By Pip Osborne, Kaiārahi

Many Technology teachers are reaching out, asking the same question:

“Do you have any resources?”

What struck me wasn’t the request itself, but the reason behind it. Many teachers aren’t looking for inspiration or new ideas. They are walking into classrooms where there are simply no programmes to inherit. No unit plans, no shared planning, no exemplars. Just an empty starting point.

I decided to test whether this was just a Technology issue or something wider. At a recent workshop I ran a short questionnaire asking educational leaders about curriculum sustainability when a sole subject teacher leaves.

The results were revealing………

• Over half of leaders reported only moderate or low confidence that programmes would remain intact if a sole subject teacher left.
•  76% were unsure whether their school even has systems in place to retain subject programmes when staff leave.
• Only 32% believed a new teacher could easily access a complete programme if they joined tomorrow, most indicated a new teacher would inherit a fractured programme or need to rebuild it themselves.
• Around 72% reported that teachers have issues with sharing teaching resources outside their school.

For Technology teachers, this isn’t surprising. Our subjects are often staffed by a single specialist. One person may hold the entire programme: the project contexts, assessments, workshop sequences, digital resources and exemplars. When that teacher leaves, the programme can effectively disappear overnight. Which leads to an uncomfortable but important realisation: if a programme disappears when a teacher leaves, it was never really a programme. It was a person.

This isn’t about blame. In the absence of clear systems, resources naturally become personal working files. Over time, programmes evolve inside individual folders or teaching platforms like Google Classroom or Teams. These tools are excellent for delivering learning to students, but they were never designed to hold the long-term knowledge structure of a subject.

In many schools, curriculum has unintentionally been built on the wrong layer of the system.

A more sustainable approach separates the programme itself from the tools used to deliver it. The programme, the structure of learning, projects and assessments, needs to sit somewhere stable and shared. Teaching resources can sit alongside it, while classroom platforms remain the place where learning is delivered.

When this happens, programmes become visible. They can be refined, improved and passed on. Ultimately, no teacher should walk into a classroom and have to rebuild an entire programme while trying to teach at the same time. A strong programme should be something teachers inherit, refine and strengthen over time. Teachers bring their own strengths to the classroom. But the curriculum itself should belong to the school and the profession around it, not to the individual who happened to teach it last year.