Sixty percent of rural and small schools without enough
With 10,000 places across school boards open for nominations - only 2000 people have so-far put their name forward, with the deadline looming this month. For rural and small schools, only 40 percent have enough nominations to form a board at this stage. Responsible for setting the strategic direction, overseeing the curriculum, finance, property, and health and safety, as well as employing the staff, a board is vital to the running of the school and the well-being of pupils. Andrew King is the principal of Oropi primary school near Tauranga and the president of the New Zealand Rural Schools Leadership Association - which represents 400 rural and small schools across Aotearoa. Kathryn also speaks with Meredith Kennett, president of NZ School Boards Association.
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1News
15 hours ago
- 1News
New Auckland footbridge changes colour with the wind
After more than a year without a pedestrian bridge, the Panmure Basin has a fresh new look and is open to the community. Locals gathered at dawn on July 19 to celebrate the opening of Te Kōpua o Hiku, a striking new walking and cycling connection that links both sides of the lagoon through art, culture, and consideration for the environment. The 60-metre bridge replaced the original Jubilee Bridge, which was closed in July 2023 after engineers deemed it unsafe. The long-awaited replacement will restore a vital route for walking and cycling around the basin and introduces interactive public art that is powered by the wind. Delivered under budget and ahead of schedule, Te Kōpua o Hiku reflected a collaboration between Ngāti Pāoa, the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board, Auckland Council engineers, and the Public Art team. The project integrated cultural storytelling, functional design, and data-responsive lighting to create a new landmark. 'It adds a little bit of heart to the community' ADVERTISEMENT Maria Meredith, chair of the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board, said the project was one of five across Auckland that the mayor praised. "The overall bridge... was one of five projects across the city that the Mayor of Auckland was really happy with," she said. "Why? Because it was delivered differently and it came under cost." The bridge was fabricated off-site, assembled in Pakuranga and then lifted into place with a 600-tonne crane in December 2024. Meredith said the successful outcome was due to collaboration across various council departments. "It wasn't just Auckland Council. There was Healthy Waters, Watercare, Vector, different people all working... to get the area ready for the installation of the new bridge." On opening day, the bridge quickly became a symbol of connection for the community. "I met two people that were in their 90s... one lady was 90, the other one was 90... they wanted to be the eldest person to cross the bridge. I met somebody who wanted to be first on his e-bike," she said. 'The new Panmure Basin Te Kōpua o Hiku bridge really adds a little bit of heart to the community.' ADVERTISEMENT At night, the bridge glows with moving colour, shaped by the natural elements. (Source: Local Democracy Reporting) A bridge built for wellbeing and everyday use Josephine Bartley, councillor of the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki ward, said the bridge supports community wellbeing and everyday travel needs. "The bridge plays a major part in people's well-being because so many people use it for exercise and they do the loop," she said. "So many people come, not just the locals, but people come from around Auckland to exercise around the basin." The bridge is an excellent example of how public art and infrastructure can work together, blending beauty with functionality. Bartley also highlighted the environmental benefits. "It's not just a beautiful bridge, but it's got functional purpose as well for people's daily lives. ADVERTISEMENT "That particular area... we have one of the only shag colonies left in the suburbs. So it's good that it's finally finished, no more disruption for the birds there." She said the bridge's design came together through strategic thinking that allowed for more funding. "In making the bridge a public art installation, we were able to use public art money to go towards the cost of the new bridge. So I think it's a very clever way to have public art in a community, but also for a functioning community." Where art meets ancestry Ngāti Pāoa named the bridge Te Kōpua o Hiku, referring to the deep pool beneath it, which has long been associated with the taniwha Moko-ika-hiku-waru. Meredith said the iwi has always referred to the area by this name. "That particular area for many centuries has always been known as Te Kōpua o Hiku, which is in reference to the taniwha... The name has never changed," she said. "It was kind of beautiful to attach that name to the bridge when it was completed." ADVERTISEMENT The bridge includes 30 tukutuku-like panels that respond to wind and light. Real-time weather data activates kinetic lighting from dusk until 10pm. "As the wind blows, it actually influences and changes the colours on the bridge," Meredith said. "It actively responds to the environment... During the day it's an awesome bridge to walk over, and by the evening... it changes colours." The design was created by artists Janine Williams (Ngāti Pāoa) and Shannon Novak (Tararā). Ngāti Pāoa also participated in the opening ceremony. "They helped to celebrate and mark the