Some washing detergents no better than water
Consumer NZ is airing some dirty laundry on Thursday with a claim that three detergents are no better than water. Consumer NZ's head of testing James le Page spoke to Charlotte Cook.
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Celebrating one hundred years of Rural Women New Zealand
This story takes us back to 1925 in Wellington where, at tea-party for wives of delegates to a Farmers' Union meeting, sixteen women agreed on the need for their own organisation. The inaugural meeting of the Women's Division of the New Zealand Farmers' Union was held the following morning, 28 July 1925 - one hundred years ago today. While there's since been a name change to Rural Women New Zealand, the organisation continues to play a vital contribution to supporting and advocating for women and the farming communities. Sandra Mathews is the president of Rural Women New Zealand speaks to Jesse. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
3 hours ago
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More Pasifika households denied emergency housing
Manaaki Rangatahi marked World Homeless Day 2024 on October 10 with impactful art activations led and inspired by rangatahi. Photo: Manaaki Rangatahi A new report on homelessness in Aotearoa shows more Pasifika families were denied emergency housing due to ineligibility than were accepted in the month of March. Te Tūāpapa Kura Kāinga - Ministry of Housing and Urban Development - has published its latest insights report, dated June 2025 . The report said there were 60 Pacific peoples' households in emergency housing in March 2025, while 75 Pacific peoples' households were denied. Read more: "An emergency housing grant decline represents an application that has been processed and considered ineligible," the report said. "The number of declines should not be considered representative of unmet demand for services, as we do not know the level of need that does not progress to a processed application." It said where people are declined emergency housing assistance, the Ministry of Social Development may provide other options, such as a referral to transitional housing, or housing support products that provide financial assistance. When it comes to Housing First clients in Auckland, nearly half the households waiting had a primary client who is Māori, while over a quarter (26.7 percent) are Pasifika. Housing First supports people living without shelter, with high or complex needs, to access and maintain stable housing and address trauma and other challenges. The report said the ethnicity comparisons are based on the primary client rather than the overall household - for example, there could be a household of Pasifika, but if the primary applicant identifies as Māori, that will be recorded. For Māori - who make up more than half of emergency housing clients - the number of households with a Māori primary client granted emergency housing was approximately 380 granted to 260 declined. A household can also be granted emergency housing and declined emergency housing in the same month. Census data suggests there were at least 112,500 people in Aotearoa who were severely housing deprived on 7 March 2023, including 4965 people estimated to be living without shelter. "However, the data and observations we have collated from around the country indicate this has increased," the report said.
RNZ News
9 hours ago
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Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns
Educators say recent cohorts of teenagers entering secondary schools have had unusually numbers of students who badly need extra help with reading and writing. Photo: Unsplash/ Simeon Frank Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy. They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests . A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy and shared with RNZ showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them. Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write. Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey. Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid. "It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent. "Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another. The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding. "Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent. "Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another. "We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal. Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools. An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read. She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget . Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since. "They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said. The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter. "Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said. "Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said. "Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said. She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country. Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch. She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students. "We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said. Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need. She told RNZ English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it. Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary. But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal. "There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks. She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy. It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA. Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers. 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