Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) Link to this
I rise to speak to Part 1 of the Education Amendment Bill. First of all, I have to say that most of the bill is made up of amendments introduced by Labour in September 2008 in the Education Amendment Bill (No 3).
Although we did not support this bill at its first reading, clearly the work that has been done in the Education and Science Committee by Labour members has meant that Government members have seen the light over a number of clauses, and we are now in a position to support the bill as long as the amendments we have proposed remain intact.
One clause that I wish to deal with in particular during this contribution, which will be the first of several contributions I wish to make on this part, is clause 36. This clause inserts new section 128A after section 128 of the principal Act, the Education Act 1989. The new section deals with the “Matching of register information and information about payment of teacher salaries at payrolled schools”.
This provision is not immediately as it sounds. Clearly, an information-matching programme is contained in this clause. It allows for information matching to occur, so that it is possible for the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education to ensure that registered teachers holding a current practising certificate are the people, in fact, who are employed in teaching positions.
This takes me back quite a long way, and with the indulgence of the Committee, and the fact that I have 5 minutes in which to do it, I would like to cite some relevant experience here. When I first started as a teacher in 1978 there was a process of registration, but there were also extraordinary teacher shortages at that time. There had been a cycle of teacher shortages, and I have to say they are a wee bit—
Hon Ruth DysonHon MARYAN STREET Link to this
I thank my colleagues for assisting me so ably.
It was customary for schools to look for any warm body to put in front of a class. It was called the warm-body approach to staffing, because prior to the 1970s, I think—towards the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s—there had been considerable teacher shortages. Mr Peachey, I am sure, will remember those days. It was required only that a warm body be in front of children so that at least some order could be maintained in a classroom. It was a case of “never mind” in terms of the educational content or achievement that went on in the classroom at the time. Fortunately, we have long passed those days. Since then we have had about four decades of pedagogy, research, and academic pursuit, which have, collectively, improved the quality of education that is offered in our primary and secondary schools.
The purpose of this information-matching programme is to allow the authorities to ensure that the people who are teaching in front of classes are properly registered and certificated teachers who hold current practising certificates. It allows that information to be kept, managed, and compared between the Ministry of Education and the New Zealand Teachers Council. We on this side of the Chamber are very much in favour of that, and we very much support it, because we do not need to return to those days of unqualified, untrained teachers appearing in classrooms.
The risk of having untrained and unqualified teachers in our classrooms is too great, and we have learnt over the years that the need to put properly trained and qualified teachers in our classrooms is reflected in the quality of learning that students engage in. The information-matching programme allows the Ministry of Education to keep accurate registration information about teachers—who are entitled to registration-dependent allowances. So there are some things that attach to a teacher’s registration.
This provision gives security for parents, principals, and other teaching staff, who can be confident that their peers and colleagues around them have met the same registration requirements, that they all hold current practising certificates, and that they have not just been dragged in off the street to provide warm bodies to keep children more or less in order. Fortunately, we have moved a long way past those days.
This provision is also terribly important for another reason. From my secondary teaching experience I went on to work for the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) in a paid capacity, having already worked for the association in an honorary capacity for some years. I was always very resentful of people who accused teachers of never deregistering their colleagues, or of making it very difficult for teachers to be deregistered, when I was certainly of the view that teachers should have been deregistered if they did not come up to scratch, and that there should be no excuses.
My job as a PPTA officer was to ensure that teachers had their rights observed. But it was also my job to ensure that if teachers were incompetent or, worse than that, more harmful than incompetent—in other words, malevolent, abusive, or dangerous for children—they were expedited out of classrooms promptly. That was something that I adhered to as a union official, and it was something that was important to me as a practising teacher.
It is really important that people who are dismissed from schools for inappropriate or incompetent behaviour are not simply found going down the road to the next school where the principal then hires them. This information-matching programme will prevent that from happening. Therefore, it is a good thing. It gives principals some security that they are not hiring somebody who has just been rejected but has not gone through an appropriate deregistration or decertification process, or someone whose deregistration or decertification has not come to the attention of the next employing principal. So this information-matching programme is important for the maintenance of standards.
It is not just national testing that provides standards in schools. Providing standards is also about ensuring that the professional competence and the appropriateness of the trained professionals in our classrooms is maintained through an adequate registration and certification programme. Clause 36 of this amendment bill attempts to address that issue, and I think it will successfully address it because of the ability of the New Zealand Teachers Council, which registers teachers, and the Ministry of Education to swap information and make sure that everybody is on the same page in respect of teachers who may or may not hold current practising certificates.
It is important that schools are not illegally employing teachers without practising certificates, and it is important that the registration category of teachers can be determined so that their eligibility for allowances that are dependent on the registration type can be applied appropriately and accurately. This is an important measure.
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tāmaki) Link to this
I appreciate the opportunity to take a very brief call on Part 1 of the Education Amendment Bill in its Committee stage. I will begin by acknowledging the officials and thanking them for their work. They serviced the Education and Science Committee with good humour, worked hard, and met the needs of the committee very, very well.
I also acknowledge the work of members of the committee themselves, including, and especially, Opposition members. Under the leadership of Mr Mallard, they were positive, constructive, and very willing to engage in discussion. Members from both sides of the House had very much at heart the interests of children and what is the best thing to do to ensure that they have the very best possible education.