occasion when we had a dawn karakia," Meredith said. "They got to share a little bit of history about the area and the rationale behind the naming." A regional taonga for future generations Auckland Council invested $1.2 million over nine years into the public art component of the bridge as part of a wider commitment to integrate culture and creativity into infrastructure. The project represented the fourth major artwork by the Public Art team that used real-time environmental data, joining other installations like Te Ara i Whiti (Lightpath), Waimahara in Myers Park, and Te Hokinga Mahara in Warkworth. ADVERTISEMENT Around 430 native plants have been added to the site, and a new 380m² pathway invites further community connection. The bridge is designed to last 100 years, with the artwork maintained separately for a decade. Meredith said the structure now serves not only Panmure, but also visitors from across the region. "This particular asset... will serve the local area as well as the wider region and any international visitors." - LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
NZ Herald
16 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Invisible Intelligence: AUT lecturer challenges how we judge education success
He is now a professor at AUT and has received a spate of awards including the Prime Minister's Award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, the NZ Government Award for Sustained Tertiary Teaching Excellence and the inaugural AUT medal for his contribution to learning and research. In other words, Ings is now in the delicate situation of having reached the very pinnacle of a system he is deeply critical of. He qualified as a teacher in 1976 and went on to teach in both primary and secondary schools but 'fled' those environments where he was forced to test and score children by measures he didn't agree with and 'wriggled' his way into the corner of education where he no longer has to. Now, he supervises PhD candidates, who are given the greatest amount of time to develop their ideas and who receive feedback rather than grades. 'I taught woodwork in a class with 28 people. I know what that is, and I know that you can't really do a good job. You can do an adequate job. You can help people, but the logistics are not right. You just can't. You can't do it.' Welby Ings in his AUT office in Auckland. Photo / Alyse Wright He rejects the accoutrements of traditional education: standardised assessment regimes, grading, pre-packaged 'teacher-proof' curricula, streaming and milestoning. 'Don't think that the comparative grades that come back from school are an adequate description of your child,' he says. 'Don't fall into that trap. 'Be very careful about milestones because every one of us is unique, and the milestones are there to systematise something. They're not there to understand the complexity of the human being. They're there to set up a system. And if your child doesn't meet the walking deadline, the talking deadline, the spelling level, the maths computation ... They may not be flawed. They might just not be meeting that milestone. It's not the only milestone. It's not the only road.' Ings suggests that rather than trying to make children into an ideal as defined by the system, parents should instead try to understand their children's strengths and use those as building blocks. 'It's what we call an appreciative approach. It's not soft. It's a strength-based way of looking at education.' Know the limitations of the system He says his new book is not a manifesto ('I'm too flawed to be writing a manifesto') but he believes the goal of education is to 'enable the most luxuriant growth from the seed of a human being'. To teachers, he says, you should 'know the limitations of the system so well that you can work to the advantage of people who are in that system so you achieve as close as possible to the same thing'. Ings describes himself as a 'humanist' and learning as a 'human endeavour'. He believes effective teaching is to be found inside human relationships. He says learning is 'embodied and it's social, and it's emotional'. What it's not, he says, is 'cognitive mechanics'. 'It seems to me that the bottom line is that learning and the growth of learning is a human activity undertaken in close proximity between human beings.' He doesn't believe a grand redesigning of the education system will fix it, and neither does he believe in 'reformist visions'. Instead, he says, he believes we should be 'infecting the system with higher levels of humanity'. Why love matters In Invisible Intelligence, he writes of the importance of things that don't get mentioned much in discussions about education, such as love. 'Love matters. When you are struggling as a learner, this love often feels like belief… You cling to someone else's belief in you when your own faith is no longer strong enough.' Besides love, he believes time and work are the other critical elements in an effective education. Ings says now: 'Of those three things, school is only well equipped for the last one: work. It's hugely under-resourced for time and it's under-resourced – I know it sounds strange – for love. Because that requires you to know somebody, and when you've got 28 people in your class, it's very difficult, and that class is going to either change at the end of an hour or at the end of the year. It's not fair to ask somebody to have that level of insight.' As a self-described optimist, he believes all this is fixable and says the first thing that needs to happen is a change in the ratio of teachers to students. He also believes in using new and emerging systems to cut down on the administrative load so teachers have more time to be with students 'growing the garden' instead of 'counting how much fertiliser there is in the shed out the back'. 