10. Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) Link to this
to the Minister for Tertiary Education
What advice has she received about the numbers of redundancies of adult and community education coordinators in high schools which are occurring right now?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Tertiary Education) Link to this
I do not have advice on the numbers, but then I would not expect to, because those are matters for the boards of trustees. I do understand that those are employment or contractual arrangements, and it depends on whether the boards of trustees have employed these coordinators, whether they have contracted them, or whether the coordinators will continue to provide services in the new year.
Hon Maryan Street Link to this
I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. This question was set down on notice as a question for consideration. I would have thought the Minister might have been able to discern that information from officials. Is that not possible?
Mr SPEAKERThe question that member has asked—and I accept fully that it was on notice—asked what advice the Minister had received on the matter. The Minister said she had not received any advice on the matter. I think that it was a perfectly reasonable answer to the question.
As I said to the member in my earlier answer, it is an employment matter between the boards of trustees and the staff.
Hon Maryan Street Link to this
What advice has she received about the pressure on schools’ budgets caused by those redundancies, and what will children go without next year because of them?
Sue MoroneyIf it is costing Melville High School in Hamilton around $80,000 to pay for two redundancies, what has she suggested that the principal of Melville High cuts from that school’s operational grant in 2010 to afford the necessary and rightful redundancy payments?
I say to the board of trustees of Melville High School that that was a decision it made when it employed someone full-time on a yearly contract of funding. It was clearly a decision that the board made itself.