Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) Link to this

I pick up from where I left off last night. I was talking about the importance of the democratic process and of the importance of the Minister Anne Tolley answering the questions that have been put to her by my colleague Grant Robertson and other members of the Labour Party. We should bear in mind that this bill has not been through the select committee process. The public has not had a chance to have a say on it. Teachers, parents, and boards of trustees also never had that chance. So the Minister should write down the questions we have put to her. She should pay attention to what we have to say, and she should stand up and answer our questions.

We all agree that truancy is a bad thing. We all want the kids to be in the classroom and learning, but we have yet to be convinced about the way this bill will make a difference. For the Minister’s benefit, I will run through some of the questions we raised last night. One of the most important questions asked what consideration had been given to whether increasing the fines would make any difference. The explanatory note of the bill states that there is a low rate of prosecutions under the current law and under the current level of fines, so we need to consider both the reason for this and the resources that are given to boards of trustees to take these prosecutions in the first place. Is it that schools are not prosecuting parents because they do not have any support to do so? I suspect that that is a good part of the problem. How will this bill increase resources to school boards of trustees? The explanatory note states that boards are unaware of their ability to prosecute under the Act. What steps are going to be taken to remedy that? What information will the Minister be giving school boards of trustees about the current provisions and the new changes? What resources are schools going to get?

The second issue is that this bill increases the powers of the Secretary for Education, but we have no information about how that will be implemented. I draw the Committee’s attention to some of the things said about that in the explanatory note. One of them is: “The Secretary for Education’s ability to take prosecutions will enable the Ministry of Education to intervene when schools are not taking action to deal with chronic parent-condoned truanting. These changes will not incur significant costs for schools.” But presumably someone is going to have to pay for them. They will have to be paid for somehow. At a time when the Government has put a sinking lid on expenditure by Government departments, we are going to load a few more responsibilities on them. So much for cutting red tape!

Furthermore, the explanatory note states: “Increased prosecution activity may impose new costs on the Court system.” What satisfaction can the House take that the court system will be given the resources needed in order to be able to do that? The explanatory note also states: “There is some risk that prosecutions for non-attendance may be pursued inappropriately, with parents being unnecessarily exposed to the threat of serious financial sanctions.”

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato) Link to this

We are here on Saturday, under urgency, because the Māori Party, the ACT Party, and the National Party have agreed to push through legislation that fundamentally affects many New Zealanders across our country, and those New Zealanders have not had a say on any of it. This Government expects that it can rush through legislation that affects ordinary New Zealanders, without letting parents or schools have a say on it and without even bothering about what they think.

So in rising to speak to Part 1 of this Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill, I want to ask the Minister a couple of questions as well. I think the point was well made by Grant Robertson when he asked why there has been no ability for parents to have a say on how a punitive step will actually affect their ability to support their children in education. After all, we all want our kids to do well in the school system. We all want them to achieve. We all support schools lifting their game to support our children. But it is about quality teaching and creating a learning environment, and that is not what this bill does. This measure takes a punitive step against parents.

I absolutely agree with Chris Carter: good parents should not be punished by imposing punitive actions such as a fine system. Why? Let us think about common examples in our communities—real examples. For example, a woman with three children whose husband has left her may be on the domestic purposes benefit. Will a punitive step actually help her to support her children in their education? She is putting kai on the table and has it in the cupboard. She supports education. Is she totally responsible for what her child does because there are issues of dysfunction in her family that perhaps are not being addressed? What does the Minister say? She says “Let’s fine her. Let’s fine that solo mum whose child does not turn up to school because his father has not been in his life and has not taken an interest in his education. Let’s just fine her.” There are already exacerbating pressures on a family like that.

This legislation will do nothing to support those mums who want their children to be educated in our communities, and that is what this Government has not done. It has not really looked at the implications of a punitive system on vulnerable families who will need support not only from the community and the schools but from us as legislators, to ensure that when we apply legislation it will have a positive effect out there in our communities. I do not think that a punitive step really reaches out to the families who will be affected.

Has the Minister asked herself why truancy is happening in our communities? This is a difficult issue, and we are taking it seriously. Truancy is a very serious issue in all our communities, because we all know that if kids are at school for longer they are more likely to achieve. But why does truancy exist? I put that question to the Minister. Dr Pita Sharples spoke in this Chamber about this particular issue, and he knows very well that if we were to compare mainstream schools with kura kaupapa and wharekura we would find there is a higher rate of truancy overall in mainstream schools than in kura kaupapa and wharekura. Why? Every one of those kura kaupapa and wharekura schools will say that it is because teachers make the difference in the learning environment in terms of valuing the students and who they are.

If we talk to parents of children attending mainstream schools about the issues of why truancy exists—if we bother to talk to them—we will often hear them say that it is because their children do not feel valued, especially Māori students and perhaps Pacific students. Dr Pita Sharples raised the issue himself. A number of the truants we are talking about are in alternative education centres. When we talk to those children and ask them why they are in alternative education centres, they will say “The teacher couldn’t even be bothered with me. I was just a number—couldn’t even say my name properly. I didn’t even bother going to school because the teachers don’t value who I am.” That is what students will tell us.

So when the Minister takes an approach like the one that has been taken in respect of this bill—a very punitive approach—she actually fails to recognise the number of other issues around the help that families need in order to be able to support their children’s education. The Minister needs to take a call on this, because it is a very, very important question.

Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) Link to this

The question that has to be asked about this Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is how it will improve educational outcomes, which surely should be the purpose of the bill. A bill should not come into the House for purely ideological reasons. There should be some reason, one would hope, why the bill will actually improve educational outcomes.

We have quite a lot of information about children who do not go to school or who have very poor outcomes from our education system. One of the things we know most of all is that they live in poverty, and they are more likely to be Māori. We know that children who are missing school are more likely to come from difficult backgrounds.

I am quite interested in the relationship between this bill and the 90-day bill. If a parent is working a couple of part-time jobs in order to pay the bills, and he or she gets a new part-time job and finds out that his or her child is truanting from school, what choice does that parent have at that point? The choices are either to take some time off work to sort out what is happening, because the child is missing school, or stay at work. If that parent stays at work and does not deal with the problem of the child not going to school, the Government will come in and say “We’re going to whack a $3,000 fine on you because your child is missing school.”

Let us say that the parent decides on the alternative of not going to work and asks the boss for the day off to try to sort out the problem of the child missing school. Let us say that the parent is within the 90-day period where he or she can be sacked at will. That parent knows, because of the new legislation that has just been passed, that if he or she takes time off work during those 90 days to do something about the child who is truanting from school, the employer can sack him or her at will. The employer will say: “Oh, that’s one of those useless workers who tries to make sure their child gets an education. I don’t want one of those workers; I will just sack that worker at will.”

How will fining those workers $3,000 help them to deal with the problem in front of them of trying to put food on the table, pay the rent while their child is missing school, and meet the principal and teachers to find out what the problem is? If they do those things, the employer can say “Well, you’re obviously not the kind of employee we want in our workplace, and we can give you the sack, because the National Government has just given us the right to sack people who try to make sure their kids go to school.” Well, thanks to the National Government, people are caught between a rock and a hard place.

How does this bill help people who are in those kinds of difficult, real-life situations—not pretend ideological situations, because, let us face it, this measure is just an ideological burp—deal with the problem of trying to get their kids to go to school when they are in a 90-day period in a new job? Has the Government thought about how these two pieces of law, which it has been ramming through the House—and we are sitting on a Saturday now—might interact when it comes to real people living in the real world who are not sitting on Ministers’ salaries but are actually doing their best by their kids and paying their way? Has the Government thought about how these laws might work together?

What about the parent who works two jobs because the minimum wage is so low, and has kids who are truanting? The fact that the minimum wage is so low puts enormous pressure on parents. These are the real issues faced by parents whose kids are not going to school. They have to have more than one job in order to pay the bills, instead of having the time they need to pay attention to their kids.

If this was a family-friendly Government, surely its first priority would be to make sure that parents have enough time to spend with their kids in order to make sure they are not truanting from school. What about the fund to insulate housing that National has now said it is not going ahead with—the $1 billion to help insulate cold, damp houses? We know kids get out of the habit of going to school when they get sick. They get sick when they live in cold, damp houses. They get glue ear, they have poor educational outcomes because they cannot hear what the teacher is saying, they get isolated and alienated from their school, they do not want to be there, and they get sick. What do we do? We could insulate the houses so kids do not get sick so often, but instead we say “Oh no, that would be bad—we wouldn’t want to do that. Let’s get rid of that billion-dollar fund that was going to insulate houses so kids could actually get to school more often. That might help reduce truancy, but we do not want to do that; we’ll get rid of that, as well.”

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) Link to this

I will make a couple of points in relation to some of the comments that have been made so far. I firstly refer to the rather eloquent speech made last night by the previous Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Carter. He talked about what his Labour Government had done and talked about the many measures it took to address truancy. He asked why there was not more in this Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill to address truancy. Well, in a way he is right, because all the measures he was talking about are other ways of addressing truancy, and we have indicated in our policy that we support many of those initiatives. We intend to bring in more initiatives and we have made some more funding available. However, none of those initiatives require legislation, which is why they are not in this bill before the Committee.

But it is interesting that for all the previous Minister said about what his Government had done for truancy, he was unable, at any time, to tell us exactly how many truancy officers are out there on the ground in New Zealand. He clearly did not want to know. Under his watch truancy grew in this country by 41 percent—a 41 percent increase occurred under all those initiatives he was talking about last night, and that was with all those dollars that had been put in. At any one time under that previous Minister’s watch 30,000 children could be missing from school. That is the record of the previous Minister.

