Ako Aotearoa Final Report
2025 summary and organisational legacy
In 2025, Ako Aotearoa – hosted by Massey University – reached a significant turning point in its history. While the year was marked by the cessation of its long-term government funding, the organisation remained highly active in strategic consultation, research outputs, and sector advocacy until its disestablishment on December 31, 2025.
Following the announcement in May, work focused on concluding its TEC-funded role as the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence while continuing to seed system-level change through research, innovation, and knowledge-sharing across Aotearoa’s tertiary sector.
While limited in 2025, the organisation’s outputs and projects cluster around:
- celebrating teaching excellence
- research and innovation funding
- new equity- and AI-focused projects
- sector capability-building for Māori and Pacific success
- the ongoing curation of its legacy knowledge base.
In this report, the key activities, strategic initiatives, outputs and deliverables are outlined. This is followed by a deeper discussion of major 2025 impact projects with a retrospective on the legacy activities Ako Aotearoa has engaged in throughout its history.
This report ends with a set of consolidated recommendations for the sector.
Supporting Documents
This report outlines the key Ako Aotearoa activities, strategic initiatives, outputs and deliverables from 2025. This is followed by a deeper discussion of major 2025 impact projects with a retrospective on the legacy activities Ako Aotearoa has engaged in throughout its history.
(PDF, 26 MB)
- 26 March 2026
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