This article dissects the performance and approaches taken by the recently created large public sector entity, the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology (NZIST), which prophesied an efficient and effective vocational education sector in New Zealand. Information about NZIST’s performance, since its inception, has been limited to ‘leaks’ through the news media, Official Information Act requests, redacted government documents, or its annual reports. Utilising the available sources as ‘data corpus’, this study employs the critical lenses of legitimacy, and stakeholder theories, and established management concepts to compare NZIST’s performance between 2020 and 2023 with its aspired objectives. In pursuit towards the objectives of efficiency and effectiveness through a network structure, the findings reveal that the suitability of the network structure posed a challenge as NZIST purged the existing social connectedness in the sector; while its financial performance is worse, social outcomes are not necessarily different from the pre-reform figures. Despite the significant influx of government funding and redundancies, savings evaporated due to the expansion in the upper echelons and their remuneration, challenging the legitimacy of practices when the organisation was bleeding.

Keywords: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Polytechnic, Te Pukenga, NZIST