The question has been asked as to whether prosecutions work and whether there has been any research. Well, there has been some research here in New Zealand. Back in 2004, under the previous Labour Government, the ministry ran a streamlined truancy prosecution trial. The results of that trial showed that the threat of prosecution, where it was used appropriately, had amazing effects. In fact, out of 30 families who were threatened with prosecution for persistent and wilful recidivist truancy, only one family was prosecuted—only one out of 30. The threat of prosecution has an effect on those parents who are wilfully supporting recidivist truancy, and they are the people whom we are targeting with this measure.

The last point I will make is this. If raising the fines and making the penalties for wilful truancy more serious in this country is such a bad thing, then why have two former Labour education Ministers talked about raising the fines over the last 4 years? All Labour did was to talk about it; it never did it. Well, this Government is doing it.

Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) Link to this

Is this not interesting? Here we are on a Saturday, in this maniac burst of pseudo-urgency, considering poorly thought-through bills. We are setting aside the proper processes of Parliament and conveying the impression of urgency and the impression of action—the impression of government. We fiddle while the world burns. Is this a serious response, in anybody’s book, to the international economic crisis? Kiwi mums and dads at home or at work this morning are feeling apprehensive about the future of their jobs, and more apprehensive after the passing of the 90-day “hire and fire at will” bill. They are at home and feeling apprehensive about their ability to pay the bills, and what are we doing? Pinging them with fines for truancy.

So why are we doing this? No one likes truancy. We have, as the previous speaker admitted, put in a raft of policies to address it and we have been making progress. But is it not interesting that the party that decried nanny Statism and the erosion of civil liberty—the imposition of solutions against the many to address the problems of the few—is now addressing this with a blanket law to fine parents for something that none of us, including most parents, would want to see?

Achievement does not equal compulsory testing, attendance does not equal compulsory fining, and a safe society does not simplistically equal tougher sentences. Those things are apparent, rather than real. They are worthy goals, but they are tokenistic solutions. They give the impression of action, rather than being real action.

I picked up this bill off the Table and thought I must have picked up an amendment. But no, this is the whole bill—an introduction and one page of measures. We are setting aside the select committee process to pass flimflam. This is flimflam. This is not policy, this is not government; this is complete procedural and policy nonsense.

The reason we are here on Saturday is that this is an abuse of Parliament. If anybody at home was in doubt, Anne Tolley proved it. She first recognised the range of measures that our Government put through. She then said that this new Government had a range of things it wanted to do on truancy. OK, I ask where they are, and moreover, I ask why those measures are not in the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. If the Government does not have them ready yet, I ask why this so-called bill is on the Table. Why is it on the Table, being considered under urgency, when, apparently, most of what the Government is going to do is not here? Why does the Government not tell the public what it is going to do? It cannot possibly be this bill, because this bill is a joke.

I think the public knows that this bill is not a solution; it is the impression of a solution. It is not a policy; it is the impression of a policy. This is not government; it is the impression of a Government. The difference between National and Labour is that we take the public seriously and we give them the honour of knowing that they can tell the difference between good policy and bad policy. They know this is a joke and an excuse for government while the world burns, and the new Government is really trying to work out what to do. The Government is here to convey the impression of urgency without having anything real to put through, because it wants to look like an action-oriented Government, whereas in fact this is not real action. In the world around us the Americans are debating the bail-out of the auto industry, the British are restructuring their banking system, Australia has just announced another major stimulus package, and what is our Government doing? It is fining parents for truancy, as if that is going to change the world and as if that merits urgency. I say to members opposite that they are here today because they are abusing Parliament and the public. Members opposite may give the impression of being a Government, but we will most definitely be a real Opposition.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) Link to this

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. Kia ora tātou i tēnei ra. I really enjoyed last night’s debate. There were some great contributions from across the House, and it was pleasing in terms of Māori education to hear contributions from my own co-leader Pita Sharples; from Mr Kelvin Davis, who came from a practical point of view; from Hekia Parata, who has been involved in a number of initiatives in respect of Māori education; from Metiria Turei; and also from Parekura Horomia. It was great to know that although we might speak across the House from different perspectives, in the end, as Māori and as those involved in education, we acknowledge the importance of education to each of us. There was a huge wealth of experience in the House last night, and all of us being here today clearly shows that we take education seriously.

I want firstly to recommend the report from the Education and Science Committee in February of this year. New members should have a look at that report, because, firstly, it contains 2 years of work, and, secondly, a huge amount of discussion came to the table. I acknowledge the contribution of the late Brian Donnelly, who led that select committee. I think it would be good if this Parliament picked up on the recommendations of that 2-year report. What was it all about? The title of the report was Inquiry intomaking the schooling system work for every child. I suppose that title recognises that the system does not necessarily fit all students.

I suspect that Part 1 of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill—“School enrolment and attendance”—is an effort to get students to go to school. The problem is that the recommendations in this part may well result in parents having to pay fines for their children not showing up, but they do not address the fundamental problem. I have some sympathy with the Supplementary Order Paper lodged by the previous Minister of Education, Mr Chris Carter, but we will consider it down the line.

Is there a truancy problem? Hell yeah! We do not have to go very far to know that. I do not think that having select committee hearings about whether there is or is not a truancy problem will do very much. There is enough evidence around to tell us that there is a problem, and, indeed, previous administrations have recognised that by way of providing truancy officers, the Waitakere truancy project, the truancy from school research project, and the text messaging project, which, I understand, Mr Mallard was part of initiating. Is there a truancy problem? Yes, and we have to acknowledge that.

As other members have said, it is likely that Māori and Pasifika students are participants in truancy. As I said at the Education and Science Committee, truancy is a sign of a bigger issue. It is likely that those who are involved in truancy are also involved in the poverty trap, and their families are not likely, in the end, to be able to pay the fines included in this part of the bill. Truancy can be viewed as a sign that the school and/or the system as a whole is not making a connection with the students. We acknowledge that the Te Kōtahitanga project was recognition by the previous Government that the teacher making a connection with the students is a very important element of our education—and Mr Davis took that angle last night. We say that that project needs to be developed, in light of Part 1. Of course, the downside for us at the time was that the Te Kōtahitanga money was taken from the manaaki tauira project, which was indeed a valuable pūtēa, or pool of money, available to assist Māori students in the tertiary sector.

I will confirm some figures in terms of truancy rates. In 2002 truancy rates were 3.6 percent for Māori, 1 percent for Pākehā, and 2.9 percent for Pasifika students. In 2004 those rates were 3.7 percent, 1.2 percent, and 3.7 percent, and in 2006 they were 4.5 percent, 1.3 percent, and 1.4 percent. Clearly, those who are suffering at the notion of attending school are more probably Māori and Pasifika.

Is there a better way? Perhaps a lead could be taken from a project that was developed in Hawaii called the Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project. Rather than our saying let us just fine parents, I tried to look for some sort of solution that had come out of research. I did some research and found that in Hawaii a project had been developed to combat truancy. The project identified five key elements to addressing the issue of truancy: parent and guardian involvement; a continuum of services, including meaningful supports, incentives, and consequences; collaboration with community resources, such as law enforcement, mental health, mentoring, and social services; school building - level administration support and commitment to maintaining youth in the educational mainstream; and, finally, ongoing evaluation, including meaningful and relevant outcome data geared towards increasing productive factors and reducing risk. I suppose those are wide-ranging points, but truancy is not limited to Aotearoa; it is a factor across the world. Will introducing high fines to deal with this issue make a difference? It seems to me that it will not, and the research does not really say that.

In terms of addressing that matter, I have lodged a Supplementary Order Paper, and I look for support for it from across the House. Basically, it separates the two issues in this bill, to allow the issue of truancy to be dealt with by itself, and the assessment issue to be dealt with by itself, in the belief that upping the fines may not necessarily, in the end, deal with the issue. If it is about getting our tamariki and our students to go to school, putting up fines, which may well affect only the parents and not those students, will not deal with the bigger issue. The bigger issue is building the relationship between tamariki and the school and, indeed, as Mr Davis pointed out, the teachers themselves, and back the other way—between the teachers and the students.

The Māori Party asks for a little bit more work on the part of the bill dealing with fines. We do not think it will work, and we look forward to some support in the House for separation of the issues. It may well be dealt with a little further down the line, but from our side of things, today is not the day to deal with the issue of fines.

MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this

I am happy to take a call on this part of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. Truancy is an issue that everyone in the House is concerned about. It is an issue that the previous Government did much work on. It is an issue, of course, that this Opposition will be happy to work with the Government on if it puts before us measures that we genuinely believe will combat truancy and will not potentially make things worse.

I start off by acknowledging Hekia Parata and her maiden statement. Her sister April was my sixth-form English teacher at Lytton High School. She was a very, very good English teacher. She was also my sixth-form and seventh-form dean. I am not worried to say that we were all a little bit scared of her, but she was a very good teacher, and it is very nice to have Hekia Parata in the House.

One of the things that I think is important, and we need to acknowledge this when we look at the statistics, is that we do now track children through the ENROL system. There was a time when we really had no idea where a lot of those children were, particularly the children of those families who travelled around a lot and changed schools regularly. When we consider the statistics, an important part is acknowledging that we do track children now and that we have a far better idea.

We are concerned that this bill will have no select committee process. None of the bills in this urgency motion will be referred to a select committee in order for the public and the sector to have their say. I just make a comment to Mr Flavell, who has just resumed his seat. The reason we are concerned about that is not that we do not think there is a truancy problem, but that we do not know whether this bill is the solution. We believe that the sector should have the opportunity to have its say because the bill might make things worse—we never know. If a family that is burdened with debt gets another fine on top of that when they are desperately trying to hold it together, it might actually make things worse. That is why we believe this bill should have gone to a select committee.