I will take a moment to reflect on the comments of Miss Street, who from time to time has also been a very positive contributor to the Education and Science Committee. I can go a little bit further back, regrettably. I began my teaching career in 1974, and I remember those years of shortage.
What is a year or two between friends? I also remember some marvellously committed schoolteachers. We did not think twice if the principal came along and said “I’m sorry but we are short of a teacher. We can’t find anybody. It will be a month or a term until we find somebody. I need to halve this class and put half of it in with yours.” We willingly accepted that. We got on with the job. I pay tribute to those sorts of teachers. But, certainly, the environment in which teachers work today is far better. One of the reasons for that improvement has been successive legislation passed through this House that has changed the employment conditions and expectations that teachers have. I endorse the comments of Miss Street in that regard.
I want to refer to one part of Part 1, and that is the increased flexibility of governance arrangements for schools. When we go through all the factors—and Miss Street mentioned a number of them, such as quality of teaching and that sort of thing—we find that quality of governance is equally important. It is important that those in a position to act actually have the tools available to them, that they have a range of tools, and that they have tools that are flexible to help them react quickly to situations where it is very, very apparent that youngsters are losing their opportunity to learn because something is going wrong in the school environment. Often, fixing governance does not always solve the problem, but it is a start to solving that problem.
I certainly commend that section of Part 1 to the Committee, and I commend Part 1 generally to the Committee. I look forward to it having the support of all parties. Thank you.
SUE MORONEY (Labour) Link to this
At the outset of my contribution I would like to beg the Chair’s indulgence for 30 seconds. This is the first time I have spoken in the Chamber since the passing away of Lady Raihā Māhuta. I add my condolences to the words that were expressed earlier in the week in Parliament. Certainly in the Waikato, Lady Raihā has been a taonga for our area. Every time that people take a walk along the banks of the Waikato River in the future they will know that they have Lady Māhuta, amongst others, to thank for what we think will be the improving condition of our river. It certainly was an issue that she fought very hard for, and I am so pleased that she was still with us to see the final conclusion and settlement of the Waikato River claim.
I will move on to the purpose of my contribution to the debate this evening on the Education Amendment Bill. Labour supports this amendment bill. Labour members did not support it at the first reading because we had some significant concerns, certainly about Part 1. Many of the areas that we had concerns about in Part 1 have been amended already. I know that we are seeking further amendments, which my colleague Grant Robertson has brought forward in his name. I look forward to his contribution on the further amendments that we seek to Part 1.
With regard to the select committee process, I reflect on the words that the chair of the Education and Science Committee just offered to the Committee. I support him in saying that it was a process where all parties—because the Labour Party, the National Party, and the Green Party are permanent members of that select committee—
The ACT Party as well, with Sir Roger, who became very important in one of the major amendments that came through in this part of the bill, which I will speak to later on in my contribution.
We all applied ourselves to this bill, because it is about the safety of our children. This bill deals with issues covering the vetting of the police records of people who have access to our children in the schoolyard and in early childhood education centres. It was an area that we all considered with a great deal of seriousness. It is true to say that although this bill, and in particular Part 1, is modelled on amendments that were brought forward by Labour when in Government, certainly the police-vetting parts of it have been watered down under the new Government. Labour members were concerned about that, so we wanted to fully traverse those issues as submitters came before us in the select committee. I believe we arrived at a position where we felt some level of comfort, but I really hope that the gap that is left, which is not as strong as what Labour had proposed, does not come back to haunt us. Labour certainly had much stronger legislation for the police vetting that we required for people who have access to our children.
I turn to the issue in Part 1 of introducing information matching between the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education to identify individuals teaching in schools without being registered. I think the timing is quite interesting on this point. At the point in time when the select committee was deliberating on that issue and considering this bill, and when submitters made their submissions on this bill, the target of having a 100 percent rate of registered teaching staff in early childhood education centres was still in place. So I saw this feature of the bill as being very important for early childhood education in particular, where we were going to be moving from an environment where not all staff were currently registered to a situation where the previous Labour Government had a target in place to have a 100 percent rate of qualified staff in early childhood education centres by the year 2012.
As followers of debates in this House will know, the Government recently ditched the commitment to have a 100 percent rate of fully qualified staff in early childhood education centres. Not only did it ditch the 100 percent target, but it also ditched the 80 percent target that had been set for 2010.
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) Link to this
He mihi nui ki te Whare Paremata. I say thanks very much to the previous speakers. Sometimes I find that I learn more about a bill after the select committee process, but it is all good learning. It is important for the Green Party to speak up on all stages of the Education Amendment Bill, because we are voting against it. The bill did not have a large number of submitters, but there were people with very serious interests in some of the important specific issues that have been raised about Part 1. The select committee process was useful in the sense that some improvements were made to the bill, and general consensus was formed on issues such as information matching for teachers, and the changes to the vetting of people associated with home care and working on school premises.
