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This paper explores recent changes in tertiary education policy in New Zealand, which are designed to address legitimation deficits. By offering an analysis of the making, and the subsequent unmaking, of quasi-markets in tertiary education, this paper attempts to describe how the state dealt with legitimation deficits resulting from providers' of tertiary education use of the adult and community education funding category to increase their revenues. In providing this description, the paper helps to provide a way of understanding how the state in New Zealand has responded to legitimation deficits by introducing a new regime of governance. The paper concludes by arguing that, in terms of its treatment of category 5.1 funding, this regime is supportive of neo-conservative goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of the factors influencing the processes of becoming an adult student at secondary school. The focus is upon the manner in which biographical, contextual and interactional influences contribute towards this process and their intersection as the student is, at one and the same time, both integrated as a member of the overall school culture and differentiated as a member of the separate adult student subculture. Particular emphasis is placed upon notions of situational adjustment, negotiation, strategies, socialisatory episodes, power, multiple realities, and the individualistic nature of the process as the students 'adapt to' their situations in undergoing the 'status passage' of becoming an adult student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault's view of the body as a detailed text from which can be read a system of power is used to consider some aspects of contemporary teacher work. In particular, this paper considers the impact on primary school teachers of social anxiety about touching children. One effect has been an intensification of self-surveillance by teachers, and increased experience of child-touch and child-proximity as 'uncomfortable'. Paradoxically, teachers' need for visibility so they can be seen as innocent has the effect of constituting teachers as always and already guilty—as potential sexual abusers. This guilt is now enacted in the everyday common sense actions of 'safe' teachers. The argument is developed with reference to teacher union policy texts and interview data from teachers in a range of New Zealand primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we argue that neo-liberal governance regimes are deeply contradictory and that these contradictions are increasingly evident within the education sector. Drawing on a case study of the consequences of restructuring in education in New Zealand, arguably a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance, we suggest the state is faced with a dilemma about how best to manage these tensions and contradictions within the framework of the political rationality itself. One strategy is to isolate and localise these problems in order to contain and manage the risks associated with them. We identify five variants we argue can broadly be viewed as local states of emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the gender differences in achievements at a variety of levels in secondary schools in New Zealand. Gender differences are shown in relation to English, mathematics and science, but the pattern is not consistent across year levels in the senior school. The relative achievements of girls in single-sex and coeducational schools are explored in detail, with careful controls for the student population differences at the two types of school. When such controls are exercised, the apparent differences between the two types of school reduce to non-significance. Data from a longitudinal study of 37 schools and from the Ministry of Education national database are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between techniques of quantitative analysis and explanatory models of the association between social class and educational success in the context of empirical data from the New Zealand Progress at School project. The data discusses in this paper are from the Progress at School project which followed the educational careers of students who entered 37 New Zealand secondary schools in 1991. The research was designed as a school effects study, but few differences in student attainment that could be attributed to any property of the school attended were observed, and the data examined here with other interests in mind. The Progress at School project was structured by a family resource framework that might best be described as an explanatory sketch, or a set of connected hypotheses, for the purposes of directing the research and interpreting empirical data of both a quantitative and ethnographic kind. The specific techniques of path analysis, and of correlational analysis, more generally, should not be ignored by studies with access to quantitative data on social difference in educational attainment. At the same time, Boudon's argument that the mode of presentation of the data, what he calls the syntax of explanation, has a non-trivial significance in constructing causal accounts of social differences in education should be admitted as on with considerable force. This does not commit realists to the methodological individualism of Boudon's empiricism, or to accounts in terms of a model homo sociologicus acting within deterministic social structures, but neither are realists committed to the habitus-driven agent of an ultimately functionalist, and probably formally determinist, theory of social and educational reproduction.

With reference to ethnographic data, this paper indicates how working class Polynesian and middle class Pakeha (European) girls actively and rationally `produce' classroom practice in a New Zealand secondary school It is argued that empirical analyses of classrooms within a radical theoretical framework, such as the work of Jean Anyon, need to be informed by an understanding of student practice as structurally-located cultural production This is necessary in order to discuss actually how schooling contributes to social reproduction and how it might be engaged in social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores recent changes in tertiary education policy in New Zealand, which are designed to address legitimation deficits. By offering an analysis of the making, and the subsequent unmaking, of quasi-markets in tertiary education, this paper attempts to describe how the state dealt with legitimation deficits resulting from providers' of tertiary education use of the adult and community education funding category to increase their revenues. In providing this description, the paper helps to provide a way of understanding how the state in New Zealand has responded to legitimation deficits by introducing a new regime of governance. The paper concludes by arguing that, in terms of its treatment of category 5.1 funding, this regime is supportive of neo-conservative goals. (Contains 1 note.)