I ask the Minister in the chair, the Hon Anne Tolley, what evidence she has that parents who cannot afford the fines now will be able to afford them when they are greater, and what difference increasing them will make. If those families are throwing up their hands now and saying they cannot do it, then why will making those fines so much more burdensome make a difference in those families? If it will make a difference and the Minister can show us the evidence, then why not make the fine $10,000 or $100,000 for parents whose children truant? I ask why we do not do that if the level of fine is what is important.

I think the problem is that we have been told that other measures are coming, but this bill is putting the cart before the horse. We do not know what those measures are. We do not know how they will fit in with the raising of the fines, and how it will make a difference. [Interruption] Maybe Mr King can tell us what these extra measures are. All the evidence we have seen this week so far, under urgency, is that this Government will pursue policies that hurt the most vulnerable families. We have seen tax increases for our low-income families. We have seen an employment relations bill that will take away rights at work for members of those families who are the most vulnerable in the first 90 days of employment.

I ask the Minister to consider this scenario. Let us suppose a mother is working two or three jobs, trying to hold her family together. It is hard to be a parent and try to hold the family together at the same time, especially for a solo parent. Let us say that she is in her first 90 days of work and she gets a phone call from the school telling her that her son or daughter has not turned up and that the school does not know where the child is. What does she do? Most people would say she will go to her employer and say: “My child is the most important thing. This is the thing that matters most so I will leave here, go home, and try to find out where my child is and get that child to school.” By doing that she flags to her employer that this might be an ongoing issue. This parent might be constantly called away from work, and what can that employer do in the first 90 days of that job?

Let us remember that hundreds of thousands of people change jobs every few months. They are mostly low-income people, who go from part-time job to part-time job, and who work a lot in the hospitality industry and in other areas where there is a high turnover.

That employer now thinks that he or she has someone here who will want a lot of time off, because this mother obviously has a kid who is in trouble or will truant a lot, even if that is not the case. All the employer has to say is: “Don’t come Monday.” Under the legislation passed in this House under urgency, where the public had no chance to have a say, all the employer has to say is: “Don’t come Monday.” The employer does not have to give a reason.

Kate Wilkinson, the Minister of Labour, might say that the mother can take a human rights complaint because she is parent and that situation is unfair. Well, she cannot do that, because how will she prove that she was fired because her child was a problem at school and because she is a solo parent? She cannot prove that. All the employer has to say is: “I am sorry. You do not look happy in your work. Don’t come Monday.”

I want to know whether the Minister is connecting these dots. I ask whether she is connecting the dots between the policies we have seen this week under urgency, which disadvantage our poorest families and give them no security at work, and the scrapping of a billion-dollar fund—as my colleague Dr Russel Norman has pointed out—that would have meant more healthy homes and more kids at school.

I want to raise another issue, and that is about a blog about a parent with a child with autism.

NATHAN GUY (Senior Whip—National) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

STUART NASH (Labour) Link to this

I was not going to speak in this Chamber until I had given my maiden speech, because that is the ancient tradition of this esteemed institution and I wanted to honour that. So to those who have gone before me, I do apologise. But last night I sat in this House and listened with growing anger and frustration to the utter drivel spouting from the mouths of members on the Government benches, and I felt I had to break my own rules on a topic that is so important it warrants it.

I listened to Mr Peachey lecture us about educational achievement. That member was the headmaster of one New Zealand’s largest schools, but it was also one of New Zealand’s wealthiest. His students knew about aspiration. They grew up with education—

IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) Link to this

I start by saying that the goals of what the Government is proposing are quite laudable. Truancy is not a joke. We all agree with that; everybody on every side of the House agrees with that. And we are starting from a reasonable base.

As the explanatory note of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill says: “The schooling system supports educational success for many students and, by international standards, a high proportion of New Zealand’s students achieve at levels comparable to the best in the world. The system, however, is not serving all students well, with 14 percent”—not one in five—“of students leaving …” without achieving good standards of numeracy and literacy. So we are starting from a good base, and it is laudable that the Government wants to do better. We all want to do better. That is great, but there is debate about how we do better. Because the Government has decided to get up on its high horse—its high Trojan horse—draw its sword, and crusade this legislation through Parliament under urgency, there is no opportunity for that debate.

We are not hearing from principals, we are not hearing from teachers, we are not hearing from students, we are not hearing from parents, we are not hearing from truancy officers, we are not hearing from the police, and we are not hearing from the truants. That would be a good place to start, would it not? How about we go and talk to the truants? That would be a good place to start. But we do not get to hear from any of those people, because the Government is ramming this legislation through under urgency. Here we are on a Saturday. I could be back in my electorate, listening to people. I have had to cancel four engagements today. One of them was at a school. I could have been listening to teachers and students talking about this issue. But, no, we are here, under urgency, because the Government is so keen to look as if it is doing something.

So let us hear from principals; let us give some of them a chance to speak up. The President of the Secondary Principals’ Association, Peter Gall, said in the New Zealand Herald yesterday: “Parents are very much in the same boat as schools, struggling to ensure the kids are in school, … Unless the truancy is condoned, it would not be right to prosecute the parents.” The Edgewater College principal, Allan Vester, in the Howick and Pakuranga Times on 13 November, said that any worthwhile plan introduced by the ministry needs a lot more than an increase in the level of fines. “Very few cases go to prosecution and that type of long term truancy is very uncommon.” He argued that what is needed are more resources for schools to follow up with families of students who miss more than the average days in situations where there is not a major medical issue. That is what those principals are saying; that is what they are telling us. But the Government insists on ramming this bill through anyway.

I decided that it would be a good idea to listen to my constituents, so I made a few phone calls yesterday. I canvassed a few educators in Palmerston North and managed to get hold of a couple of them, even at such short notice. Do members know what? The first person I spoke—

Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour) Link to this

This particular provision is for me primarily and largely about vulnerable families, and we need to factor them into the programme we are now debating. As we increase penalties for the most vulnerable, we must know that it is serious for them, and everyone from our side has already spoken out about that. We need to be clear that we understand when those punitive measures are to be triggered. They have to be triggered at the right time, particularly for vulnerable families. In order to ensure that we have the trigger points right, we ought to take much more advice than we have taken at the present time.

The Minister, Anne Tolley, said earlier that she was relying on 2001 research on the effects of this, which the ministry or someone else might have done. However, I say to the Minister that she ought to rely on contemporary evidence, and that contemporary evidence comes from the people who are not teachers but are working in schools right now, and who are working with these vulnerable families.

I was part of a group that pioneered school social work in this country. We placed social workers in schools for a good reason—to help and work with vulnerable families. I would like to hear from those social workers. What are they saying? What is their advice? What have they found out so far, what works, and what does not work? I think we ought to bring that into the consideration of this particular clause.

I agree with Mr Te Ururoa Flavell when he talked about the experience from Hawaii. As I understood from what he said, they were talking about involving parents and having a continuum of services. I did not hear him talk about punitive measures; I heard him talk about measures that enable people to participate. So simply increasing the fine will not address what is perceived as an important problem at the present time. I think the House should have the benefit of those people who have the experience and who know the conditions under which optimal assistance can be provided to families. The provisions in clauses 5 and 6 do not do that.

These considerations are important, because the families likely to get caught out for the non-attendance of their children come from the lower economic and vulnerable levels of society. They are likely to be families on a low income, or families with irregular work, and, more important, are likely to have many, many social issues. Those issues need to be understood and heard. We need to know what other factors must be considered in those sorts of provisions, so that changes can be made.

I ask members to consider for a moment these different conditions. If it were a family like mine, then working with the school would be quite easy. But consider the family that I talked about in my maiden speech; a family with disability in the home and difficulties with three children. If those kinds of families, which are coping with inordinate difficulties in the home, are fined or face a prosecution, how does that help them? The system the Government has designed in clauses 5 and 6 will punish them. When I worked with those families, it was the bringing together of all of their needs and using the power of the State, and the provisions that could be made, that made a difference in the life of those families. It will not be done by punishing them with fines. I urge the Minister to send this bill to the select committee, so that the experts can come along and improve on the proposals. This is a one-shot act of conscience only; it satisfies those people who want to punish.

The Minister is acting in an authoritative way but these provisions are not authoritative. What will make the Minister authoritative is to take the best evidence, take the right experience, from those who work with such families. We have worked with those families in the past ourselves, and having worked with them intensively, I say we need to understand their experiences and what will help. It simply satisfies the expectations of a different sector of society, who believe that only by punishing the vulnerable will we will improve their life situation. There is no evidence of that. We will develop a dog-eat-dog society, but we want to avoid that. If we listen to those with experience, we will avoid that happening.

TODD McCLAY (National—Rotorua) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatū) Link to this

We have been debating this education bill for about 2½ hours, and I think there is a consensus in the Committee that literacy and numeracy standards for students in our schools are things we all desire, but the question that the Labour Party asks is this: how does this bill do anything about lifting literacy and numeracy standards in schools?

We heard the new Minister of Education saying that somehow national standards would make a difference. Well, we have explained, more than once, about the national administration guidelines that govern all schools. I personally think the Minister has never heard of them and knows nothing about them. I want to tell her, as many members of the House have already done, that schools are required under those guidelines to do exactly what she says the national standards will do. So we ask ourselves—as the public and certainly all members on this side of the Chamber are asking—what the point of this bill is. If these things are already happening, why are we doing it? Labour members have explained already why we think the Minister is doing this. We think the Minister is doing this so that she can create competition between schools.