Following on from previous speakers, the select committee consideration reminded me of experiences in the bad old days. In some schools that I was connected with, it took 12-year-old girls using a tape-recorder in a classroom to prove to boards, school committees, and the education department that there were abusive teachers saying abusive things. We managed to get rid of some teachers like that from our school, but we did not have the knowledge or confidence then that information matching would mean that the behaviour of those teachers would not continue in another school. So it is good to see that we have come a long way on that issue and that there is progress. It is appalling that in those days some of our children had to take a tape-recorder into the classroom in order to be believed; people did not believe that some of the abuse towards children in schools in this country was possible. We welcome those aspects of the bill, and have no problem with them.
Because the Green Party is the only party voting against the bill, we need to reiterate that we did find some parts inoffensive and some parts very useful. But we, and some of the submitters, were not persuaded by what are called “minor changes” to the Education Act. The Quality Public Education Coalition and the Green Party are concerned about the clauses in the bill that relate to school governance. There was never any real explanation of the clauses relating to combining school boards and relating to body corporate control in the governance section of the bill. Other parties have spoken as if that language is just convenient phrasing that reflects the status quo and that creates choice for communities, rather than being a potentially serious opportunity to change the governance from public institutions to potentially privately controlled structures.
Just as the Green Party stands against free trade and for fair trade, and just as we stand against unsustainable growth and for genuine progress indicators, we stand for public ownership and governance of the public school system. It is not to say that we have no critique of that system; we strongly critique the system for its inability to meet the needs of many young people whose voices we hear. We consider that tangata whenua tamariki and rangatahi, in particular, have not been nurtured to their full potential by an education system that has embedded problems with monocultural ignorance and a strong Pākehā learning framework and bias that is currently seen as so normal that it is barely recognised, particularly in some high schools. However, this legislation does nothing to improve that situation and could also have serious and long-term unintended consequences.
We could debate whether the term “body corporate” will have major effects, but the Green Party stands with the submitters from the Quality Public Education Coalition who were concerned that the legislation was legitimising corporate control in public schools. The practical example they raised with me when we discussed the legislation was what happens when schools are considered to be failing. Under this legislation the board of trustees can be taken over by a statutory manager, which may be necessary at times. But if that manager is a body corporate, the risk of private control becomes more explicitly provided for than in the Education Act to date. Why would we open a door to a different governance model that moves governance further from the local community? What if a school was considered to be failing because it worked with a different cultural bias from the current framework and it was taken over by an “efficient” private management group that had no experience of the educational needs of children from that community? It was argued at the select committee by just about everybody else except me that as long as some individual was made accountable, everything would be OK, because accountability is about knowing who is responsible, but not necessarily knowing the impact of the kind of model of responsibility that we may be facilitating in this legislation. That is where the Greens and other submitters beg to differ from the Government.
We also agree with the Quality Public Education Coalition that combining school boards risks the autonomy of communities. A combined board might sound efficient, but it risks the takeover of a unique community in that parents who are not directly involved are making key decisions about a school in their district. The governance of a combined board could dilute the purpose of the board of trustees in allowing more distant interests and priorities—let alone more corporate ones—to dominate. Today at the Education and Science Committee my colleague Sue Kedgley presented the school foods petition. One issue she highlighted was the way vested interests can dictate the food our children buy in schools, now that this Government has abolished the healthy food guidelines written by the previous Government. Contractors can make more money from widely promoted junk food than they can from healthy food choices. Shall we expand that to contracting all education services? Who will benefit from that?
I return to the issue of unintended consequences, which can bedevil legislation. Imagine the nightmare scenario if we ended up with an accelerating progression towards an ACT Party utopia in education? Individual parents would seek so-called choice in a chaotic and privatised education system, where survival of the fittest—the schools at the top of the league table—had taken over. The rich would choose beautiful, well-resourced schools behind guarded walls, and the poor would end up in the draughty hall down the road. Oh my God, that is starting to happen already. The language of this legislation may further facilitate the degradation of the public education system towards schools as businesses, some of which will inevitably fail. But what the heck! That is the market, and children who suffer educational inequity can just pull themselves up by their future-focused, undeserving bootstraps. I say no thank you. We will stand our ground and we will vote against the bill. Kia ora.
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) Link to this
I did not intend to take a call at this stage, but after hearing the last speech, which contained flights of fancy, I felt I had to make a correction for the Committee.
The original proposal, which is the proposal contained within the Education Amendment Bill that is being debated by the Committee, is about statutory interventions. In particular, the appointment of a commissioner to a school is done either by the Minister of Education dismissing an existing board of trustees or by the Secretary for Education appointing a commissioner to a school. A number of conditions for the appointment of a commissioner to a school are laid out in the Education Act, and they are quite prescribed. In general, we find that there is no acting board of trustees in place. Those interventions, and the intent of the changes around those interventions, are only ever intended to be temporary. The whole ethos of Tomorrow’s Schools is that the board of trustees represents the local community and parents.
To go off into flights of fancy about corporates taking over schools and students picking and choosing is way outside the intent of the changes that were made. In fact, the very changes that were suggested were suggested in order to provide a far wider range of skills that are often needed when we find we have to replace a board of trustees in a school that has a complex range of dysfunctions, from employment and financial matters to learning qualities.
I wanted to take just a very short call to point out that the Green Party’s interpretation of what was intended here is way outside the changes that were made. I repeat that statutory interventions—all of them—are intended to be as short term as they possibly can, and a return to the norm will occur as soon as the Minister of Education and the Secretary for Education are sure that the school has the skills and the capability to continue to function as our 2,600-odd schools do under Tomorrow’s Schools.
