Focusing on a faultline: gender and education policy development in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1975 to 1995

Abstract

This thesis explores the production of government policy related to the education of girls and women in Aotearoa-New Zealand during the years 1975-1995. It describes, analyses and theorises the policy process in which gender and education policy evolved in the Department of Education from 1975 to 1989, and the Ministry of Education from 1989-1995. A political model of policy, based on an analysis of discourse, is employed to identify significant sites of struggle in educational debate and their implications for educational policy for girls and women. Policy production is compared to living on a volcanic faultline. The process of producing policy is a dynamic one, consisting of struggles between contenders of competing objectives for decisions which are then enacted as policy. Occasionally, as in the education reforms of 1989, a massive earthquake appears and disrupts the routine expectations and assumptions that have been associated with the policy process. Policy results occur through a process of conflict and adjustment. The one constant is the knowing of perpetual uncertainty. Interviews were held with ten of the women involved in policy formation and analysis relating to gender reform over the twenty year period. The transcripts are used in conjunction with policy documents and relevant literature to produce a record of the perspectives of the participants alongside the official documents. Whereas the policy documents themselves stand as a record of the decisions that were arrived at, the women's words enable the dynamic nature of policy production to be revealed. The project reveals the complex ways in which institutions, meaning, power and gender come together. A range of contending forces challenge and contest the rules, roles and structures which determine the development of gender and education policy. As one of the research participants stated: in trying to work out how the system made explicit how it worked, we suddenly realised there were a whole lot of implicit understandings that people had and you had to unlock into that. This thesis then makes explicit some of the understandings evident in the policy formulation and development of gender reform in education.