'I've taught your kids' But is all this really necessary? Is our system really so flawed? Plenty of New Zealanders have excelled at school, got good grades and gone on to successful careers. Is it wrong for these people to hope for the same for their children? To them, Ings says: 'I've taught your kids. They come in here with their golden trajectory glowing behind them and they're terrified. They've learned strategy. And when it comes to actually having independent thought, they're afraid to take risks, they're afraid to go into the unknown. They become disparaging as a defence, or dismissive, going: 'That's rubbish. I'm not interested in that'. 'They're deeply injured. They're some of the most difficult people to help heal. Because they have learned strategies to conform to an ideal of what intelligence is and it has disabled their ability to really think.' Ings rarely talks about the economic value of education, either for the person receiving the education, or for the country as a whole. In announcing the defunding of humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund earlier this year, Judith Collins, in her capacity as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology, said the changes were being made to help 'lift our economic growth' and said, 'We are focused on a system that supports growth, and a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.' Ings says New Zealand has a long history of electing business leaders to positions of power: 'Too often we trust the leadership of a nation to people who have shown expertise in business. But a nation is not a business. It's not a business. It's much more than that.' 'When people would start using that language like 'We fix it with growth' or that the solution will lie economically, you go. 'How's that going for you?' AUT lecturer Welby Ings' new book Invisible Intelligence outlines why the education system in New Zealand is failing too many students. Photo / Alyse Wright The point of Ings' book is not to suggest that what our children are taught in school is wrong, but that much of value is not taught at all, and that, as a result, the system is failing too many people. Intelligence is diverse, he says, and we need to be careful about labelling things as problems when they are just signs of difference. 'Talent that looks very different is vulnerable. It's vulnerable. And it's vulnerable to systems that say it's redundant talent.' He says that more than a third of the PhD candidates he supervises are managing physical or mental health issues. 'These are brilliant, brilliant people. And they have risen inside this antithetical system called the Academy. They've risen and they are uneven. It's part of their brilliance that they are uneven. An education for them is about knowing what you're good at so you can work out how to most productively use what you have, so you know where the gaps are that have to be filled in and you can fill them with the minimum that's needed to get them working.' Great sportspeople succeed, he says, not because they're excellent in every aspect of sport, but because they've used their strengths and filled in the gaps to achieve success in the area in which they're strongest. 'They take an appreciative approach. And it's interesting because we see it in very high-end performance stuff. We know it. Yet we don't necessarily do it in education.' Leaving something of value Ings is primarily known as a teacher and thinker but he is also a designer, a filmmaker, a writer and a creator. He says he wants to leave something of value in the world, and he is very specific about what he wants that to be: craft. He is involved with, and attracted to, craft across many fields: thought, design, literature, furniture, film, music. 'And one of the reasons is that craft often lasts and craft can transcend momentary flickers of fashion. It can go beyond those things. So I try to leave behind crafted things, knowing that they are all flawed. They're not ideals, but I'm proud of them. 'Everything I look at, I can still find the flaw in it. I can still go: 'I should have cut that scene, that beat.' I was reading something that I've written years and years ago and thinking, 'Oh shit! That's terrible! It's terrible!' And you go: 'No, no, it's not terrible. There are things that you'd change now…'' Ings is trying to articulate something valuable about the idea of value, but it's not immediately clear exactly what that is. He tells a story about a moment a few years ago, when he was at a film festival in Scandinavia that was screening one of his films. At the time, he thought he was about to lose his job at AUT. 'The cinema screen there goes just beyond your peripheral vision, so you see the whole film with all your vision, and the sound was brilliant and I sat there naked in a room full of people on the other side of the world, knowing that they could see my imagination with all this exquisite clarity, and I was terrified and proud at the same time.' This is of value, he says, 'Because it reminds us of what we can be'. What he doesn't need to add: like a great teacher. Invisible Intelligence by Welby Ings, published by Otago University Press, on sale July 24, RRP $45. Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Can a partner claim part of my house if we never lived together?
