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In recent years, literacy achievement among school-aged students has received growing attention in Aotearoa New Zealand. Particular focus has been paid to reports of declining literacy levels over the past decade. In both the academic literature and popular press, a myriad of reasons have been proffered for this decline; however, the evidence base on which some of these claims are based is not as robust as often is implied. Given the number of literacy-focused policy initiatives currently being developed in Aotearoa New Zealand and the critical importance of young people developing strong literacy skills, this paper explores what evidence exists to support (or challenge) some of the claims most commonly made about literacy achievement in New Zealand. It also offers two further claims that are not frequently mentioned in research or policy discussion of literacy but none-the-less have a strong evidence base behind them to suggest they are impacting current literacy levels in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This article seeks to explain how Aotearoa New Zealand moved from a consensus that the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) should grant a high degree of autonomy to teachers, to an emerging view that it ought to be more prescriptive about content. To do this, it takes an assemblage approach to policy analysis, understanding policies as constantly evolving 'bundles' of divergent components temporarily woven together. The article first explores the complex intermingling of Third Way priorities, knowledge economy discourses, educational progressivism and narratives of 'harmonious' biculturalism which constitute the 2007 NZC. It then explores the sustained critique of the NZC from the 2015 parliamentary petition calling for compulsory teaching of the New Zealand Wars, up to the government's 2021 'curriculum refresh' announcement. It is argued that this 'refresh' moves to reassemble the NZC so that it accommodates a series of demands made of it in recent years, including demands the curriculum take a more active role in redressing the impact of colonisation, and demands from both business-aligned groups and academics that the curriculum become more 'knowledge-led'.

The 'Learning Compass 2030' was released by the OECD in 2019 as their new policy framework for the compulsory schooling sector. This framework takes the bold step of asserting that access to disciplinary knowledge is central to schooling, putting it in stark contrast to previous OECD reports which have advocated instead for more generic skills and competencies. Drawing on Basil Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device, this paper critiques the way the "Learning Compass 2030" imagines disciplinary knowledge. It argues that while its inclusion offers an exciting possibility, the way that the "Learning Compass 2030" continues to be governed by the instrumentalist logic of knowledge economy discourses prevalent in previous OECD documents means that disciplinary knowledge is constructed in a limited way. Instead of a tool which opens up new perspectives to students, the "Learning Compass 2030" positions disciplinary knowledge almost exclusively as something which has an immediate and practical value in a marketised world. In taking this step, the "Learning Compass" denies the critical, transformative powers of disciplinary knowledge, thereby undercutting students' access to frameworks which will allow them to reimagine and ultimately better our society.

The last 30 years have witnessed a global 'curricular turn', with curricula increasingly moving from specifying particular content to specifying broad, skill-based 'learning objectives'. This paper explores the implications of this curricular turn through a critical assessment of the current state of secondary school English in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is achieved through a critical discourse analysis of key curricular and assessment documents and a series of semi-structured interviews with English teachers. Biesta's concept of 'learnification', which captures how contemporary schooling can focus on learning in a way which can obscure important questions of what students are learning and why, is used as a lens through which to analyse this data. The paper argues that secondary school English in New Zealand is highly 'learnified', that is, both official documents and teachers are concerned above all else with ensuring 'learning' is happening and 'learning objectives' are being met, rather than with bigger questions of purpose. This problematically decreases the opportunity for what Biesta calls a 'pedagogy of interruption': the opportunity for curricular encounters to challenge and extend students' horizons.

In this article we analyse the constructed 'free speech crisis' associated with higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK). We examine the media discourses from 2012 to 2022 which led to the establishment of a sense of crisis around speech in universities and, ultimately, to the Freedom of Speech Act in May 2023. We undertake a critical discourse analysis focused on the constructions of universities and university students in two major right‐wing broadsheet newspapers, The Times and The Telegraph, and in the right‐wing magazine The Spectator. We conceptualise the 'free speech crisis' as a discursive formation which is part of broader political efforts of conservative elites to maintain hegemony in Britain. Drawing on populism theory and race critical analyses, we argue that the 'free speech crisis' is an expression of racial liberalism and a placeholder for a deeper white anxiety over the social reproduction of elites in university spaces, and thus over (cultural) hegemony in the public sphere. We understand the desire to regulate 'free' speech in HE as an effort to prevent the emergence of an elite and (counter)hegemony different to the status quo. We make contributions to two emergent and interrelating bodies of literature: firstly, the study of populism in (post)Brexit Britain, and secondly, the study of culture wars, including iterations of the 'free speech crisis' and 'the war on woke'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention has been given in recent years to how the OECD promotes a neoliberal, marketised vision of education. There has been less focus, however, on how the OECD also offers a neocolonial vision of education, which promotes the epistemologies of the Global North at the expense of those of the Global South. This article contributes to this latter kind of critique through a decolonial analysis of the OECD's new policy framework for the compulsory schooling sector – the Learning Compass 2030. Drawing on the work of the Latin American Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad and that of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it argues the Learning Compass's drive to 'modernise' education worldwide unavoidably exists alongside a colonising impulse which denies the viability of non-western epistemological positions. This will be shown through an analysis of those parts of the Learning Compass which are focused on what knowledge students should acquire in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the mainstreaming of the idea that there is a ‘free speech crisis’ in the United Kingdom, from its emergence in the 2010s to the Free Speech Act of 2023. We argue that ‘free speech’ is initially constructed during this period in opposition to an imagined ‘uncivilised’, ‘external’ Muslim other. However, by the end of the 2010s, the threat to ‘free speech’ is imagined as much more widespread, and as coming from ‘inside the West’, where a new enemy is identified alongside the ‘uncivilised Muslim’: the ‘woke’, censorious ‘snowflake’. This new enemy of free speech is cast in populist terms: as part of an illegitimate elite or proto-elite. This discursive shift occurs, on our account, because the rhetoric of a ‘free speech crisis’ paradoxically becomes an increasingly powerful way for right-wing political actors to deny political legitimacy to those opposed to their political positions. By locating those opposed to them as against the incontrovertible Western Enlightenment good of ‘free speech’ itself, these right-wing actors racialise the speech of others as ‘uncivilised’ and therefore outside of politics in a way that silences critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]