The New Zealand schooling system is well-known for its progressive and innovative approach to education (Couch, 2012; Mutch, 2013; Wells, 2016). Their national curriculum is inclusive and flexible, allowing schools and teachers to select the content they deem necessary to meet the competencies in the designated learning areas (Ministry of…

Early years are a critical period for skill development. In this sense, the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programmes have an important role in promoting children's learning during this period. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of ECEC programmes by analysing the relationship between students' ECEC attendance and their later…

New Zealand legislation removing school zones radically reshaped school choice, resulting in increased school stratification from parental choice frequently driven by social factors such as ethnic makeup of the school community. This article considers school choice through the eyes of 1,465 adolescents from 12 secondary schools in Dunedin (New…

This article presents the empirical analysis of the effects of a school choice policy in Estonia. The article shows that relying on markets and giving autonomy to the schools over student selection will produce admission tests, even at the elementary school level. This article's contribution is to show that a school choice policy experiment with…

"The Wiley Handbook of Home Education" is a comprehensive collection of the latest scholarship in all aspects of home education in the United States and abroad. This book presents the latest findings on academic achievement of home-schooled children, issues of socialization, and legal argumentation about home-schooling and government…

This report contains the main findings from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research's (NZCER's) 2012 national survey of secondary schools. The survey draws on responses from more than half the country's secondary school principals and from hundreds of teachers, parents and members of boards of trustees, and was carried out in July and…

Parents' views on the goals of early childhood programs and on characteristics of a high quality center were examined in a study that also investigated parents' understandings of quality in three different types of early childhood services. The study was part of a major project on the quality of early childhood centers, which was funded by the New…

After six decades of supposed equal resource sharing among all cultural groups, in 1982 the first Maori-initiated and operated child care center opened in New Zealand. Called a "Kohanga Reo" ("language nest"), it inaugurated a new movement, and by 1990 there were 612 such centers. This paper first describes the characteristics…

This telephone survey examined the early childhood education (ECE) experiences, home experiences, and home resources of near-5-year-olds in New Zealand, as identified by their parents. Participating were 767 New Zealand families in Wellington and Porirua, a sample selected to be comparable to those selected in other longitudinal studies. The main…