League tables will be an inevitable result if this legislation becomes law. It is about introducing, for the first time ever, the concept that primary schools would be able to compare their results with other primary schools, and that individuals would be able to compare their results with those of other individuals. It is not that a 5-year-old should know this, or a 7-year-old should know that—that is already required in schools. It is already happening in schools. We have the benchmarks; we have the progressions. We have asTTle tests whereby the individual achievement of pupils is recorded and is available to parents, and it is required by the national administration guidelines in schools to be available to parents. The Education Review Office checks it every 3 years. So what is the point? The point is a right-wing agenda in education.

The scariest speech I have heard in this whole debate was that of the Associate Minister of Education Heather Roy, who started to talk about what, I think, is behind this legislation. She talked about choice. She talked about competition. She talked about reshaping New Zealand education. That is a truly scary prospect.

Let us remind ourselves of what happened when we came into Government in 1999. We inherited an education system that was absolutely demoralised. Not only was it full of decaying buildings, through the neglect of the property programme, but schools were set up in competition with each other, and bulk funding had divided the profession and demoralised education. We had a crumbling education system. The Labour Government doubled the funding. We put in $5.5 billion extra. We put $3.4 billion into school property, and we put all sorts of amazing programmes into schools to lift literacy and numeracy. We employed 6,000 teachers above what was required by roll growth.

Those are the practical things that one has to do to lift numeracy and literacy in schools. It is not about slogans; it is actually about an ideology of making sure that public education is just that—available to all the public—and that the neighbourhood school is a quality school that any parent would be pleased to send their child to. As many of our members from provincial and rural areas know, the school is the centre of a provincial community, and it should be a quality learning place where quality teaching and learning takes place, and where literacy and numeracy levels are lifting for all students.

New Zealand education after 9 years of Labour is world class. It is cutting edge. During the time that I was the Minister of Education—and during the time of my two predecessors, Trevor Mallard and Steve Maharey, in that portfolio—international visitor after international visitor came to New Zealand to look at our education system. They asked why New Zealand 15-year-olds score best in the English-speaking world in literacy and numeracy. How is it that New Zealand education has been cutting edge, with everything from Marie Clay and the reading recovery programme to Professor Hattie with his asTTle programme at Auckland University rolling out into our schools?

International educationalists ask why New Zealand schools are so good. I will tell members why they are good. It is because we have poured resources into our schools in the last 9 years; we have had a culture in New Zealand of collaboration in our schools, a culture of innovation; and we have a curriculum, developed under a Labour Government, that is flexible enough to cater for individual creativity among teachers and educators and to allow for local flavours within those core competencies. We have an education system that is cutting edge. It is an education system that I as Minister was incredibly proud of. I was incredibly proud of what New Zealand teachers were doing in our schools.

Yes, we do have a tail in education. I have been the first to admit that. When we were in Government, we were the first to admit it. Indeed, that is why we rolled out the decile rating system. That is why we poured money into those low-decile schools. That is where the challenge is for lifting literacy and numeracy. That is where we have to make the difference, to pick up the tail. We have to lift up that 14 percent of young New Zealanders who are leaving school with no qualifications, and those large groups of students in low-decile schools who are not reading at their chronological age, not only for their own potential but for the potential of our country.

Māori and Pasifika students figure highly in underachievers in New Zealand education. The global picture is that New Zealand education is first-class—world class. Within that global picture there is a specific problem: how do we lift up those underachievers—the tail—for their sake and for all our sakes? We can do that only through resourcing. Slogans will not work. National standards or league tables for primary schools will not work. Making children in primary schools focus on a one-off test will not work.

What are the dangers of a one-off test? Well, those of us who are teachers—I was a teacher for many years; and on the National side I can see Hekia Parata and Mr Peachey, who have both been teachers—know that a test is a one-off event. A child may be sick or may have had something happen at home, or he or she could be freaked out by the pressure and tension of the test. It is a snapshot of that moment, on that day, for that child. It is not cumulative, and it does not show the progress of a child over a period of time.

We have moved in secondary schools from that one-off School Certificate and university entrance approach—an exam—to the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, which is a cumulative assessment process. That is a modern, effective system. Indeed, young people are coming out of the system with a true picture of their quality. If we go to national standards for primary schools we will fall back into that old problem of the snapshot for kids.

A number of my colleagues have talked about the experiences of other countries that have done that. We will no doubt hear some more in the next couple of hours. In the United States there is the No Child Left Behind policy. What it has actually done is leave the education system behind. The American education system performs worst in the English-speaking world, and it has got worse under the right-wing Bush regime. Teachers’ salaries became dependent on the result of the tests. Schools’ funding became dependent on the result of the tests.

What was the effect in the United States of the sort of choice that Heather Roy was talking about yesterday—the ACT right-wing agenda where schools are in competition with each other? Well, teachers started cheating in the test. That is well-proved now by educational researchers. The tests themselves became the criteria for teachers keeping their jobs. Low-decile schools in inner-city ghettos and the poorer suburbs of American cities were closing down or were completely restricted in their resourcing. That was the effect of the No Child Left Behind policy.

In the UK the schools of Manchester are ranked 1 to 560. When parents looked at the rankings, who was going to send their child to the 560th school on the list? Everyone wanted their child to go to the schools ranked No. 1, No. 2, or whatever, but, of course, they could not afford to do that because they did not live in the right suburbs. That was the effect of national standards. That was the effect of having league tables between schools.

Mrs Tolley said that this information will not be available to the public; it will be available only to the Government. Has she not heard of the Official Information Act? Does she think that schools will not, with glee, publish the results of their tests, as they do already? With the tests that they sit—the Australasian maths test, and the Cambridge International Examinations—schools love showing what success they have. Who would not? Every teacher and principal is proud of what happens at their school. The effect of that, though, will be to create and compound differences between low and high-deciles schools; between perceived winner and loser schools. We have had a double whammy for education: the 90-day rule, which has made teachers in small schools vulnerable, and now league tables for primary schools.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) Link to this

I have before me an interesting blog from the principal of Ōpōtiki College—a college the Minister of Education would not be totally unfamiliar with. He makes within it some comments that are probably better not read in the Chamber. But he makes a couple of pretty succinct points. The first is that the country that has gone furthest along the line of this bill—the United States—ranks 42nd in the international Programme for International Student Assessment tests, while New Zealand consistently ranks in the top five. A school in a system that spends a lot of time measuring against a standard, rather than focusing on teaching and learning, is one that is not succeeding. He indicates the reason for this: spending time weighing the pig does not make the pig fatter.

The point I want to make is that as part of the learning process, having regular quality assessment is important, and that is what the National Administration Guidelines do. But doing more—putting it into a national testing system and having a national standard that people have to get to, which is the objective of this bill—will add nothing and, in my view, will in fact take away from our education system.

New Zealand has an enormous international reputation for teaching and learning, especially in the literacy area. We are the home of Dame Marie Clay, the person who developed reading recovery, which is now the basis of many, many systems internationally. We have had a lot of debate around the right way to teach reading. One of the challenges in my time as Minister of Education, it might be fair to say, was to get some officials within the ministry to accept that there is more than one approach to the teaching of reading and that different things work better for different young people at different times. It was therefore important not to write off particular systems, which I think it is fair to say had been written off under Nick Smith and Wyatt Creech as being unfashionable, old-fashioned, and not working. I refer especially to phonic approaches to reading. As a teacher I say that it is not my favourite approach, but there is no doubt that it works for some young people at some stages.

I felt slightly in two minds about heading down the route taken by Nick Smith and Wyatt Creech. I was supporting the systems that were more old-fashioned. I was supporting the systems that we learnt to read by. I am not saying that they were the best systems for all kids, and I am not even saying that they were the best systems for most kids most of the time, but I think we got to the point where we managed to more or less drive ideology out of the ministry with this approach. We did a lot of work bringing together the best evidence on the teaching of reading. There was a lot of documentation, and a lot of work now informs the teaching of teachers, both by way of their professional development and also within the colleges of education.

This is a slow process. It takes a lot of time to re-educate, and to develop in a professional sense, people who are teaching reading. We are actually talking about every classroom teacher, including most of the teachers within secondary schools. The point I am making initially is that I think it is very important that we do not get ideological in this particular area.

SUE MORONEY (Labour) Link to this

When I spoke on Part 1 of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill last evening I lamented the fact that there was no opportunity for the general public to come to talk to Parliament about their views on these very, very important issues. This is even more so in Part 2.

There would be a lot to be gained from the Education and Science Committee hearing from people as to how they want to see these national standards put in place. What type of national standards would they be? What would they look like? What must we try to avoid? There are some things that we know we must try to avoid. We have evidence-based research from overseas that shows us exactly what we must avoid. We must avoid national testing, in the way that it drives teachers to teach to a test and therefore does not allow them to use their creativity to address individual children’s needs. I am pleased to say that there is a Supplementary Order Paper that may help to ease the general public’s concerns about their lack of consultation on this bill and the legislative process to date and I want to speak in favour of this Supplementary Order Paper put forward in the name of the Hon Chris Carter.

The purpose of the Supplementary Order Paper is to ensure consultation with the public before the Minister can publish, by a notice in the Gazette, any national standards. I think that is a basic minimum requirement. I would be very, very concerned if the Minister was to not support this amendment. If the National Party is not supporting this amendment, then I think the intention is very clear: the Minister, who has a lot of power and not very much knowledge about these issues, has absolute carte blanche to go ahead and decide what these national standards will be. That could very easily turn into national testing.

MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this

I am happy to take a call on Part 2, and to follow my colleague Sue Moroney in reiterating that members on this side of the Chamber are concerned at the lack of process in this bill.

METIRIA TUREI (Green) Link to this

In some of my earlier contributions I mentioned my concern that private schools will not be included in this policy. Private schools will not be subject to the national standardised testing regime introduced by the National Government, even though they get a considerable amount of public funding. Indeed, it is National policy to increase the public funding of private schools, from around $40 million a year to $70 million a year. That is nearly a 100 percent increase in funding from public money going directly to private schools, but without the imposition on those schools of the same obligations that State schools will need to have in order to meet the national standardised testing. That then raises the issue about how the schools that might not meet the standardised testing regime of the Minister will be funded and resourced in order to meet that standard or to support their children to meet those standards.

It recalls to mind the No Child Left Behind policy of the US legislation, which I talked about in my second reading speech. The experience in the US is that the standardised testing regime had a major impact on the schools that failed to meet that test, even if they were improving. None the less, if they continued to fail to meet those tests, then one of the obligations was that the school potentially had to hand itself over to be run by a private company rather than by the community. Indeed, there has been a great deal of interest in the No Child Left Behind policy in the US. Privatisation advocates in the US have said that in their view, the schools that fail to meet the standards would be the first to be privatised. They would be the first to be either handed over because of the law to private interests, or just bought out by private interests and run by private companies as private schools.

What will it mean for New Zealand if, in the future, schools consistently fail to meet the standard? They might be progressing and making advances but they might none the less not be meeting the standards. What will this mean for schools in poorer communities such as Aranui, Highbury, Ōtara, and Porirua at the same time that decile 10 schools and private schools will get almost a doubling in their public funding? For example, if we look at Kings High—and I understand that John Key is a parent of a child at that high school—it will get an increase per annum—

KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) Link to this

Last night I spoke about what is currently available in schools—notably, the curriculum levels and the achievement objectives for each level. Part of my point was that we already have standards in schools.

If we look at an intermediate school year such as year 8, it is reasonable to expect that a child in that year will be learning and functioning at level 4 of the curriculum. In fact, in each curriculum level there are three sub-levels. It is relatively easy for a child who comes into a school and is operating at, say, sub-level 11 to progress through one sub-level in the course of a year and reach the benchmark. A relatively mediocre teacher can achieve that. It is a lot more difficult for a teacher who receives a child who is working at sub-level 5 to progress that child through five or six sub-levels to reach the benchmark. A teacher who gets a child at sub-level 5 and progresses him or her through four sub-levels is actually doing a fantastic job—a better job than the mediocre teacher who gets a child to move just one sub-level and reach the benchmark. That excellent teacher could be penalised and called a substandard teacher, although he or she has actually done a better job in raising a child from a lower level.

If that teacher and the school do a fantastic job in raising achievement to a greater level but still fail to meet the benchmark, the school could be deemed to be a failing school in the league tables. The effect of a school being deemed to be failing is that parents tend to vote with their feet, the school suffers a falling roll, and that affects resourcing. Good teachers who see the writing on the wall then get out of that school because they can, while they can, and lower-quality teachers tend to remain. There is a downward spiral effect on the quality of achievement. In effect, the school starts to suffocate through the good teachers leaving and through the resourcing leaving with the kids whose parents vote with their feet, and there is a detrimental effect on education overall. There are alternatives. It is reasonable to expect—and this is something our school worked with last year—a child to progress two sub-levels in the course of a year. I suggest that instead of setting a benchmark or a standard, we look at alternatives such as minimum progress over the course of the year.

However, because the bill is not going to go through the select committee process, we are unable to explore all the various options. Members have spoken about getting the truants to come in; well, how about getting the parents of truants to come in? We could get all manner of people within the sector to come and talk about truancy, and we could hear the various options that are available. It is arrogant of us to believe that we sitting here have all the answers and know what the various options are.

So that is the effect of comparing schools’ results—the league tables that will inevitably happen if we have national testing. My biggest concern about this whole process and the lack of transparency is that we are neglecting to bring people in to give them an opportunity through the select committee process to have their say and put forward alternative systems and ideas.

The bill is not going to raise achievement whatsoever—which, of course, is the goal of the bill. I keep going back to the point I made last night that we will not raise achievement until every child in every class in every school has an excellent teacher in front of him or her. I believe that it is the role of the Government to provide the conditions where excellent teachers can weave their magic. Generally, a child will truant because he or she is disengaged, unmotivated, and disenfranchised from the classroom. It is imperative that we give the teachers the skills, the training, and the opportunity so that they can weave their magic for the kids.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) Link to this

I would like to have just a quick word because I get the impression from Opposition members that they are rather confused. They have been saying that we do not need this bill because we already have it, there is nothing new there, and we are already doing it. I again acknowledge the very thoughtful contribution from Mr Davis. His is a welcome voice in this debate. However, unfortunately not all principals are as thoughtful and competent as Mr Davis has shown in this Chamber that he is.

We have to wonder why the previous Minister went out to the media yesterday and said “We cannot support this legislation because of its content.” If the content is something we are already doing, how can he vote against it? The Opposition needs to think through the processes. I say again to Mr Davis that he has done a fantastic job at his school, and we want every single school to have that same opportunity. In 2007 the Education Review Office told us that unfortunately 56 percent of our schools are not doing that. We are setting these standards because we want every child to have that opportunity. It is very interesting that the previous Minister of Education, Chris Carter, said that if Labour gets back into Government he would repeal this law and would not have educational standards for children. That is what a Labour Government would do in the future.

I remind Opposition members that while they are trying to make up their minds whether something we are already doing is a bad idea, a former Minister of Education Trevor Mallard himself said that “A national system of benchmark testing was needed so principals and teachers could significantly raise standards in schools and help New Zealand to regain its status as a world leader in education. Mr Mallard said standards testing was necessary to improve the delivery of education.” Mr Mallard said that. He said that if he were Minister of Education, “trial testing would have started this year.” Well, why do not those members make up their minds? I cannot believe that on the one hand they are saying that we are already doing it, but on the other hand they are voting against it.

GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) Link to this

If there is any confusion in this Chamber today, it comes from the Minister. Nobody on this side of the Chamber has said we do not want there to be standards in education. The Minister seems to be unaware of the situation, so I will help her by drawing her attention to the National Administration Guidelines, which already say “Each Board, through the principal and staff, is required to”, among other things, give “priority to student achievement in literacy and numeracy, especially in years 1-4;”, and “through a range of assessment practises, gather information that is sufficiently comprehensive to enable the progress and achievement of students to be evaluated;”. That is already in the guidelines. They say that student achievement in literacy and numeracy, especially in years 1-4, is a priority.

We have to ask ourselves again why we are debating the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. I think the regulatory impact statement on the bill gives us some guide to that. We read in it that “The Minister of Education can set national standards through the existing provisions of the … Act … either by way of the national education guidelines or by regulations. Regulating for this power could achieve the same policy objective as legislating”. So why would we not do that by regulatory power? Why would we not have a situation where the standards could come under some scrutiny? Today and throughout this week we have seen that National members do not want their policy to come under scrutiny. They do not want to hear from parents, they do not want to hear from educators, and they do not want this policy to come under a proper gaze.

We are left with the Minister being able to gazette the standards. There is no chance for anyone to look at them; that is the Minister’s prerogative, and into the Gazette they go. Members on this side of the Chamber believe that if we are to have standards in education, then we should actually trust parents through boards of trustees, and with their schools and their teachers using the guidelines, to put the standards in place. Those members are saying they do not trust parents. That is the message we are hearing from the National members today. They are shutting parents out of this debate. Part 2 of this bill should be debated by parents and educators in a select committee process. That is important. Does National not believe that getting the views of parents on an important issue like standards in education is something we should do? It is a shame on this Committee that the National Government is ramming this bill through.

There has been a lot of talk in recent months and years from National about the compliance costs for businesses. We often hear those members talk about cutting red tape; they say that has to be the aim. If we refer to the regulatory impact statement on this bill, we see there are some interesting statements about compliance costs. I will quote from it. It states: “The Ministry of Education is unable to calculate the compliance costs of setting national standards at this time, as this is dependant on its implementation.” So we do not even know what the costs for schools will be. We do not even know what the impact will be on hard-working teachers and stressed principals of putting this unnecessary extra load in place. We hear that compliance will come about by having further reporting and more assessment programmes, which will put more pressure on teachers, who are already stressed out and already finding it difficult to do all that work.

This measure does not cut red tape; it increases the burden of compliance for no gain, because we know from the administration guidelines that schools are already doing those things. We have heard from my colleague Kelvin Davis about the excellent work that is going on around the country in terms of standards. We are getting there, and there is no need to go down this path. Why would we want to go down a path led by George W Bush, with his No Child Left Behind policy? We know that policy has been a failure; we know about the inequities that have been caused by that policy. Why would we choose to follow USA down that path? More particularly, why would we choose to go down that path without bringing in the educators and the people who have researched it, to hear their point of view? But no, this Government, 1 week into office, believes it can simply ram this bill through under urgency, without any input from people in the sector.

We have an education system in New Zealand that we can be proud of. It is staffed by dedicated professionals and dedicated teachers who should be talked to, who should be listened to, and who should be brought in to analyse this bill. The learning that our children do is defined by the teachers in the classroom—and I totally support Kelvin Davis when he says that. This bill is no crusade for literacy and numeracy in education; this bill is pure politics. It is about National members being able to say they have done something on literacy and numeracy. Well, I say to the Minister that she has not done anything in this bill.

