This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the core disciplines, and contemporary concerns, that inform the study of education in Aotearoa. As a collection, the work provides a critical account of education policy trajectories and speculates on their limits and possibilities in the changing social and political landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand in the first half of the 21st century. The work has two aims. First, to serve as an introductory text for students in initial teacher education and other education programmes. Secondly, to be a resource for practitioners, policy makers, administrators and other stakeholders seeking to update their knowledge of the disciplines that comprise education studies, and their application in the current environment. It builds on the premise detailed in the Introduction: that all educational theory--in Aotearoa and beyond--must be understood and applied with due regard to personal, historical, and global context.

Providing an international perspective on education policy, and of the role and function of education in the global economy, this text covers the major topics of central significance in education and the sociology of education.

Transformation of Education Policy deals with internalization processes in education policy and their impact on national policy making. It investigates national responses to the PISA study for secondary education and the Bologna study for tertiary education.

In Australia and New Zealand, many public projects, programs and services perform well. But these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied. We cannot properly ‘see’—let alone recognise and explain—variations in government performance when media, political and academic discourses are saturated with accounts of their shortcomings and failures, but are next to silent on their achievements. Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand helps to turn that tide. It aims to reset the agenda for teaching, research and dialogue on public policy performance. This is done through a series of close-up, in-depth and carefully chosen case study accounts of the genesis and evolution of stand-out public policy achievements, across a range of sectors within Australia and New Zealand. Through these accounts, written by experts from both countries, we engage with the conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges that have plagued extant research seeking to evaluate, explain and design successful public policy. Studies of public policy successes are rare—not just in Australia and New Zealand, but the world over. This book is embedded in a broader project exploring policy successes globally; its companion volume, Great Policy Successes (edited by Paul ‘t Hart and Mallory Compton), is published by Oxford University Press (2019).

Originally published in 1974. Here is a detailed discussion of educational change in New Zealand with implications which should provoke a fresh approach both to the educational tradition in Britain and to the problems of other educational systems which are subject to democratic control. It is primarily concerned with developments in the quarter-century between 1945 and 1970. With frequent reference to events preceding and following this period, the author stresses throughout the professed educational ideal of all post-war New Zealand governments: to provide equality of opportunity in education. He deals with principles of policy and administrative control, including the universities and estimates the influence on official policy of interest groups inside and outside the educational system. He examines social issues which include the extent to which governments have failed to promote equality of opportunity in the schooling of minority groups in the country, and treats, in an historical perspective, the perennial vexed question of state aid to private schools. The concluding chapters describe and analyse the characteristics, difficulties and prospects of primary, secondary and tertiary education.