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) Link to this
I want to pick up on the Minister of Education’s intervention, which focused on clauses 22 and 23 of the Education Amendment Bill. I will pick up the question of why there is some concern around the idea that we can introduce the concept of a body corporate or some body that is not a person into this role of statutory manager. In my electorate at the moment I am dealing with a particular school that has had a statutory manager appointed. I have been working with the board and with the principal of the school, because they have asked me to. They are complex situations, as the Minister notes, and they are often quite individualised. They are about relationships, and, more often than not, they are about relationships within the board, between the board and the principal, or around the school, and often they require an intervention that is quite lengthy. Although it is a temporary appointment, and I accept the Minister’s point in that regard, those relationships take time to be rebuilt and there is a need for a lengthy process by which the statutory manager is involved.
Mr Mallard makes the point that sometimes that is right, and other times it can be dealt with rapidly. I guess the overall point is that each situation is individual, each school has a situation that will be different, and there will be complex relationships that need to be managed. I think it is important that change was made in the Education and Science Committee. The Greens obviously have a view that says the change does not go far enough. From my judgment, as I am looking at it, it does provide some protection in that regard. Really, it is about accountability. It is about being able to say that there is a person accountable for his or her role as limited statutory manager, not some kind of entity, and not something that we cannot put our finger on and say that that is the person. My understanding of the discussion in the select committee is that it was around accountability that a coalition of different parties from across the House came together to support the changes here, because most members of the committee understood that moving to an approach where an entity could undertake this role rather than a person would reduce accountability.
The other aspect that this raises for me in relation to the Minister of Education’s comments is the importance of understanding the role of the board of trustees in the context of, in this case, a limited statutory manager being appointed. That is why I have tabled an amendment to reintroduce something that was in the Labour Government’s education amendment bill, which was to specify the functions of a board of trustees within this legislation. The Minister described the importance of the role of the statutory manager and the role of the board of trustees, which, as she said, is crucial to Tomorrow’s Schools, and that importance actually emphasises why we should include those functions explicitly within this bill. They were in the earlier draft of the amendment bill that Labour put forward, and I think this is now an opportunity for the Minister and others perhaps to reconsider removing them from that bill and explicitly outlining them.
So that members are familiar with what we are talking about, my proposal is to include the statement: “(1) A board must perform the following functions: (a) ensuring the enrolment at the school of all persons who are entitled to be enrolled at the school and apply to be enrolled at it: (b) ensuring that education is provided to each student enrolled at the school: (c) promoting a school environment that supports the highest standards of achievement for all students: (d) actively managing and monitoring the performance of the principal:”, and I will come to the others shortly. Those first four functions are critical roles. They help explain why a board of trustees is so crucial to the running of a school and why, in the context of the changes that have been proposed here to do with it being a limited statutory manager, it is important to have the board’s role spelt out like that. I hope that the Minister could perhaps take a call at some point and tell members whether she is prepared to reconsider including those functions of a board of trustees in order to fill out the overall explanation of what we are trying to do here, under clause 22.
I move now on to the section about information matching. I think that clause 76 is an important section, because it emphasises the importance of having registered teachers within a school environment. Just to clarify for those members who have not been following this closely, we will now have, effectively, the Teachers Council, through its list of registered teachers, and the Ministry of Education, using its payroll function, able to compare data to identify and ensure that every teacher in the classroom is a qualified teacher.
Not in early childhood education, as my colleague Sue Moroney points out, and that is a glaring omission in the overall National education policy. But here we do have it, and it is important, because the quality of education depends upon—
COLIN KING (National—Kaikōura) Link to this
It is a pleasure to speak on this bill during its Committee stage. The bill has quite a number of clauses in it. Many of those clauses were put into a category of corrections. Of the approximately 80 clauses, 37 would fit into that category, 33 of them were considered to be minor amendments, and 15 clauses were policy changes.
When I talk about minor corrections, I should articulate clearly that inside the Education Act there is still a lot of residue from previous legislation. If members turn to section 159, “Interpretation”, of the Education Act 1989, they will see mentioned “New Zealand apprenticeship committee”. Of course, we know that, under the Industry Training Act, the New Zealand apprenticeship committees passed out of existence. That was a reference to section 27 of the Apprenticeship Act 1983. That was an example of a correction made to the Education Act in the Education Amendment Bill, and we can appreciate that that change was quite appropriate.
With regard to minor amendments, one example is in clause 15 with regard to the registration and inspection of private schools. The clause effectively states that the chief review officer would ensure that a review is taken of all schools in accordance with Part 28 of the Education Act. That was considered to be a minor amendment.
But when we look at policy changes, we see some far more sensitive areas. One of those that I will turn to relates to police vetting. I believe that the matching of registration information has been well traversed by members on the other side of the Chamber, and they brought out many, many good points. But when it comes down to police vetting, we see that fine balance between protecting children and ensuring that there is a safe learning environment, and setting up a system where the school has better control and is able to manage things in a timely way. Until this amendment, the Teachers Council ran the whole process. It is deemed by the select committee that we have the balance right.
