by Rebecca Thomas My SMART data for my class of thirteen trauma-affected students tells me everything I need to know about this new (not new) NCEA replacement announcement. When you spend every day inside a real classroom with children whose lives do not fit inside assessment rubrics, phased expectations, attendance percentages, or national consistency measures, you start realising how little these systems actually understand about the future they are trying to control. The current government...

by ELV My Kids Taught Me This How do you make tamariki who don’t trust adults, learn to stay? When you split a trauma class that had bonded more deeply to each other than they ever had to the adults around them, the experiment begins. Monday Multiple roaming ākonga. In and out of rooms. Hands slapping together in loud “wassup” greetings every time a familiar face passed the window. Kids halfway through tasks suddenly pulled by the gravity of each other again. I spy the pack behaviour, that...

by ELV Supporting students is ‘wasteful spending’… until the country starts wondering why all its graduates left. Nicola Willis has now confirmed that 2026 will be the final year of the fees-free university scheme. Just like that. A scheme thousands of students planned their futures around is now being scrapped, after years of telling young people that relief would come at the end of their studies. And I genuinely cannot get over the hypocrisy of this Government anymore. We were lectured...