Internationally recent research has indicated that curriculum physical education (PE) has become at least to some extent 'an open market', in which teachers are no longer necessarily the sole or main providers of curriculum and co-curricular PE and/or sport. This paper centres on research that provides new insight into the contemporary policy, curriculum and pedagogical landscape of Health and Physical Education (HPE) in Aotearoa New Zealand, by exploring the number and diversity of government and non-governmental external agencies and organisations offering HPE related resources and services to schools. Data collection utilised publically available information sourced via the internet to examine the public and privately funded initiatives, programmes and resources targeted towards the provision of HPE across all phases of education. The data presented raises fundamental questions about policy and pedagogical influence in curriculum and co-curricular contexts, and more specifically, points towards established policy actors and agencies (Ball, 2010) as marginally positioned in national, local and institutional policy arenas. The study revealed an abundance of providers delivering a wide range of 'pseudo' HPE programmes in school settings, and prompts questions about the respective roles and relative authority of national government, so called 'external providers', teachers, teacher educators, and professional associations in shaping contemporary HPE curriculum and pedagogy. Attention is directed towards the extent to which new policy actors now appear to be prominant/dominant in HPE curriculum and pedagogy in Aotearoa New Zealand; the network relations and communities that are associated with that policy position; and the prospective impact in relation to the discourses that are being legitimised in/as HPE.
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