While the terms student-centred and learner-centred are used to describe a range of neo-liberal educational policies and practices around the world, the meaning is not clearly defined. This limits its utility as a concept in policy, research and practice. This article applies abductive reasoning to explore how student-centred education is theorised in academic literature and articulated within a sample of New Zealand school principals’ visions for their schools. The findings suggest that student-centred education can be synthesised into a conceptual framework that includes three overlapping dimensions; humanist, agentic and cognitive. The humanist dimension encompasses getting to know students as unique human beings, the agentic focuses on empowering students and the cognitive dimension considers each student’s learning progress. There was diverse understanding of what it meant to be student-centred by the principals with the humanist and agentic dimensions dominating. It is anticipated that educational outcomes for disadvantaged students would improve when the three dimensions are applied together. The proposed framework could be applied by policymakers, practitioners and researchers to enhance clarity of student-centred education policies and practices.
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