• Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

  • By: Newstalk ZB
  • Podcast

Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

By: Newstalk ZB
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  • Summary

  • Join Kerre Woodham one of New Zealand’s best loved personalities as she dishes up a bold, sharp and energetic show Monday to Friday 9am-12md on Newstalk ZB. News, opinion, analysis, lifestyle and entertainment – we’ve got your morning listening covered.
    2024 Newstalk ZB
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Episodes
  • Kerre Woodham: New Zealand's education system has been failing children for a long time

    Kerre Woodham: New Zealand's education system has been failing children for a long time
    Aug 5 2024
    Yes, the maths. You know, I know we've been talking about this, that we have been failing our children for decades now. This is not a previous Government issue, this is not of their making. This has been a long time coming. Where New Zealanders used to assume a world class education as their birth right, where anybody who was educated in New Zealand could stand amongst the brightest minds in the world, now we've had successive generations of children falling behind in every metric. The numbers have been there. But instead of using the international results that have consistently put us at the bottom or near the bottom of the class, the educators, the boffins who make decisions about what our kids learn and how they learn and what our teachers teach, have refused to accept that their ideology is flawed, that their experimentation with our children has failed. Instead, they phaff around and say that testing is outmoded and an old patriarchal colonial construct, and not the best way to assess a child's abilities and the like. Utter, utter nonsense. In 2021, the Ministry of Education commissioned a report on our math syllabus, in the face of two decades of slipping maths results, and that's by both international and national measures. So it asked a panel of independent experts convened by the Royal Society to look at the New Zealand Curriculum, which outlines what kids need to know and when, to see if it was fit for purpose. The conclusion? Massey University distinguished Professor of Maths Gaven Martin, who was chair of the panel that wrote the report told the New Zealand Herald our maths education was a 'goddamn mess'. Pretty unequivocal. The system was widening the gap between rich and poor children and left Māori and Pasifika children falling behind at school and ultimately falling behind in life. And you know it, and I know it. You'll have heard the calls from so many parents and grandparents who are paying through the nose to send children to private tuition companies, to either get their kids the education in maths that they're not getting at school, or to give them the extra stimulus because they're good at maths and want to be better, that overworked and underprepared teachers simply cannot give them. So Labour knew there was something wrong under Helen Clark, and National knew under John Key, and Labour knew under Jacinda Ardern, and now this coalition Government knows that there is something terribly wrong with how we're teaching our kids. Christopher Luxon has moved to introduce structural maths for students 0-8 a year earlier than intended, after new data showed just 22 percent of Year 8 students in New Zealand reached the benchmark for maths. That's the bare minimum. And only 22 percent of them reached that benchmark. He said it amounts to a crisis - and Minister for Education Erica Stanford told Mike Hosking she agrees. "We've compared ourselves to other countries who are doing a much better job than us, who have been actually climbing the ranks in the OECD, whereas we've been dropping for many, many years and I don't believe for a second that there are some people who just can't do math. That is completely untrue." "Everybody can do maths. It's just the confidence and having wonderful teachers and great curriculum and great resources. And we've seen other countries like Singapore and Australia and the UK surge ahead because they have those things right and we don't and we are going to get them right under this Government." "And I tell you what, I have been around the country for the last couple of years talking with principals of high schools and primary schools, and they all agree that we have a massive problem in maths. Nobody agrees with the Union apart from the Union, and I don't think we should be listening to them. High school principals tell me when I walk in the door, Erica, the first thing we have to do with our year nines or our third formers is teach them their timetables because they don't know them. Without fail, every high school I go in to. So there is a problem and the unions can have their heads in the sand but I'm going to move on despite that and implement our plan because it has to happen." It really, really does. We've talked about it for far too long. The leader of the Academy report back in 2021 said the real issues went beyond the curriculum to the heart of how New Zealand educates its students, which ranged from insufficient teacher knowledge to a system that labels kids too early in life and doesn't give them the same chance to succeed. It said there needs to be a real shake-up, but there's doubts that there is the political will. Currently teachers and schools have to pick and choose from a myriad of options for both professional development and curriculum resources, and that is true across many, many lessons, many subjects. So if you want to learn history, you make up your own lesson plan, basically, based on the resource material that's there, it's a lucky dip,...
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    8 mins
  • Gaven Martin: Massey University maths professor on the Government's new fast-tracked maths curriculum

    Gaven Martin: Massey University maths professor on the Government's new fast-tracked maths curriculum
    Aug 4 2024

    A maths expert says a new Government action plan is a good step.