One point that came out with regard to home schooling was quite important, and I think it is appropriate to draw the Committee’s attention to it. New section 319FB, which is to be inserted in the Education Act by clause 70, talks about vetting household members who are either 17 years of age or over. It talks about how police vetting should be conducted. It is a very sensitive area, because on the one hand we are protecting the children, and on the other hand we have to protect the reputation of the individual. The point that is made quite clearly is to do with the validation of the information that the police get, and it is a very important point: if the service provider has had a reasonable opportunity to validate the information but has failed to do so within the reasonable period, then action can take place.
Although there are not a lot of major policy changes in the bill, it corrects a lot of aspects of the Education Act 1989. Altogether, it will make the Education Act work better. It will be a bit more balanced and it will certainly take our children forward. We look forward to the changes to this bill being written into the Education Act 1989 in due course. It is a pleasure to support the bill.
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) Link to this
It is a pleasure to rise to take a call on the Education Amendment Bill. Halfway through this, our first term in Parliament, new members are asked by a lot of people in our community to talk about our experiences and what it is like being in Parliament. One of the answers I have for my constituents is about the robustness of the parliamentary process and how important it is that a bill goes through all its different readings and the select committee process. I think this is one of those cases where we have seen a bill that Labour opposed at its first reading, but it has gone to a select committee and, after some sensible discussion—and I know that Mr Peachey acknowledged Trevor Mallard and his role in discussing different aspects of the bill—it has come back as something that the Labour Party can now support.
The previous speaker, Colin King, referred to some of the more minor amendments and compared them with some of the more major ones. He said that the amendment in clause 15, which refers to the registration and inspection of private schools, was fairly minor. I do not know that it is as minor as that. I would say that the replacement of a colon with a semicolon is minor and that the introduction of a hyphen is fairly minor—
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY Link to this
—although, with a hyphenated surname myself, I think that a hyphen is fairly important, and I hope that everybody remembers to get that one in there. Clause 15 refers to an amendment to section 35A. Essentially, it is an amendment intended to bring private schools into line with the practice for State schools. Section 35A(9)(a)(ii) of the current Act says: “thereafter, at intervals of no more than 3 years;” the chief review officer needs to review a private school. That has changed so that private schools come more into line with public, or State, schools. That is appropriate. It will remove some red tape for those schools. I think it is quite important. In an environment where the Government has significantly increased the public funding to State schools—
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY Link to this
Not to State schools at all, actually. That was a bit of a slip of the tongue. There is a significant increase in funding to private schools. It is important that we continue to make sure that the reviews and the standards required of private schools are just as high as the standards required of State schools.
The new change refers us to Part 28 of the original Act. It says that that part applies to every educational service and that it includes any school that receives public money appropriated by Parliament. Of course, that includes private schools. They have received a significant recent increase to their funding. I am the beneficiary of a private education. I was privately educated all the way through. I know that is a little bit rare on this side of the House, but that is OK. I have no problem proudly announcing that fact. It probably explains the hyphenated surname, but that is OK.
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY Link to this
No, it was definitely King’s College, a very masculine name, I say to Mr Mallard. The point I am trying to make is that when the Government announced its increase in funding for private schools—and I am not one to pull the ladder up—I was quite interested to see what the effect would be of that increase. The effect has been that no private schools have decreased their fees. It has not increased the availability of a private education to people in New Zealand. Those schools have seen the increase as a catch-up on the past, and the fees have continued to go up. So it has not increased the availability whatsoever, which I think—and the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Education, might want to take a call on this—was the original intention of that additional funding that was made available to private schools. All it has done is leave a gap in the potential funding that could have been available to State schools.
LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō) Link to this
I am very pleased to stand and talk about Part 1 of the Education Amendment Bill in its Committee stage. I want take the focus back to the two main points that this bill addresses, and I will pick up on the one that states the legislation basically is about reducing compliance costs for schools in the area of police vetting.
I am very pleased that National started with a bill that Labour was unable to support in the first reading. At this stage of proceedings we have ended up with a bill that is supported across the Chamber, with the exception of the Green Party. That is democracy in action. The discussion on reducing compliance costs relating to police vetting is a keen interest of mine. I firmly believe, as this Government believes, that we must make sure that as much of the spending as possible is focused on the right area. Anything that gets in the way of schools teaching and of schools achieving positive outcomes in education is what we have our sights on.
In terms of police vetting, we added the clauses in new section 78C to make sure early childhood services and schools are able to get the vetting done in a time frame that suits them. We also needed to make sure the vet would be required before non-teaching staff had unsupervised access to children. It is an important part of the amendment bill. It is about making sure children in school environments and in early childhood services are safe.
I spoke in the second reading about the growing number of home-based, early childhood services. Adults in those families over the age of 17 need to be included in that police vet because children in the care of the home-based services are exposed to them too. As it is an area that is growing it is important that we do not layer unnecessary costs, compliances, and regulation on to the services that take the focus away from education. Schools and early childhood services will have to request a police vet check within at least 2 weeks of non-teaching staff starting work, instead of, as previously was the case, before the staff start work at the school. It will mean that there is not a hold-up and it reduces the risk of delays being incurred because of the police.
