Manaaki Hub started with a dean, a spreadsheet, and a very long day.

I'm a dean at a New Zealand high school. In 2025, like most pastoral staff, I was drowning in data - Ministry updates, attendance records, KAMAR notes, academic reports - all spread across systems that never quite talked to each other. I'd spend hours each week, on my couch in the evenings, just trying to find the students who needed support, let alone actually support them.

Too often, I'd only catch a problem once it hit crisis point. A tauira who'd been slipping for weeks; a pattern that was obvious in hindsight, invisible in the moment. Every time, the same thought: why did no one tell me this earlier? Someone must have noticed something.

The truth was, someone probably did. Or could have. The information already existed. It was just buried, scattered, or sitting in a spreadsheet nobody had time to check, because everyone was in the same boat. Another student in crisis, another team asking “how did we miss that?"

I was also completing my Master of Secondary School Leadership at the time, learning about and researching effective school data use. I was sitting in rooms with incredible leaders from diverse kura all over Aotearoa, and in the lunch time kōrero - we all could have been from the same school. The exact same issues, tensions, struggles, at every kura represented in the room.

Between the study and the kōrero and the day job, the gap was impossible to ignore: schools had more data than ever. We’re mandated to collect it, report on it, and send it off to the Ministry or report annually to the Board. But, very little of it was reaching the boots on the ground who needed it, when they needed it.

This gap became Manaaki Hub.

I built Manaaki Hub for me. The idea was simple: bring the data together, flag what matters the moment it starts to matter, and get it in front of the right person before it becomes a crisis, not after. I didn't mean for it to get bigger than that.

Within a few weeks, I was more effective in pastoral care than I'd been in my last several years in the role. I could open Manaaki Hub at 7:30 in the morning and know instantly who needed my help that day.

I showed a colleague who'd asked about it. Within a few weeks, our whole pastoral team wanted in - I had to expand our first trial just three weeks in because I was fielding too many emails asking to join. We've grown from there, and are now trialling in six high schools.

Manaaki Hub has always been about one thing: helping our kids, so that no child falls through the cracks. It's built on a simple belief that teachers, deans, and senior leadership teams all want the best for every tauira in their care. No child should fall through the cracks when a whole team would dive in to help them, if only they knew.

Manaaki Hub is a gift from one tired, time-poor, perhaps slightly starry-eyed pastoral care team member to another. Someone who, after years in the trenches, still loves this job, still loves these students, has met very, very few teachers who given the resources, won’t help a struggling kid, and believes we can genuinely help, given the right tools.

This worked for me, my teachers, and most importantly, my students. I believe it can work for you and yours.