New Zealand is currently in the middle of what has been described a ‘curriculum war’ (Gomez, 2024). Such curriculum wars are not a new phenomenon (Kliebard, 2004). Nor will they disappear, especially in the context of growing societal polarisation (Sant, 2021).

However, New Zealand’s current curriculum war appears to be particularly highly charged, with diametrically opposed views being advanced by competing political parties and other powerful actors about the national curriculum’s purpose, its ideal form and the knowledge that it should contain. Between 2019 and 2023, a centre-left government began a reform of the curriculum focused on centring indigenous rights, local curriculum making, and concept-led learning (Hughson, 2022). Then, in 2024, a new centre-right government discarded the previous government’s reforms and has instead been constructing a new curriculum focused on disciplinary knowledge, explicit teaching and the removal of much indigenous content (Wood & Hughson, 2025). With a tightly contested general election set for 2026, these different approaches to curriculum remain at loggerheads with each other.

This paper uses the example of New Zealand to analyse the increasing ‘swings’ present in curricula in many jurisdictions (Biesta, 2021; Wood & Hughson, 2025), with a particular focus on the way political polarisation (see Lee & Tipoe, 2025) can reshape curriculum and the knowledge that it contains. Specifically, it addresses two intersecting research questions: “Why has New Zealand’s curriculum landscape become so polarised?” and “what impact has political polarisation had on the nature and form of curriculum content?”.

To answer these questions, it draws on a conceptual framework we have developed of five axes upon which curriculum can ‘swing’ on (Wood & Hughson, 2025). Here we will focus on two axes in particular: the ‘political’ axis of swings between more progressive and more conservative political projects, and the related ‘local-global’ axis of whether a curriculum orients itself more towards the local/the particular or the global/the universal. The political axis is conceptualised in particular in relation to an Althusserian notion of ideology, which understands political ideology as a normative view of the world that “interpellates individuals as subjects” (Althusser, 1971, p. 172) – i.e. it seeks to create certain kinds of individuals or (specifically when thinking about politics) citizens. The local/global axis is thought about in relation both to whether curricula are more concerned with local or global content (i.e. that in students’ immediate vicinity or that in the wider world), but also, drawing on Bernstein (2000), whether conceptualisations of knowledge position it as local and perspectival (Bernstein’s horizontal discourse), or as systematically organised and offering ‘universal truth’ (Bernstein’s vertical discourse) (cf. Smith, 2021).

The insights this paper offers will be highly relevant for both European and global audiences. Political polarisation is acknowledged as a pressing problem globally, with particularly significant manifestations in Europe (Reiljan, 2020). However, as of yet, we lack significant case studies of how this impacts curriculum, and also lack a conceptual toolbox to explore this emerging trend. In closely examining how New Zealand’s ‘curriculum consensus’ (see Hughson, 2022) has fallen apart due to political polarisation and how this has begun to reshape the form of curriculum and the knowledge it contains, this presentation both offers a deep analysis of one particular instance of this phenomenon, while also offering a framework for thinking about it that can be applied to other jurisdictions.

This paper relies on critical discourse analysis (CDA) combined with the use of Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPRB) approach and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). CDA offers a way of thinking about thinking about curriculum not as a technical document but rather as an instance of semiosis that both emerges from, and has the potential to further reshape, social relations – in particular social relations of power (Fairclough, 2013). The paper embraces Fairclough’s (2013) ‘strategic critique’, which “focuses on how semiosis figures within the strategies pursued by groups of social agents to change societies in particular directions” (p. 492-3). In this case, the focus is particularly on how political actors seek to use curricula to reshape their citizenry in line with their preferred ideological commitments and aspirations. To undertake this critical discourse analysis, we compiled both the core curriculum documents from 2007 (when the most recent completed national curriculum was released) through to January 2026, as well as related documents that help to unpack and explain the ideologies at play in the formation of these documents. These ‘auxiliary documents’ included: additional government statements regarding the purpose of the curriculum, ministerial speeches and press releases and major press interviews given by ministers and government officials. CDA does not require one particular approach to conducting analysis. To understand the ideological formation behind the curricula, we relied on the WPRB approach, which involved coming to each document and asking what the implicit nature of the problem that it sought to address was (Bacchi, 2009). This involved working through a selection of Bacchi’s questions to help unpack the nature of this problem, including: ‘what presuppositions or assumptions underpin this representation of the problem?’ and ‘what effects are produced by this representation of the problem?’ Seeking to understand the problem representation allowed us to understand the underlying ideological position governing the various iterations of the curriculum, as it surfaced the normative frame(s) of reference that governed their construction (cf. van Dijk, 1998). To understand the nature and form of the curriculum content and how ideology may have shaped it, we engaged in thematic analysis of the curriculum document(s). This was partially a deductive process using the Bernsteinian categories introduced above, and partially an inducive process looking at the ways the knowledge in the curriculum appeared to be shaped by the ideological formations governing the curricula.

From initial analysis, it appears that the primary origin of New Zealand’s political polarisation – at least as it plays out over curriculum – is a profound tension over the ‘true’ nature of the nation. In particular, from the mid-2010s onwards, this settler colonial state appears to have become increasingly divided about whether it should orient itself towards a decolonial, (re)indigenising project (advocated for by parties on the left) or reinforce its status as a ‘western’ Anglosphere jurisdiction in a globalised world. This political polarisation appears to have profoundly reshaped the curriculum. Analysis reveals a move from a broad range of purposes being held together in the 2007 national curriculum to a more singular focus in each of the recent reform efforts. In each of these latter reforms, the curriculum is directed to primarily advance the political project favoured by the governing political party and an associated coalition of aligned actors. This is turn has significant effects on selection and form of knowledge in the curriculum. As may be expected, subjects like history and English literature include significantly different content in these curricula. For example, history curricula produced under the left-wing Labour government focused almost exclusively on local content and on affirming indigenous perspectives. In contrast, the recent right-wing rewrite has moved the focus significantly to ‘global history’ and positions the local history that is covered as more downstream of global dynamics. These examples highlight the volatile and ideological nature of curricular reform and the challenges of retaining disciplinary coherence and integrity.

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