Another amendment that has been confirmed is the policy position that police vet checks will not need to be renewed for staff who are no longer employed by the school or early childhood education service. That is common sense, but it was something that we needed to tidy up. Schools or early childhood education services will need to apply for a police vet within 4 weeks of the Act coming into force. That will also ensure that they are not held up by any police delays.
Police vetting was one of the primary focuses of the amendments. The second focus was the whole area of information matching between the Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education. There has been quite a discussion about that already, so I do not see it as necessary to cover old ground. But it is important to make sure that we focus on issues like the reduction of compliance costs for school services. Thank you.
Dr ASHRAF CHOUDHARY (Labour) Link to this
First of all, by way of preamble to this debate, I say that children are the most important asset in our lives. Children are our future. As a parent, I can say that one of the main things we think about when children go to school is whether they will be safe.
Hon Rodney HideDr ASHRAF CHOUDHARY Link to this
I will not comment on that, I say to Mr Rodney Hide. I think it is important to realise that when our children go to school they should be safe and they should have an education that is of a high standard.
I also say at this stage that although I am not currently a member of the Education and Science Committee, I was a member of that committee for the last two terms, and I enjoyed every bit of the work that I did in that committee. I certainly appreciated in the last term the contribution made by Mr Peachey and Colin King in the committee. They had a positive attitude at that time when I was the chair of the committee.
I would like to comment on information sharing. In a way, talking about this issue traverses the comments that have been made before, but I think it is important to do so. It reminds me of some years ago when there was an incident at a high school involving one of the teachers. I recall he was teaching chemistry. It was found out after a few years that he did not even have any qualifications to teach chemistry. That teacher was found out and, of course, deregistered. But it was amazing that in those days it was quite possible for teachers to get through the system and be registered without even having a good background check, whether it was a security check or a police investigation in respect of qualifications. But now I am delighted with this bill, which is pretty much a bipartisan bill. I am delighted that most of the parties support this bill. It is great that we support this bill.
In terms of information matching it is important that teachers have proper qualifications—teaching licences or certificates, if you like—to ensure that we have properly qualified teachers at the front of the classrooms, and also to ensure that no schools are employing teachers illegally and without reference to their proper qualifications. It is also important to the maintenance of standards of education that we have teachers with proper qualifications, and that it is well known within the Ministry of Education, as well as at schools, that there are proper teachers doing the teaching in schools.
Secondly, I will talk briefly about police vetting. As I said earlier, it is important for us to know that our children are safe at school and that teachers, staff, and any contractors who are working there are properly vetted before they are allowed to come into contact with students and pupils. I am particularly delighted that with this three-way involvement of schools, the Teachers Council, and the police, that issue has been sorted out, and that now schools can approach the police directly, rather than having to go through the Teachers Council to ensure that the proper vetting of contractors and people who are involved in teaching is done.
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) Link to this
I will make three main points in this debate on Part 1, and a few other points later, if time allows. First, I will go back to the comments that the Minister made earlier, and underscore one of the points that my colleague Grant Robertson raised about the importance of personal relationships between a limited statutory manager or a commissioner and the school community they are there for. I will go a little bit wider than that to talk about the issue of one school board temporarily taking over another school board. I guess I stress some caution in the potential for the damage that could exist in relationships between schools, if an environment were created where a school that was struggling was seen to be potentially threatened with a takeover by another nearby school, albeit even on a temporary basis. I can think of a couple of schools in my electorate that are struggling, and that have much stronger schools—
I know Trevor Mallard did his best to try to reduce the number of schools in the electorate, but there are still a few schools in my electorate that are struggling, and that have schools reasonably close by that are much stronger. I think one of the worst things for those struggling schools would be an implied threat, if you like, that they would be taken over by the stronger schools. There are all sorts of reasons why that would not be the right outcome for the community, and why that could potentially create more issues, if the matter were not treated very carefully and done in the right manner. That is one of the reasons, I think, that the amendment was made at the select committee to prevent a school board from taking on the role of a commissioner or limited statutory manager - type function for another school. The committee prevented that from happening, and I think that that was a very sensible thing for it to do. I have spoken to school principals in my area who have been the subject of limited statutory management, and they have really emphasised to me the importance of that personal relationship. There would be real reluctance on the part of schools to see that function taken on by a corporate or a company, rather than by an individual with whom they could form a relationship.
The second point I raise is about the importance of career counselling. I speak particularly in favour of an amendment put forward by my colleague Grant Robertson, which would require school principals to ensure that schools provide guidance and counselling on career choices and career pathways. I think that as we have seen in Parliament—just yesterday, in fact—there are significant risks when people embark on a course of study without knowing fully what they are getting themselves into, and without being fully prepared. For example, I am aware of a student who undertook 3 years of study—11 papers—and in fact passed only three of those. That issue was well canvassed in the Chamber yesterday because it concerned Steven Joyce, somebody who is known very well to members. Had there been adequate guidance and counselling prior to that course of study being undertaken, perhaps Steven Joyce might have had a little bit more success in his course of study. That is something that I think all students should have access to, particularly in an environment where the Government is talking about increasing the penalties and sanctions for students who do not successfully complete their courses of study, and about reducing their ability to re-enrol. Making sure that students are going into courses with their eyes wide open, whatever courses of study they are going into following school, is really important. Adequate counselling on their career choices and pathways, and on their potential options for future courses of study, is really important.