RNZ's money correspondent Susan Edmunds answers your questions. Photo: RNZ Send your questions to I recently separated and managed to buy the house and own it myself with a mortgage ... I have been seeing someone that I don't plan to live with. So my question is if you have a relationship with someone for a length of time that you don't live with or share bills with do I need to protect myself with a prenuptial agreement? When does the relationship need to have documentation of what I own and never want to share? People normally think of relationship property issues arising when a couple lives together but you can sometimes be captured even if you're living apart. Victoria University law professor Nicola Peart said this question came down to whether a relationship would qualify as 'de facto' . She pointed to the Property Relationships Act, which sets out a definition of a de facto relationship. But she said none of the criteria were essential to decide that someone was in such a relationships. The act says that the things taken into account include the nature of the relationship, the extent of common residence, whether you have a sexual relationship, the amount of financial interdependence between the parties, the ownership and use of property, the degree of mutual commitment to a shared life, the performance of household duties and the public aspects of the relationship, as well as the care of children. So it's possible you could tick off those factors while still maintaining separate homes. "Not living in the same house or not sharing finances does not exclude the possibility that a de facto relationship exists. If in doubt, contract out to preserve separate property ," Peart said. My partner of 11yrs received his inheritance last September. Just wondering if I'm entitled to any of it ... we split up just five weeks ago due to an argument. It sort of depends what he did with it when he received it. If it went into a joint bank account you both contribute to and pay bills from, or into a mortgage on your family home, for example, then it's likely to have become relationship property and you would be entitled to a share of it. But if he has kept it separate, you might not be. This would be a good thing to talk to a lawyer about as you work through your separation agreements. If property investors are making a loss, can't they still get something back on taxes? Through a rebate scheme? I thought I heard something about that. It used to be the case that property investors who made a loss on their rental investments could offset that against their other sources of income, such as the salary and wages they received from their job. That would reduce the tax they paid and sometimes meant they got a tax refund at the end of the year. That ended when "residential loss ring fencing" rules were introduced in 2019. "Broadly, these rules quarantine any losses from residential property so they can only be offset against profits from residential property, either carried forward to a future year or offset against other properties in a portfolio. There are some minor exceptions to these rules, for example for property which is or will be taxed on sale, and a property that is also a person's main home," said Robyn Walker, a tax partner at Deloitte. What you might have heard about recently is the reintroduction of interest deductibility. From 2021, investors' ability to include interest payments in their calculation of property profits was phased out. That's returned now, which will usually reduce their tax bills. Walker said another thing you might be thinking of is the Investment Boost policy. "This allows a 20 percent deduction for the cost of new assets which are used for business purposes on or after 22 May 2025. There are some restrictions on this as it does not apply to residential property or improvements to residential property. This restriction covers the building itself, it's possible that Investment Boost can apply to other assets which are included in a residential property but are not part of the property itself - separately identifiable chattels like a fridge. Again, any deductions available under the Investment Boost are also subject to the ring fencing rules." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
