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This paper explores relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in New Zealand secondary schools. After conducting a nationwide survey of teachers and producing a report on the challenges reported by RSE teachers, we began to develop a paper exploring the perennial issues faced by RSE teachers as they enact curriculum policy. Given that these issues endure, we considered how else we could approach the paper: in particular, what different questions could we ask of our data; and what alternative analytics offer potential for thinking in new ways about the perennial issues, and move us beyond telling the same old story? Asking these questions led us to Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? (approach to policy analysis. Using data from our survey to focus our attention on key issues for teachers, we work with extracts from national government guidance for schools and teachers on RSE to apply this approach. Under five headings developed through the data analysis, we present five ‘provocations’ – or deliberately provocative proposals for the future of RSE in New Zealand. We hope the ideas in this paper may spark different ways of thinking about RSE policy and practice, with the ultimate aim of delivering meaningful and responsive RSE in secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most secondary (high) schools in a broad range of jurisdictions internationally engage in various forms of high stakes, standardized assessment and related qualifications. In this paper, we interrogate how educational achievement regimes – especially via the reporting of curriculum and assessment ‘data’ – continue to mobilize particular gender norms. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of haunting we explore how such regimes impose and reinscribe stable and binary gendered patterning and create what Barad has named ‘entangled relationalities of inheritance’ [https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206,] despite young people (and many schools) moving towards greater recognition of non-binary genders. Drawing on assessment data from Aotearoa New Zealand, we look at both generalized reporting of educational achievement data along the lines of ‘male’ and ‘female’ and on reporting of a single (historically gendered) curriculum subject – health education. We argue that such systems are ‘haunted’ by stable gender categorizations and hierarchies and we ask what this means for the reporting of educational assessment data and the erasure of identities that don’t align with the binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floating photovoltaic (FPV) systems have generated much interest in the literature, due to the potential synergies with existing hydropower reservoirs. This is of particular relevance to Aotearoa New Zealand, where the national grid's heavy reliance on hydro resources has left the country prone to energy shortages during dry years. This paper investigates the potential implications of a 1-gigawatt peak fleet of distributed FPV systems on seven hydro schemes around the country. The results show that an FPV fleet in Aotearoa New Zealand could provide additional electricity generation when the controlled hydropower storage is low. A larger, wider rollout would allow for the reservoirs to replenish after the country's unique winter peak in electricity demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]