This article explores the nature, scope and form of third-sector involvement in education in New Zealand as demonstrated through a comparison of its relationship with the state in two distinct periods of state and educational development. It begins with an analysis of the period of state expansion from crown colony to centralised administration in the mid-1870s. It then examines the relationship in the decade following the restructuring of education in 1989, as the neoliberal state negotiated economic changes at the national and supranational levels, and challenges to the existing educational organisation from both the political left and the political right. Although an almost mirror image of nineteenth-century arrangements is identified, the nature of the state/third-sector relationship was vastly different as a smaller, but nonetheless stronger, state retained control over the governance of education and, with it, possibilities and limitations for third-sector involvement.