Strip away the bark. Expose the heartwood. Get to the heart of the matter: re/regulating teachers' labour in New Zealand

In this paper I examine the way the rise of the neoliberal state in New Zealand since the early 1980s, and neoliberal approaches of marketisation, contractualism and community governance in the education sector, have combined to create a new regulatory framework which shapes teachers' labour in schools. This has involved deregulating the contexts and conditions under which teachers have worked for much of this century while embedding a new set of regulatory codes. The paper begins with a brief sketch of the "New Zealand experiment" and its relationship to globalisation to identify more precisely what it is that has been "stripped away" and the "heartwood" to be "exposed." I argue that the new regulatory codes structure a very different kind of teacher-state-econotny-civil society relation while privileging a new set of teacher identities and practices. In addressing the question posed by this special issue - "Where to Now?" - I conclude by assessing the consequences of these developments for the future of teachers' work and for educational provision in New Zealand.