PAUL QUINN (National) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

Hon LUAMANUVAO WINNIE LABAN (Labour—Mana) Link to this

Mr Chair, kia ora, talofa lava, and warm Pacific greetings. During the election campaign in the Mana electorate an education forum was held at the Whitireia Community Polytechnic in Porirua. Representatives from the early childhood, primary, and secondary education sectors attended. Most political parties, including National, were represented at that forum, and heard the strong voice and the views of the education sector. The educators spoke with one voice. They said that there had been a lot of education reforms, but now they had got it right. They said that the education system is not broken, so we need not fix it—if it ain’t broke, do not fix it. Teacher after teacher and principal after principal stood up and emphasised that fact. As research has proven, we New Zealanders have a world-class education system. The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), despite early problems, is now working and is very successful. The educators were all against National’s policies to introduce more tests and the one-size-fits-all approach, disguised as the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill crusading for numeracy and literacy. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”, they said.

The testing regime, as proposed by National, will lead to winners and losers. It will lead to elite schools and disadvantaged schools. It will lead to haves and have-nots. The current education system, introduced by the Labour-led Government over the last 9 years, has been reducing inequalities in education, building inclusion, and ensuring that all of our children—Māori, Pacific, Pākehā, Asian, and all the other cultures—have the educational opportunities to reach their potential. That was the vision of Peter Fraser and Clarence Beeby. Every person, whether rich or poor, or from town or country, has a right as a citizen to an education that will allow that person to fulfil his or her potential. Their vision was implemented by Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, and now, under the leadership of Phil Goff, Annette King, our Labour team will continue that vision. We will shed light on the Government’s real agenda, and we will hold it to account.

I have visited every early childhood centre and every school in my electorate, and have attended prize-givings. I have talked to and I have listened to principals, teachers, support staff, boards of trustees, parents, students, and members of our communities. There is a deep sense of pride as a result of Labour’s massive investment in education and in the outcomes. The proof is shown, with most of our schools performing extremely well, and New Zealand is already a world-class leader in literacy, participation, numeracy, retention, and achievement. This manifests itself in the way our children from schools in Porirua East, like Cannons Creek School, walk tall. They have worked hard, and they have all the support in terms of world-class teachers and support from schools, families, and communities to achieve. I also add that all the support from Labour, with 20 hours’ free early childhood education, numeracy and literacy support, home-school participation, the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters, Computers in Homes, Gateway, apprenticeships, the Youth Enterprise scheme, and the emphasis on Māori and Pacific preschools, has led to wonderful results. And our parents are in work, they are in affordable housing, and they are getting Working for Families and cheaper health, which all leads to better education outcomes and pride in our children. That is what I want to emphasise.

With regard to Pasifika children, we are above the national average in terms of leading level 2 in NCEA examinations. We have increased numbers in tertiary education. Our graduation levels have gone up. Yes, there is room for improvement, but it is always there and we are committed to that. The education system ain’t broke—do not fix it. If it ain’t broke, do not fix it. Our New Zealand schools are already world leaders in literacy and numeracy achievement and they already have all the assessment tools needed to measure and benchmark our children. The targets have already been set, including in relation to Pasifika children. We have already a joint education programme with the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs with the targets. National’s testing regime will lead to winners and losers. It will lead to elite schools and disadvantaged schools, the haves and have-nots. The worst and most dangerous agenda that National has—and the Minister of Education should listen—

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) Link to this

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair; kia ora anō tātou katoa. I will refer again to the Education and Science Committee’s report in February on the school system, for two reasons. The first one is it seems to me, on reading the report on that inquiry again, that all the information is there—that is the first point. The second point is that, importantly, most of the parties in the House at this point in time contributed to that report, so one would think there was a commonality of view about it.

If I could firstly just set the scene, the report states that the National Administration Guidelines aim “to put good assessment practice at the heart of the schooling system. Accurate, comprehensive assessment enables teachers to plan appropriate learning programmes to build upon students’ knowledge and skills and address their learning difficulties. It also enables schools to report on what students have achieved to parents and the wider community.” Here is the crunch: “Persuasive evidence was presented to the inquiry that inconsistent assessment practice hampers the development of appropriate learning programmes in many parts of the schooling system. The most significant inconsistencies in the effective use of assessment occur within schools, between classrooms or teaching teams. The failure to observe the National Administration Guideline means that students do not learn progressively and cannot steadily improve their achievement. This is particularly damaging to the underachievers, for whom the consequences of following an unsuitable learning programme can be lifelong.” If there is a rationale for this particular part of the bill, there it is.

The second point is that the report talks about assessment tools. This point was picked up by my colleague Moana Mackey. The report continues: “A wide variety of assessment tools are available. They can provide teachers with a wealth of information about what students know and can do, and can be of immense value in planning programmes that will enable students to improve their achievement. . . . Reports are generated to show what students know, what gaps they have in their learning, and what they need to learn next.” Well, I do not necessarily agree with Moana Mackey about the discussion in the select committee. What that discussion told me was that there are umpteen numbers of assessment tools, but the problem is that they assess different things and, therefore, deliver different outcomes. Again, if ever there was a rationale for moving in this direction, there it is, because the general view of the submitters to the select committee was that the vast number of tools produce different outcomes. I will read out some of them: Prose Reading Observation, Behaviour and Evaluation of Comprehension, the Junior Oral Screening Tool, the Numeracy Project Assessment, and the Supplementary Test of Achievement in Reading. Those are some of the ones mentioned in the report. It told us simply that, yes, tools are available, but they produce different outcomes. This provision will perhaps streamline that process.

The third point that the select committee made was in respect of the use of data. Its report states: “We are satisfied that teachers have plenty of suitable assessment tools at their disposal. Our concern is that the schooling system as a whole is not using the huge potential of these tools to support the creation of programmes to improve the achievement of students. This is an issue for all students, but is particularly important for those in the underachieving tail.” The vast majority of those students are probably Māori and Pasifika. “The gaps and deficiencies in the learning of these students cannot be corrected until they have been precisely diagnosed.”

Those are important points, but perhaps we should reflect on a point made further on about an Education Review Office evaluation in March 2007 of how effectively schools collect and use assessment information. The report states: “only half of the 314 evaluated schools demonstrated effective assessment practices, and only 44 percent of schools used worthwhile assessment information which gave an accurate picture of the achievement of students across the school.” This is important information. I would be the first to acknowledge the risk of having too many assessment tools, because they place a huge demand on teachers, some of whom may feel that the assessment takes up time that would be better used in curriculum delivery. But in terms of some of the statistics we have on Māori students in particular at this point in time, I think the effort to give us more data would, in fact, shape those programmes, particularly in terms of what I read out at the start of my delivery.

The final point I want to make in terms of the report is that it also said we should not just go about the process and put out another assessment guideline; it said we should back it up with professional development. Again I quote from the report: “Access to good professional development is essential if assessment is to be used effectively throughout the schooling system.” I totally endorse that point, and I am looking forward to Dr Pita Sharples working with Minister Anne Tolley on this particular issue. In terms of that, the report makes one final point—if the Committee could indulge me by allowing me to provide this information. The report states: “We recommend that more resources be devoted to the provision of comprehensive professional development in assessment practice, so that by 2010 all schools have experienced appropriate training in the collection and use of assessment data. This would make a considerable difference to students’ achievement, particularly among the tail.”—the tail of underachievers.

From the Māori Party’s perspective, schools should be held to account for their part in the underachievement of Māori students. We see this particular part of the bill as an important ingredient in the data gathered being used for productive ends—for setting positive programmes for the future. It is an initiative that the Māori Party will be supporting.

TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) Link to this

The Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is both unnecessary and alarming. It is unnecessary because, as is stated in the bill itself, the Minister of Education can set national standards through the existing provisions of the Education Act, either by way of the National Education Guidelines or by regulations. Regulating for this power could achieve the same policy as legislating, so why are we here and why is this bill alarming? We should be clear about this: the bill is alarming because it gives the Minister of Education the power to introduce national testing in our schools. The Government says it does not want to have national testing, so why are we passing a bill that allows for it? National could achieve the raising of national standards simply through using the existing regulatory powers that it has, but it does not want to do that; it wants to introduce national testing and performance pay for teachers. This is a slippery slope, and we are well on the way to it.

National claims that this bill is about raising standards, but we in the Labour Party know that there is a big difference between raising standards and standardising education. That is what this bill is about. It is about standardising education, and implementing a one-size-fits-all approach to the education system, rather than catering to the needs of individual students. This Government needs to wake up to reality and realise that different kids learn at different rates, and not all kids arrive at school at exactly the same point. Some have had early childhood education, and some have not. Some have a lot of support at home for their learning, and some have not so much. We need to recognise that fact in the primary school system. This bill will penalise good teachers who choose to teach in disadvantaged areas and teach disadvantaged students. It will reward the teachers who choose to teach in higher-decile schools, where the kids are already at a higher rate in their learning. The bill will stigmatise the students who live in lower socio-economic areas, and it will increase the gap between the rich schools and the poor schools.

My colleague Trevor Mallard spoke earlier on about a number of the things that Labour did when we were in Government to increase the number of resources for schools. He did a lot of work in looking at assessment tools in schools and promoting tools like the asTTle assessment tool—I tell Mrs Tolley that I am not referring to a cricketer. He focused on things that work, and he talked to the teachers, the principals, the parents, and the school boards of trustees. Why is this Government so afraid of hearing what those people have to say that one of the first things it does is ram this bill through Parliament without giving them any chance to have a say through a select committee process? In the Labour Party we focus on what works. We listen to the evidence, we listen to what teachers tell us, we listen to what the principals tell us, and then we act accordingly.

