Trust: the missing link in educational change

Abstract Over the past quarter century, education systems worldwide have pursued sustained reform aimed at improving quality, equity, and responsiveness of education systems. Yet despite the scale and intensity of these efforts, progress has remained uneven and often fragile. This ‘think piece’ argues that a central limitation of contemporary education reform lies in its predominantly technical orientation, which has largely overlooked the relational conditions necessary for meaningful and durable change. Drawing on research, including contributions published in the Journal of Educational Change, the article positions relational trust as a precondition and mechanism of successful educational change. It examines how trust operates across system levels to enable professional agency, mediate policy enactment, and sustain improvement, while also exploring how inequality and governance structures shape its distribution. The article cautions against superficial invocations of trust in policy discourse and argues for a fundamental shift toward a relational paradigm of educational change. It concludes by suggesting that future educational change efforts must focus less on designing new interventions and more on cultivating the conditions under which trust can emerge and endure.