The notion of "the school" as a set of institutional processes and practices that shape the possibilities of educational research forms the focus of this article. It is argued that the discursive and material practices that render schools agencies of cultural reproduction also have effects for what research can be undertaken in them and how. With reference to a series of "episodes" that occurred during research about young people and sexuality in New Zealand, evidence for how schools shape research endeavours is provided. These examples present a complex picture of the way in which schools simultaneously police and are regulated by symbolic boundaries of gender and sexuality. How school disciplinary power works to effect what it is possible to claim about the voluntary nature of student research participation is also explored. It is argued that through the powerful discursive and material practices that occur in schools, these institutions can impede research that attempts to transgress dominant meanings about gender and sexuality.

Recent restructuring of research funding for New Zealand's higher education institutions is 'outputs-driven'. Under the Performance Based Research Fund, units of assessment of research quality are individuals, every degree teacher receiving a confidential score of A, B or C (if deemed 'research active') or 'R' ('Research Inactive'). Despite its relatively high number of A and B rated individuals, Education's collective ranking was low. I interviewed staff and draw on Bernstein to explore how this process affects professional identity formation, a process involving engagement with changing 'official' external identities. I overview Bernsteinian concepts, historicise Education's changing official identities and illustrate how these enabled and constrained participants' self-definitions before, during, and immediately after, the quality evaluation. The imposition of audit culture reproduces old theory/practice binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand’s rapid emergence as a late‐modern, neo‐liberal society following 1984 led to a transformation in the institutional infrastructure for youth transitions from school to post‐school worlds. Our research focuses on the ways that young people born after 1984 craft identities in transition. We investigate their perspectives on transition in their last year of school, and the processes by which they make choices about post‐school destinations. In particular, we examine the extent to which the transitions they negotiate are shaped by the institutional infrastructure for transition established by policy. Expecting some degree of mismatch between the complexities of participants’ lives and the linear transition process implicit in policy, we found instead a combination of traditional assumptions (that transition would be a straightforward, linear process) and late‐modern assumptions (about the construction of elective biographies through active choice). These combined to produce a particular perception of risk among participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of ‘the school’ as a set of institutional processes and practices that shape the possibilities of educational research forms the focus of this article. It is argued that the discursive and material practices that render schools agencies of cultural reproduction also have effects for what research can be undertaken in them and how. With reference to a series of ‘episodes’ that occurred during research about young people and sexuality in New Zealand, evidence for how schools shape research endeavours is provided. These examples present a complex picture of the way in which schools simultaneously police and are regulated by symbolic boundaries of gender and sexuality. How school disciplinary power works to effect what it is possible to claim about the voluntary nature of student research participation is also explored. It is argued that through the powerful discursive and material practices that occur in schools, these institutions can impede research that attempts to transgress dominant meanings about gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major developments within the sociology of education is the recovery of the role of human agency within what had previously been considered to be determining structures This article looks at one aspect of such agency, namely the meaning production engaged in by a group of largely working-class students within transition programmes in three secondary schools in New Zealand Their contestual industry in receiving, reinterpreting, re-creating and rejecting meanings provides valid spaces in which critical and conscientising education can occur It as argued, however, that this same activity hardly warrants the optimism evident in contemporary educational discourse relating progressive change at the micro-level of the school to changes in the larger social formation. Some of the factors which subvert the transformative potential of contestual and resistant activity are therefore explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite policy provision enabling sexuality education to address more than disease and pregnancy prevention, this focus continues to permeate many school programmes. This paper problematises the danger prevention emphasis in sexuality education, examines school's investment in it and asks how useful it is. The ways this kind of sexuality education may inhibit the reduction of "negative" sexual outcomes and fail to support young people's sexual well-being is explored. Suggesting sexuality education might be conceptualisxed without this danger prevention emphasis necessitates an exploration of what might replace it. Foucault's work around an ethics of pleasure is drawn on as one example of how the objectives of sexuality education might be re-envisaged.

Changes in participation and achievement patterns mark a turning point for girls in schooling and place female empowerment squarely in the public domain. Using data from a longitudinal study of girls, this paper looks at female empowerment by exploring the relationship between the production of female subjectivity and the processes operating in social spaces. Findings relating to aspirations for girls' future careers are placed within a context of decile school ratings, and from those findings insights are offered about how the rhetoric of "girl power" is lived and spoken into existence in relation to categories of social class. By examining how schooling, family and classed processes weave through hopes and dreams, the intent is to contribute towards a line of discussion about the shaping of female subjectivities. (Contains 1 note.)