Local Innovation or Government Initiative? Curriculum Specialisation in New Zealand’s Education Quasi– Market

2 INTRODUCTION This paper investigates and compares approaches to the phenomenon of specialisation within secondary education in New Zealand and England. Both countries have witnessed a movement since the 1980s towards a market-based system of education; in both cases there has developed increased curriculum-based specialisation among secondary schools, although this (as we shall demonstrate) has been quite different in form and especially in scope. New Zealand and England exhibit within their education systems many similarities and yet provide contrasting patterns of specialisation. Although New Zealand has become economically more dependent on Asia than on Britain (as in the colonial and more recent post-colonial past), there is some evidence that in the field of education, New Zealand continues to be influenced by British education policy. For instance, the wholesale adoption of unit standards during the mid 1990s was clearly modelled on the the changes, was modelled directly from the policies of Thatcher's England (Smyth, 1993). It is therefore interesting to examine the extent to which the different education systems, the level of government encouragement and support and the differences in underlying philosophy have affected the form and development of approaches to specialisation in the two countries. Curriculum specialisation, largely driven by the existence of government funding, is well established in England, and is becoming increasing thoroughly documented. Such developments will be examined in a later section of the paper. In New Zealand, specialisation is considerably less commonplace, often possesses a local or 'homespun' character, and is not generally supported and encouraged by government initiatives. Our research project, Curriculum Specialisation in New Zealand (CSNZ), was set up to investigate the scale, scope and nature of such developments, and in 3 particular to examine the imperatives that have driven the establishment of specialist programmes in individual schools. CSNZ is comprised of case study research carried out in a small number of New Zealand schools which have gone at least some way towards establishing specialist programmes in a variety of subject areas. While this sample could be viewed as the tip of the iceberg, as many schools within New Zealand are undertaking similar initiatives to those described, it should be noted that the research undertaken represents a snapshot of some of the more notable examples of this sort of curriculum development. Furthermore, while many schools have diversified in terms of curricular provision, specialisation is only found in a minority of New Zealand schools; it …