National is not at all interested in what the teachers have to say or what the professionals have to say. National knows best; it has had its polling company out there. Its polling company told it that raising national standards was the way to go, so that is what National will do. It will have a bill that is a page and a half long and is all about raising the national standards. That will save all of the problems that we have with literacy and numeracy! National is on a crusade—it is a page-and-a-half long crusade! It will not last for very long.

METIRIA TUREI (Green) Link to this

I seek leave to table two documents at this stage. The first is a report entitled “Exacerbating inequality: the failed promise of the No Child Left Behind Act”.

KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) Link to this

We are debating Part 2 of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. As the Minister of Education said, this provision is part of the National Government’s action plan. It is trying to identify underperforming schools and help them, but in discussion on the floor of this Chamber we have had identified the amount of funding that this Government will be providing to schools to assist them with the whole issue of standards. That amount is $18 million, which is just a tiny fraction of the current education budget. It will not provide any of the supposed turbocharge indicated by the Government. Some action plan it will provide!

We heard the Minister in the chair, the Hon Anne Tolley, say that 32,000 children are truant every day. I ask her what extra resource will be provided for a typical low-decile school, because it is the low-decile schools that will be most affected and will need extra resources to deal with the issues of truancy, numeracy, and literacy. I also ask her what resources will be provided for Māori schools and for children of Māori origin at schools, because our friends in the Māori Party have been asking for assistance in that respect. The explanatory note of the bill refers to the compliance costs. It advises that the Ministry of Education cannot calculate the compliance costs for schools, but it will supposedly take steps to minimise those costs. I suggest that this provision will simply mean another layer of red tape regulation that schools have to meet.

This bill is about a one-size-fits-all approach to schools. It will pit school against school. I have visited just about every one of the 35 schools in my electorate of Christchurch Central, and I can report that not one principal, not one teacher, not one parent, and not one board of trustees representative has ever raised with me the need for this kind of legislation. What many of those schools in Christchurch Central require—many of them being low to moderate decile schools—is more resources. That is what will address the issues still there in terms of literacy and numeracy. In fact, this bill is simply more right-wing dogma. It is a one-size-fits-all approach. It is picking up on the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, which is failed policy. The analysis has been that that policy has failed.

I want to also comment on suggestions that there was failure in education over the last 9 years, under the previous administration. That is offensive, I think, to all those children who did well under the last Government’s policies, who are still doing well, and who have made extraordinary achievements under those policies. It also, I think, provides offence to the many thousands of dedicated teachers who go beyond the call of duty every day to assist their pupils, and who do a darned good job, as many world league tables show.

As the Minister indicated, this bill is also about getting higher achievement. We all acknowledge that schools can do better, but I suggest to the Minister that what she needs to do is already in place. I took the previous Minister, the Hon Chris Carter, to see a decile 3 school in my electorate, Linwood High School. That school acknowledged that it had problems with literacy and numeracy, so a dedicated teacher at that school set up the LANE project—the Literacy and Numeracy Empowerment project. It has become an inspirational project for that school, and I suggest that it provides a model for the Minister of Education to look at, if she truly wants to address numeracy and literacy issues. The school has assessed every year 9 pupil coming into it, right across the board. It assesses the children’s family background, health, educational status, and the sorts of situations they come from. Many of the children come from one-parent homes. Many have very poor teeth, because they cannot get proper dental care. Some students were arriving at school having had no breakfast. The most extraordinary thing of all to be determined by the Literacy and Numeracy Empowerment project, which covers every year 9 pupil at Linwood High School, was that one in five of those children could not read.

MELISSA LEE (National) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatū) Link to this

When I first looked at the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill I got it wrong. I thought it was actually a nothing. I thought it was just a sham, a fig leaf, an answer to election slogans that said National was going to have a crusade on literacy, that it had five planks on which to build a new, strong economy that would lift New Zealand up in the OECD league, and that education was one of them—a crusade on literacy and numeracy was going to be one of the tools that did it. I looked at the bill, as tabled by the Minister of Education, Mrs Tolley, and I thought “what a joke”. It contained nothing but things that were already happening and required to happen in our schools. We already have standards for literacy and numeracy—national standards. They are required to be there under the National Education Guidelines. We have talked about that for hours and hours today and yesterday. Of course, National Party members have not listened; neither has Mrs Tolley, but then one would expect no less. I thought “what’s the purpose of this bill, this nothing bill, this fig leaf, this sham?” Actually, the more I read it the more alarmed I became. It is not a sham or a fig leaf; it is an insidious Trojan horse—in the words of my new colleague, Iain Lees-Galloway, from Palmerston North. He called it a Trojan horse and I thought it was a very good analogy, because the bill introduces, for the first time, the concept into New Zealand schools that primary school-age children will sit exams and those exams will be compared with exams of other children within their school and other schools.

We know that that right-wing agenda, as articulated by Heather Roy when she was in the Chamber late last night and talked about choice, competition in education, and a vision of education, is very different from that of the Labour Party and the Labour Government that has just spent 9 years administering—I would say very successfully—our education system. Labour members talked about the $5.5 billion extra we put into education. We talked about 20 free hours, we talked about $3.4 billion for new school buildings and 6,000 extra teachers above roll growth. We talked about wonderful little initiatives such as laptops for teachers and sabbaticals for principals. We talked about programmes for aspiring principals’ and for first-time principals—all the structures that one puts in to make a real difference to teaching and learning.

What does this bill do? It does not mention anything about resourcing, of course. We heard Mrs Tolley talking about $18 million. I have to tell Mrs Tolley that it costs $10 million to get a 1 percent lift in the operations grant for all 2,600 schools in New Zealand, so the Minister’s $18 million will not give even a 2 percent lift in the operations grant. We gave, this year, a 5 percent lift in the operations grant. I have to say that it was greeted with howls of outrage by the education sector that said it was not enough. Of course, we would have liked to give more; indeed, of course we had already put in $5.5 billion extra into education. I have to tell Mrs Tolley that if she thinks $18 million is going to make even a ripple in the pond of education, or is going to make even the slightest impact on literacy and numeracy outcomes she must be kidding. I tell the Minister that what will happen, of course, is that she will spend most of that money on bureaucrats and consultants. The Minister actually does not like educational experts employed by the Ministry of Education so she will probably consult on this with somebody who will charge her most of that $18 million, or at least the company will, to set up the so-called standards, which are the literacy and numeracy progressions that all New Zealand schools are currently trialling.

We should think about what the title of this bill should be. We could perhaps call it the “Great Leap Backwards Education Bill” because it is going back to those discredited right-wing agendas of the early 1990s when we had people like Nick Smith, Lockwood Smith, and others who were education Ministers, and when we had bulk funding, neglect of school infrastructure, and a shift of resourcing to private education. Or we could call it, of course, the “Roger Douglas has Returned to Parliament Bill”. That would be a rather good title for it, would it not? Seeing Roger sitting over there, I thought a ghost from the past had come back; a horrible nightmare, an agenda that New Zealanders thought was well past, had suddenly reappeared like the ghost in Macbeth. Of course, he brings with him not just himself but that agenda of privatisation—that somehow the market works best, which is a policy that is totally discredited. That policy has not worked in a whole range of areas, but I will talk about education.

Chile went down the path of Roger Douglas and his mates in education. That country thought it would introduce choice into its education system. It would give parents the choice to choose where to send their children. What it did was provide an absolute bonanza for individuals setting up private schools. Chilean education, which was considered one of the best in Latin America, completely collapsed. Hekia Parata’s sister, Apryll Pārata, came with me on an education delegation to Santiago in Chile earlier this year. We had a seminar on the New Zealand education experience and Chilean teachers, educators, and the Minister of Education were all there, because they said New Zealand had got it right. Our learning outcomes for our students, as evidenced in the Programme for International Student Assessment scores and the fantastic educational programmes that were operating in our country, were the envy of Chilean educators, because they said that they had stuffed their education system. Something like 70 percent of Chilean students were now in private schools—these were businesses. The State sector was wrecked by under-investment, teachers were on strike, and students were getting really low-quality education. Tertiary providers were saying that Chilean students coming into education were of declining quality in their literacy and numeracy, and in their ability to study in higher education. All of this was the result of choice and competition. It completely gutted Chile’s education system.

We have not gone down that path, but this bill starts us on that journey. It states—and it all so sounds so innocent, in fact, so attractive—“national standards in literacy and numeracy.” Labour members have said already endless times today and yesterday that we have already got those, so what is this about? I will tell members what the legislation is about. It is about setting up league tables between primary schools. It is about saying that the children in that decile 1 school over there are sitting right at the bottom of a comparison in the greater area. In my own electorate of Te Atatū each of those primary schools—21 of them—will be ranked against each other and the parents will want to compare how children do at Tirimoana Primary School, Edmonton Primary School, Flanshaw Road School, or Peninsula Primary School. They are going to say: “We can drive across the electorate in 12 minutes.” It is the most compact electorate in the country, it is just a concentration of working-class suburbs.

MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this

I am happy to take a call on this part, and I will address a comment the Minister of Education made when she got to her feet during the debate on Part 2. She said that the Opposition was confused because we say that the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill does nothing but that we are voting against it because of the content. I would like the Minister to listen very carefully, because I think that she is the one who is confused. We are opposing this bill not because it does nothing, but because it achieves nothing, and there is a very, very big difference.

