It is a pleasure to guest-edit this special issue on ‘Nine Years of National-led Education Policy’. As the journal of the faculty where I have worked for much of my career, I am rather fond of the Waikato Journal of Education. One of my earliest papers was published in the very first issue. That article was on the politics of scapegoating schools and teachers for wider socio-economic problems (Thrupp, 1995). It has been a theme that my work has come back to repeatedly and is mentioned in this introduction as well.