From restaurants to rocket-builders — businesses of all sorts share a common problem: Finding enough skilled staff. Anthony Doesburg reports.

'You only live once - so do what you love." While hardly rocket science, the advice was just as important as anything else one of our most accomplished chemists.

A teacher who failed to report the behaviour of a student who developed an intense crush on him has been censured, but will continue to be able to teach.

Peter Calder writes: Waikowhai Primary School in Mt Roskill is one of 15 schools where the seven-week course called Kiwi Kids has been run over the past eight years.

An education-themed political meeting threatened to boil over as teachers took aim at Education Minister Hekia Parata and unloaded their long list of complaints about their schools, funding and heavy workload.

Auckland will get nine new schools after the Govt announced a $350m funding boost in an effort to get ahead of the city's surging population.

'Do you want to leave now?' asked the host of last night's Helensville debate of Prime Minister John Key - who came closest to being kicked out.

Her own boy has done okay - but over a 35-year teaching career Margaret McCaw has helped in the development of hundreds of other children.

For the first time, US public schools are projected this northern autumn to have more minority students than non-Hispanic whites.

Schools are being made to re-enrol students they had kicked out for bad behaviour including carrying weapons, physical assaults and drug use.

Alarming numbers of secondary students are "catastrophic spellers", a quarter getting nearly every word wrong in a test to gauge word skills, a new study has found.

There are advantages in having a chest infection. For instance, I can get a husky 30s jazz singer drawl, without smoking my way to an early death before I can pay off my student debt.

Students at an Auckland high school had a first-hand look at life in the trenches this week.

A group of primary school children have solved a problem that our biggest bank couldn't solve - finding a way to let disabled people into its downtown Auckland branch.

A central Auckland school is to be transformed in a building project that could cost at least $50 million.

I look in the mirror and wonder how I managed to survive the torture and humiliation I faced when I was a teenager, writes Jesse Greenslade.

Learning the ukulele? Can’t remember what that song playing on the radio is? Trying to find the wine you liked at a party? There are apps for all that.

The move to place beleaguered payroll system Novopay under Government control will make it more transparent and accountable, school heads say.

Why, Labour education spokesman Chris Hipkins asked, had it taken the Government so long to take action over the troubled Novopay school payroll service?

Adecile 10 Auckland school considered criminal charges after it uncovered a scam it says enabled out-of-zone families to fraudulently enrol children.

Kevin Fallon gets dismissed as a football coach at Mt Albert Grammar and it makes the national news.

Australian company Talent2 has been dumped from its own ill-starred Novopay teachers' payroll system.

A relief teacher sent photos of primary school pupils to a man he knew was seeking medical help for his sexual attraction to children.

Students are being kicked out of some of Auckland's most sought-after schools after officials ruled they were not genuinely living within zone.

A former principal and her husband who scammed $30,000 from a decile one school have abandoned their appeal after a judge told them they may be jailed.