In the last 15 years, New Zealand has experienced a range of educational "reforms'' driven by a neo-liberal agenda which has insisted that the education system serve the goal of enhancing the nation's economic performance and its competitive edge through the inculcation in learners of the skills requisite to the pursuit of this goal. Fuelled by a perception that the education system needed quality management and greater accountability to its clientele, a series of administrative reforms were put in place in the late 1980s and were followed by a series of radical, state-dictated curriculum and assessment reforms. The subsequent reshaping of curriculum and assessment has had a profound impact on the nature of teachers' work and their identity as professionals. Using research undertaken in New Zealand in the later 1990s, this article examines ways in which 1990s reforms in New Zealand have worked to reconstruct the professional knowledge (including pedagogical knowledge) of secondary English teachers. It further examines the implications of these changes in teachers' work for professional identity and discusses some of the implications of these ''reforms'' for pre-service teacher education.