The amendment put forward in the name of my colleague Grant Robertson is a very important one. It restores an amendment that was part of the original bill put forward by the previous Labour Government. Most of the amendments in this bill put forward by Anne Tolley, in fact, pick up those earlier amendments, but that one was not picked up. Grant Robertson’s amendment puts the provision back in, and that is really important.
Another amendment that Grant Robertson has put forward clarifies to a much greater extent the functions of a school board of trustees. That is really important, too, and I do not think there could be any legitimate argument to say why the functions of a school board of trustees should not be enshrined in legislation: for example, as in new section 60AA(1)(b), which is inserted by new clause 16A: “ensuring that education is provided to each student enrolled at the school:”. There can be nothing more fundamental than a school board of trustees making sure that education is provided to the students enrolled at that school. I do not see any legitimate argument to say that that is not something that should be specifically enshrined in legislation.
RAHUI KATENE (Māori Party—Te Tai Tonga) Link to this
When I spoke to the second reading of the Education Amendment Bill, I raised a number of points. I have been listening tonight to see whether anybody picks up on those points, and I am hoping that the Minister of Education will rise to take a call about them.
First of all, I want to talk about the good points of the bill. I like its focus on the safety of our children; that is something we need to be aware of at all times. Of course, in other legislation the safety of children is paramount. So I support the provisions on police vetting. I think we should always ensure that people who deal with children are safe to be with them. It is very important that our children are safe with teachers and contractors—anybody who is working with our children—and that we have no worries about people our children are with.
I like the provisions on the registration of teachers. We will be able to match those up so that we can ensure that the teachers of our children know what they are talking about, can teach correctly, and will not be going off on tangents or giving them incorrect information. Those points I support very much.
One thing I see as missing from this bill is cultural safety. I miss anything in the bill that points teachers to training in programmes such as Te Kōtahitanga, so that children are able to grow up safe in their cultural identity. I want to talk about a few examples that I am aware of. Although they are historical examples, they are still happening today and that is a real pity. I think about the example my aunts told me of what happened when they were at school and being taught history. My aunts grew up in Te Tau Ihu in the Nelson-Marlborough area. They were taught the history of the Wairau massacre. They were told that Maōri heathens—savages—blatantly broke the law by massacring settlers. The teacher was very well aware that she was talking about my aunties’ great-grandparents at that stage. My aunties grew up having been taught by this teacher that their great-grandparents were dirty savages and heathens who massacred innocent settlers. It took them years to learn for themselves that that was not what had happened.
Yes. Those things are still happening today. I think we need to look at our history curriculum and at the ability of teachers to teach our children their true identity.
Another example I will bring up is, again, from one of my aunt’s experiences. She is a teacher and has a lot of experience and expertise in teaching, but she found that one of her daughters was struggling at school. When she went to talk to the teacher, she was spoken to by that teacher as though she was ignorant and had no concept at all of what a teacher is supposed to teach children. She walked out of that meeting feeling totally inadequate as a parent and as a teacher. I think that is something we need to be training our teachers in. It is a matter of safety for children as well as for their parents. I hope the Minister in the chair will take a call to talk to us about cultural identity and cultural safety, and how those issues can be taught in our schools.
Also missing from this bill, and something that we should look at, is the issue of a school’s awareness of how children are doing at home. Are they coming to school not having had breakfast?
SUE MORONEY (Labour) Link to this
It is great to have the opportunity to take a second call on Part 1 as a member of the select committee, because I want to continue from where the bell caught me out last time round. As we know, one of the main features of Part 1 is the introduction of information matching between the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education. The purpose of that is to identify individuals teaching in schools without registration. The point I wanted to make about this amendment is that it could have been a very useful amendment for the early childhood education sector, as well, had the Government not reneged on the target of having 100 percent qualified staff in that sector.
This amendment is about the only part of the bill whose application is confined to schools only. Almost all of the other clauses in Part 1 refer to schools and to early childhood education services. This amendment does not refer to early childhood education services, because it would be a nonsense to identify people who are on the payroll with the Ministry of Education but who are not registered as teachers with the Teachers Council. The Government now allows that to be the case in early childhood education. I think it is a great shame that that will be the situation. I think that many parents, and certainly the sector, were looking forward to the ongoing professionalisation of the early childhood education sector because of the strong link between having qualified teachers, who know what they are doing, and the quality of early childhood education services.
I will now go on to address some other clauses in Part 1. Colin King was right to say that many of them are very minor. The one that really caught my attention was clause 9, “Amendment of enrolment scheme”. One of the things that one learns to do in this job is to look for gaps in legislation. They may be things that seem quite straightforward at the outset, but when one looks at them in conjunction with other policies and other Acts of Parliament, one sees what implications they might have. Even though clause 9 seemed like quite an innocent clause, I was interested to think about what the amendment to the enrolment scheme might mean, because we know that a proposal is coming forward from an Associate Minister of Education to look at having a voucher-type system within the education system. I was a bit concerned to see there was an amendment to the enrolment scheme, and I wondered whether it was a sneaky way of getting in that proposal.