This bill does do something. It absolutely replicates what schools are already doing. It adds to the compliance costs and the load on our teachers, and it makes them do what they are already doing. Why does it do that? It does that because the Minister needs to save face. She went out on the campaign trail and promised national standardised testing, and she was beaten down by a howl of opposition from anyone who knows anything about education. So the policy was watered down, watered down, and watered down to the point where it is now simply replicating what is already happening in our schools.

So this bill does do something. This bill makes it harder for our teachers to teach, because they will be forced to implement a national standards system and a system of assessment that they are already doing. That is why this Opposition is opposing the bill. The title of the bill could be the “Increased Compliance Costs and Less Time for Teaching for Our Teachers Bill”, because that is exactly what it does.

The Minister would do well to listen to the education sector. The problem with being an education expert is that everyone thinks he or she is an education expert because everyone went to school. The fact is that there are people in this country who are actually professionals in this area, including teachers and principals, who oppose this legislation.

I ask the Minister how she will avoid having league tables. She says that this is not the purpose of the bill and that she is the only one who will be able to see the comparison. My colleague Kelvin Davis, who knows an awful lot more about education than the Minister does, who has been in the sector for a long time, and who has been the principal of a school that greatly increased its performance under the current system, pointed out that parents will vote with their feet. The community will know which of these schools are the ones that are not doing well.

METIRIA TUREI (Green) Link to this

I am not at all surprised that the National Government has not allowed the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill to be referred to a select committee, because of course there is an agenda behind the face of the legislation, and that is around the privatisation of education. It is pretty clear that privatisation is certainly ACT’s policy. Some members may have been on the hustings with ACT candidates who talked about how schools should be part of the marketplace like any other company, and who said schools should be run as companies, with all of the corporate culture that is involved with that idea. This is clearly the ACT Party policy. Even Heather Roy, when I mentioned the No Child Left Behind policy in the US, was quite happy to discuss her party’s policy of vouchers and charters. Of course, ACT is part of the Government now. It has Ministers in Government, and no doubt the National Government is following that philosophy and ideology in this legislation.

Perhaps we should rename this bill as the “Education (First Step) Amendment Bill” because it lays the groundwork for the opportunity to have increased privatisation of the public schooling sector. We see National’s intention to increase privatisation already in the large funnelling of public money into private schools. It is worthwhile looking again at how the neo-liberal agenda has impacted on schooling policy in the US, particularly with the use of standardised testing. I refer to two further articles on that issue. The first is called “Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies”, and the second is called “The Growth of High-Stakes Testing in the USA: Accountability, Markets and the Decline in Educational Equality”.

We are talking about the agenda of neo-liberal deregulation and privatisation of public services, and it leads in some ways to the kind of rhetoric that we have heard from National, particularly around the privatisation of public education and the blaming of public education for our lack of international competitiveness and the increasing gap between rich and poor. We have heard those comments all through the National Party statements on this legislation. We had Allan Peachey blaming education for poverty, and for the long tail of poverty. That is exactly the kind of rhetoric that George W Bush has spouted about the US policy as well. We have heard Nick Smith describe poverty as the politics of envy, completely failing to understand that the long tail of underachievement in this country is a long tail of poverty. What is National doing about that? It is doing absolutely nothing; it is simply punishing the poor for being poor. We have been talking about that all week.

GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) Link to this

I am very pleased to take a call on these clauses. I think members have already heard me talk about my concern that we have not sent this bill to a select committee, and have not had the opportunity for some focus on the bill’s detail. In particular, I have been focusing on the regulatory impact statement. I want to quote another part of the regulatory impact statement: “Requiring schools to assess students against national standards will help to focus teachers on skills that every child should be mastering in reading, writing and mathematics.” That leads me to believe that perhaps we should be calling this bill the “Patronising Teachers and Parents Bill”. To say that teachers will focus on reading, writing, and mathematics only if they have national standards is patronising. Perhaps that goes to show why this Government is putting through this bill under urgency—they simply do not want to hear about it from teachers and parents.

There are other names that we could give this bill. As I am a fan of the movies, we could call it the “Back to the Future Bill”. What we are doing here is moving back to a time when we sought to put students in boxes, and we are saying to teachers and children that one size fits all in education and that is all that is needed. We are saying that we can have national standards, and that we do not need the flexibility currently in the system, so we are going back to the future with this bill. We are going back to the future by making sure that students have to fit in rather than by looking at their needs, and by working with teachers and encouraging them to develop different kinds of programmes and assessments. Yes, the National Government wants to take us back to the future.

I could carry the movie theme on and perhaps call the bill the “Meet the Feebles Bill”, because National has launched on a feeble crusade today. The bill is a 1½-page crusade on literacy and numeracy. It is a pitiful effort from the member. It replicates what is already done, and done well, inside our schools now by teachers and parents, who should be trusted, listened to, and brought in to talk about these issues and how to improve them. That is what we should be doing, instead of taking the approach of ramming the bill through now.

There are other things we could call this bill. We could call it the “National Plays Politics Bill”. That is what it is. It is about bumper sticker slogans that were put out through the election campaign and that have now come to this House. They represent nothing in the way of really lifting standards in education. We know that across this country—and Mr Peachey knows it—schools have been developing excellent work in this area. We need to be talking to them and working with them, not imposing additional compliance on them. We should be ensuring that teachers who are already stressed out and busy are not now being told to do more reporting in a different way, when in many cases they are already adequately communicating with their parents. We do not need to be putting this legislation in place now. It is simply playing politics so that National can say it is doing something. We have the National Administration Guidelines that allow—in fact, require—schools to do this. So it is quite clear that the Minister does not trust parents and does not want to listen to them. We can therefore call this bill the “Don’t Trust Parents and Teachers Bill”.

We can also look at the bill and say that the compliance costs that have been put on schools have not even been assessed: “The Ministry of Education is unable to calculate the compliance costs of setting national standards at this time,”. That is a result of ramming through this bill under urgency at the end of the year—at a time when schools have not had a chance even to think about what this means.

I have also spoken to schools in my electorate over the last few days. To a person, those who responded to me asked: “Why is this being done in this way? Why is this Government putting this bill through when we have not heard an adequate explanation from the Minister?” A teacher said to me: “Why would we follow George Bush?”. America has just rejected George Bush, so why would we choose at this time to follow George Bush and his No Child Left Behind policy? It is a ridiculous policy. It has failed in America and has led to inequalities, and that is where this process is heading.

National standards will require national testing. That is the real agenda of this National Government. That is what it has come here to pass. The crusade has begun with the Trojan Horse, as my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway said. So perhaps we could call the bill the “Education Standards (Trojan Horse) Bill”, because that is what this Minister has brought to this House today. We know, internationally, that this approach does not work; it puts students and children into boxes. It does not allow them to learn in the way that is most appropriate for them, but that should be the vision of education that we have in this country. We have a system we can be proud of, and a system staffed by dedicated professionals. We know, from throughout this debate, that teachers make the difference, not standards.

JO GOODHEW (National—Rangitata) Link to this

I move, That the question be now put.

METIRIA TUREI (Green) Link to this

I seek leave to table two documents. The first is a report entitled “No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies”.

SUE MORONEY (Labour) Link to this

I think that the New Zealand public did actually believe the National Party when it said during the election campaign that education was the most important thing. I think that a lot of parents and a lot of teachers thought that National meant it, but already those people know National did not mean it. Let us look at the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill, which we have in front of us. Honestly! Does it even make 3 pages? No. It is very, very slim. That shows how much the National members care about education. But the issue is not even about the small number of pages in the bill; it is actually about daring to say this issue does not need proper discussion, and we should not have a proper, democratic process so that teachers, parents, and communities can have a say on what our education system should look like in the future.

One of these two statements must be true: this bill is either meaningless, because it does what is already in the National Administration Guidelines anyway—and why are we here on a Saturday wasting parliamentary time, if it is meaningless—or dangerous. I am starting to subscribe to the second view, now, after listening to this debate. I was particularly interested in what Metiria Turei had to say about a hidden agenda. I was also interested in the discussion my own colleagues have had about a Trojan Horse, and that is starting to ring more and more true. The reason I say that is that I watched very carefully what happened to the very good amendments that were put forward by the Hon Chris Carter in order to ensure there could be debate about, and some public scrutiny of, the national standards the Minister might decide to put in. What did the National members do with regard to those amendments? They shut them down straight away. That tells me that there must be a secret agenda. Why else would the National Party deny the public the opportunity to scrutinise national standards that come from the Minister?

This Minister has said during the course of this debate that we will not end up with national testing. I ask the Minister in the chair, Anne Tolley, whether that is right. Oh, she is not confirming that now. Already she will not confirm it, but I thought I heard her say this legislation is not about national testing. There is no reaction—so it is about national testing. Is it about national testing or not? Suddenly I am unsure again, and that concerns me even more, because I thought I heard the Minister say the bill is not about national testing. She is not prepared to confirm that now, but I thought I heard her say that before.

We have also seen that Minister on video, saying teachers would be exempt from the provisions of the 90-day probationary employment period bill. How did that end up? It ended up with that Minister voting against the very amendment that would have ensured teachers were excluded from the 90-day bill. So can we trust this Minister? Can we trust this Minister to have the ability to gazette national standards? Those may or may not be national testing; she will not confirm or deny that now. She seems to be taking the American stance yet again—neither confirm nor deny. We have heard that before from the Americans. Maybe the Government is completely going towards the American stance.

Anne Tolley is neither confirming nor denying national testing at this stage, but I am just looking at a Hansard here from earlier on in the debate. My colleague Brendon Burns said in his speech that the bill introduces standardised testing, and the Hon Anne Tolley said it does not. That is in Hansard. So which is the true statement there? The issue is really very clear.