• The disruption to school as we know it caused by COVID-19, and the government's efforts to contain it, provide an opportunity to explore new ways of thinking about school and how to improve our education system. This means making it more equitable and better able to support education success for Māori and Pasifika students. • Diverse voices provide valuable perspectives that are critical for understanding the complexity of the system. Hearing from parents of Māori and Pasifika students and other groups underserved by our current education system is particularly important. • There is the potential to build on the experiences of school-led learning at home to strengthen the partnerships between schools and the communities they serve.

This paper responds to the articles in the recent special edition of The Curriculum Journal (Volume 20, Number 3). The special edition discusses an ‘archaeological’ approach to student enquiry, with associated ideas of personalisation, competency development, and building learning power. We argue that the papers both raise and omit complex issues that need to be addressed if their transformative agenda is to be realized. For example, it is important to reconsider traditional assumptions about the nature of knowledge, so that teachers' practice and students' learning can become more appropriately aligned to twenty‐first century conditions of knowing and being. Similarly, the wider political contexts that frame practice need to be addressed, in part by rethinking connections between pedagogy, curriculum and assessment to provide a more satisfactory theoretical rationale for competencies and personalization, and by re‐theorising related ideas such as ‘equity’. We fear that lack of attention to such issues will simply mean the new pedagogies will continue to reproduce the status quo.

There is growing recognition of the importance of helping children to develop an ability to think about biological and environmental issues in terms of systems interactions and impacts. Several progressions have been published that suggest how their conceptual understandings may develop over time. However these are not necessarily as informative for teachers as for researchers or specialist resource developers, nor do they take account of 'moment in time' interactions between an individual's contextual and conceptual knowledge. This research aimed to develop examples to support assessment for learning by helping teachers recognise students' next learning steps in relation to interactions between the components of an ecosystem (both conceptual and contextual) with which the children had varying degrees of familiarity.

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