before getting to the real work. It is the work. A school’s history, vision, culture, demographics, teacher experience levels, mind sets and staffing numbers, community and parent expectations, previous improvement efforts, the resources left behind but no longer used, who trusts whom, and what people are quietly (or sometimes not so quietly) exhausted by all matter. Get this wrong, and even the strongest curriculum framework will end up in a shared drive that nobody opens after Term 2. Or people leave, especially in a climate of teacher shortages.
Why capacity, not commitment, is the constraint
In a large metro school, curriculum reform has infrastructure behind it. A head of learning, curriculum leaders, learning area leaders. Someone is across the data, someone is across timetabling, an assistant principal whose portfolio is sometimes with or without the focus of a department like teaching and learning. The work distributes.
In a small regional school, one person does the work of four. They lead curriculum while carrying a teaching load. They prepare for a regulatory review while covering classes, because there is no CRT within ninety minutes. They're the wellbeing contact, the timetabler, and the person who knows where the spare keys live, or steps in to manage the fort when the Principal or front admin staff are absent.
The implication is obvious and routinely ignored: every hour you ask for is taken directly from something else that matters. There is no slack in the system and nothing to delegate down, because there is no down.
So, when a consultant arrives with a polished model, a twelve-week implementation timeline and templates designed for a school with ninety staff, they aren't just missing the mark. They're loading up the people with the least capacity to absorb it, and then, quietly, reading the result as a lack of commitment.
The model didn't fail because the school wasn't willing. It failed because it was built for a school that doesn't exist there.
Start with values, not gaps
The fastest way to open an engagement is a gap audit: here's the standard, here's your current state, here's the distance. Efficient, defensible, and in a small school, corrosive. The gaps in these schools are rarely a competence problem. They're a capacity problem, and the people in front of you can already list every one of them. Telling them is not a service.
A better first question: what does this school actually value, what's already working that should be protected rather than replaced, and does the current documentation reflect any of the vision it claims to serve? Then build backwards from there.
Teacher voice as a design principle, not a consultation step
In a small school, the people who work with documentation every day are also the ones who need to explain it, defend it, and keep it up to date. There is no layer between authorship and use. If they did not help build it, they will not own it. And if they do not own it, it will fade as soon as the consultant stops showing up.
That makes co-construction a structural necessity, not a courtesy. It may be slower at the outset and feel somewhat messy or unsteady along the way, but once a school moves through the liminal phase of change, the work becomes far more durable. This was also a key finding of my doctoral research.
Evidence as practice, not as an event
My academic research background is grounded in a sequential multi-methods approach. The qualitative dimension of education research is essential to understanding the people and culture of schools, the language we use to create cultures of learning and belonging, and what makes a school a good place to work. A VRQA review may set the deadline, but it is not the point. The most valuable shift in this engagement was not producing evidence, it was working through what evidence actually is. What it looks like in this particular school. What it tells you. How it is organised. How you think about it when you are standing in front of it.
Rather than asking, collect the following artefacts before the visit, ask: what would you show someone to demonstrate that what you say happens here genuinely happens here, and where does that evidence live?
Make evidence part of everyday practice. The most credible evidence is rarely created solely for an inspection; it is the natural record of thoughtful work over time. Encourage teams to identify the routines, conversations, decisions, outcomes and reflections that already leave a trace, then make those traces easy to find and understand. This might include meeting notes, learner work, feedback, photographs, data, case studies or staff reflections. By agreeing who is responsible for maintaining each source and how often it is reviewed, you can build an accurate, up-to-date picture of practice without turning evidence-gathering into a last-minute exercise. I use a range of short workshops to help teachers open up, share ideas and build trust quickly. These sessions also create space for leaders to listen actively to and observe their teachers; an opportunity they do not often have. Praxis matters.
Once that clicks, compliance stops being a cycle to survive and becomes a by-product of practice already underway. In a school where the alternative is one person assembling a folder over three weekends, that difference is far from academic.
The measure of the work is what survives after I leave
The documentation isn't the deliverable. It's the easy part. The real test is whether the system still runs, and still makes sense to the people using it, twelve months after the final invoice. That's why coaching runs alongside the documentation throughout, and why so much of the work is about how to think about this rather than what to produce.
The goal is to become unnecessary. Slowly, deliberately, from the first day. "I feel we are on a much better path" is the part of that message I'm proudest of. Not you fixed it. A path, something they're walking, and can keep walking.
The broader point
Work in small and regional schools is not a scaled-down version of the work in large schools. It demands contextual understanding, genuine relationships and earned trust, not as a warm-up before the consulting starts, but as the mechanism by which anything sustainable gets built.
A great deal of expertise in this sector never reaches these schools, because the delivery model assumes a school most regional schools aren't. That's a design problem, and it's fixable.
The most useful support leaves schools stronger and more confident to lead their own next steps. That means working alongside leaders, teachers and communities to develop practical capability, rather than importing a solution that disappears when the engagement ends. When advice is adaptable, paced to local realities and owned by the people doing the work, it can continue to create value long after external support has stepped away.
Author: Dr Ingrid H Lee. Making space for possibility in education. I write about curriculum, learning, governance, and leadership in education - examining accountability, systems, and what holds up when pressure hits. When I'm not thinking about systems, I'm usually hand-milling flour for sourdough, sketching and painting in the countryside, or being supervised by my two miniature poodles, Monty and Ivy.