Clause 9 states: “Section 11M(3) is amended by omitting ‘enrolment scheme, in order’ and substituting ‘enrolment scheme in order’.” That might seem like a very strange thing to do, because what I have just read out is a set of words being omitted and replaced with exactly the same set of words.
There is a comma in the first one, and it took me a little while to work out that this was not a sneaky way of bringing in the voucher system. This amendment was, in fact, about a comma. We are omitting “enrolment scheme, in order”, with a comma, and replacing it with “enrolment scheme in order”, with no comma. In clause 9 we have got rid of the scandalous comma, and now the principal Act will be much easier to read as a result.
Apart from some minor amendments—and that is probably at the extreme end, I think Mr King would agree, of the minor amendments that are proposed in Part 1—some things, as I said before, are missing from Part 1. One learns to look for the gaps in this job. I think one of the most significant features that is now missing was proposed in Labour’s amendment bill previously. Some things are missing from the board’s functions that are now required to be in this bill. Certainly, when this legislation was under Labour’s stewardship, the board was required to do a great deal more. That amendment proposed to insert the following responsibilities, and some of these have now been removed.
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this
I am happy to stand and take a call on Part 1 of the Education Amendment Bill. I want to raise some new issues around topics that people have been talking about, because this is very important legislation. It is particularly important that we have managed to get almost unanimous support for this bill. For a number of reasons, it is always good when we can get some stability in legislation.
I remember being in the UK not long after two young schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, were murdered by a school worker. I remember the public furore that followed about where the failures were and how the particular person was allowed to work at the school. I think we can learn a number of lessons from that particular case. But I think the most important point was that it was a most difficult environment in which to be making policy. In fact, the discussions we have had here in New Zealand on this legislation have very much mirrored the discussions held in Britain following those terrible, tragic murders. The fact that we have managed to get, I think, unanimous support for the police vetting provisions means that should we face such a tragedy in New Zealand—and fingers crossed that we never do—this Parliament can say we came to what we believed to be a sensible compromise on police vetting; a compromise that balances the requirements on schools, and the burden that comes with that, with the safety of children. We can stand up and say all parties in this House were in agreement that we had reached that compromise, and we did not play the blame game, which so often happens in politics following such a tragedy.
But we can learn things from that case, and I want to raise those issues. We have come to a position on police vetting that I think most people are comfortable with. But the police vetting provisions in themselves will not keep children safe. This is not something that tells us we can now take our eye off the ball and not worry now about the safety of our children in schools. We still need to be vigilant, because what happened in the United Kingdom with regard to that terrible murder was that, in fact, the gentleman concerned was known to the police, but that a number of the charges that they were trying to bring against him for rape and for offences against a child were never taken to prosecution. So they did not end up in the database that was used for the vetting, despite the fact that the individual was known to the police. Also, because the police were under such pressure at that time—because they had funding shortages, and because they had administrative staffing shortages—sometimes those things were not being entered into the police computer system in time. That gentleman faced a number of charges that should have been in the police computer, which would have shown them up in the police vetting, but they were not there because there was too big a lag time in the police entering those details in.
Hon Trevor Mallard Link to this
“Lag time” are not quite the right words. If he was doing a lag, it would not have happened.
That is a fair comment; Mr Mallard is being helpful, as always.
When we are going through a very heated discussion in New Zealand about the role of administrative staff in the public sector, and when we are going through a difficult economic period in terms of financial constraints on the Government—and it is the same point that I raised when we passed the legislation providing for the increased taking of DNA samples—the police must be funded properly, because if they are not, then this bill is not worth the paper that it is written on. More than that, even though these would not be considered to be front-line services, we need staff to be there in order to ensure that the kind of information that will be helpful to schools when they want to vet an individual is there and is there on time, so that we do not end up in the same situation that occurred in the UK, where someone slipped through the net and a most tragic outcome occurred because of that. I really want to make that point, because we can pass all the legislation in the world and it means nothing if the resources, in terms of money and staff, are not there to ensure that the clauses that we are passing are able to be implemented as Parliament intended.
I am very pleased that we have come to this compromise on police vetting. I will just finish off this comment, and will make—
Mr Mallard informs me that I should go until 5 to, at which time I will sit down so that the Hon Roger Douglas can take over.
Oh, we will report progress then.
The only other part that I want to comment on—and I would appreciate the Minister’s comments on this—is the amendment in the name of my colleague Grant Robertson to insert new clause 5B, which would require the Minister to advise the House of changes to the criteria for enrolment at the Correspondence School. I congratulate my colleague Grant Robertson on bringing this amendment to the Committee. It is incredibly important. The Correspondence School is an important entity. It provides education for a number of people in remote rural areas who are unable to access it otherwise, but also for people who for other reasons are not able to go through a mainstream school. Any changes in criteria could have a significant impact on our communities. I think that in terms of transparency, this amendment would be very helpful. I would be interested in hearing the Minister’s comments on that.
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) Link to this
I want to take the opportunity to go through one or two of the amendments I am proposing to the Education Amendment Bill, because I think it is important to set the context for the Committee for why we are bringing forward these amendments. It will not be a surprise to members to realise that most of the amendments arise from the earlier version of this bill, which was put forward under the previous Government. We have heard a lot of talk recently about the importance of information, and about the importance of parents knowing what is happening in schools and understanding how schools work.