    It's bringing forward a new curriculum to Term One next year, with twice yearly assessments - and a $20 million boost for teachers' professional development.

    Massey University maths professor Gaven Martin chaired an expert panel asked in 2021 to improve student maths results.

    He says the devil will be in the detail.

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    13 mins
  • Kerre Woodham: Transpower needs to take responsibility

    Kerre Woodham: Transpower needs to take responsibility
    Aug 2 2024
    Mistakes happen. We get that, we've all made them. Some are more serious than others. Some are fixable, some are not. But as old Mr. Martin said in the LV Martin and TV ads, it's the putting right that counts. There was no doubt, almost from the time the Transpower pylon tower hit the ground, that somebody within that crew had made a fundamental error. We had callers in, the morning of the tower collapse, who pretty much delivered the same findings that the official investigators produced days later. The tower fell because the crew that was performing routine base plant maintenance work didn't follow standard practice and they removed all of the nuts from three of the tower four legs, and it fell over. That human error caused the incident that cut power to tens of thousands of people and cost an estimated $60 million to householders and businesses. Northland's been hit pretty hard over the past few years with the Covid lockdowns, major closures and weather events, and then the pylon collapse. Some of the events have been acts of God, and you just have to accept that life is not always easy. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. You take a deep breath, and you carry on. But when a major company is responsible for a seismic interruption to business, when there was insufficient supervision of inexperienced workers who hadn't received any formal training for the work they were doing, who weren't certified for the tasks they completed unsupervised, that the inexperienced team member who removed the nuts from the foundation legs was not adequately supervised while performing the task... come on, this is not one of those things! This is not an oh well, we can't control the weather or well, it's a tricky little virus that needs to be controlled situation, this is a SNAFU. This is a FUBAR. And companies should take responsibility when they make fundamental errors or their contractors do. Ultimately, Transpower is responsible for delivering the part of the region. They shouldn't be trying to weasel their way out of their obligations. Transpower acting CEO John Clarke said compensation for businesses won't be happening: “Given the challenges and practicalities for utilities, of all the things that can happen to interrupt supply, there's not any way that we can compensate them.” It is simply not good enough. This is under oh well you know, one of those things. It's not one of those things, it's a major stuff up. North Chamber Chief Executive Darryn Fisher says Transpower needs to front up. “In a place like Kaitaia, where 600 people are reliant on one big business staying alive, the direct result of what has happened here with Transpower puts those things in jeopardy. And I'm calling for the board and that management team to put their big boy pants on, get on an airplane, get up here, and front up to these local communities and explain why their negligence is putting their livelihoods at risk.” “Transpower have got values on their website talking about how they're good social citizens, and how they're good community people, well what they're about to do through their negligence and avoiding all of this conversation is absolutely crush a workforce and small community towns like Kaitaia.” And Northland MP Grant McCallum says transfer needs to open up their chequebook for Northland. “People like myself, the leaders of Northland, sit down with Transpower and say, actually you owe the people of Northland. There's a lot of anger out there. You've heard it from the business community this morning. They're really frustrated. They feel that they have their owed something. And actually the wider community, which has been my pitch, is for the wider community to get a decent cheque from Transpower which we can use to benefit all of Northland, because everybody was affected, the power went out to the whole province.” It's just not good enough. I mean, come back to what John Clarke said, the Acting Chief Executive: “Given the challenges and practicalities for utilities, of all the things that can happen to interrupt supply”. Well sure, weather events. I totally understand that Transpower can't control those. There are things that can happen that are beyond your control, this is not one of them. This is contracting out to a crew who weren’t up to the task quite clearly. If it had happened to any one of these businesses that had been affected, if they'd made an error of that magnitude, that could be traced back to incompetence and inadequate supervision, you can bet your bippy that they would have to pay, that they would have to recompense their customers. This is a fundamental human error, it is not one of those things, and it is high time in this country that when we made mistakes, we owned to them, and we did our best to mitigate them. I'm sick and tired of people washing their hands of responsibility. Of going, you know what, you know it happens, we stuffed up and ...
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    7 mins
Political Science
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