Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2)

I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2).

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

I move, That the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.

This bill continues the Government’s overall programme to reform the legislation around education and training in New Zealand. To rewind the clock back 30-plus years, to when the Education Act 1989 was passed through this House, was only one part of the equation. In fact, some of the legislation that we’ve relied on for that 30-year period dated back to prior to that time—in fact, to the 1960s. When we became the Government, we started a programme of consolidating, modernising, and updating the education legislation framework, and this bill continues that work. The most significant change that we made was the passage of the Education and Training Act 2020, which brought all of the existing legislation together under one umbrella, reorganised it, streamlined it, updated the language, and brought it into a form where we could actually start to make significant policy decisions so that we can get legislation that genuinely reflects the way our education system currently operates. Having said that, with a legislative change that is that comprehensive—and that was, frankly, done in a relatively short space of time—there will inevitably be issues that flow from that. This bill picks up some of the issues where further work needed to be done or where additional clarification was required.

So, first of all, the legislation from 2020 introduced new network planning provisions for early childhood education (ECE) that are not dissimilar—or, effectively, create a more similar process—to what we have for new schools. People can’t just simply establish new schools without going through an approvals process. This introduces an approvals process for new early childhood education services ahead of when they are established. It deals with a range of issues that we have seen with the proliferation of ECE services in recent years. We’ve seen examples where low-quality providers—who may be on a provisional licence in some of their services because there are concerns about the quality that they have been delivering—have been able to establish additional new services with very few, if any, regulatory barriers to stop them from doing that. That’s not a good outcome for the children, and the network planning provisions that we are putting in place with this legislation help us to address that issue. We’ve also seen a plethora of ECE services being established in some areas while there continues to be under-provision in other areas. So a more strategic and planned approach to ECE provision can help us to even that out so that we can ensure that all of our communities have access to the quality early childhood education that our tamariki deserve to have.

We have listened to some of the feedback that was provided during the select committee process. We’ve made changes to the bill as a result of that feedback, including making provision to allow for those centres that are currently under construction to continue to do that—so they, basically, can finish their construction before the new measures come into effect. Other changes in the bill which I think are quite significant haven’t perhaps been given as much attention as I think perhaps they deserve. One of them is the changes around police vetting requirements. Some very, very significant changes were made in this House, through the Children’s Act 2014, that changed the requirements for people working with children right the way across the public sector. They didn’t pick up every aspect of that, though, and there are aspects of our education legislation that are currently inconsistent with those changes when it comes to police vetting. So this legislation deals with that. It makes sure that we’re taking a consistent approach to police vetting of people who are working with children, and I do welcome the widespread support that we’ve received for those provisions.

The bill also deals with some issues that arose from reform of the Teaching Council back under the period of the last Government, and they were some changes which we, as an Opposition, scrutinised vigorously and, on balance, supported because we were concerned, as everybody was, that there should be a very rigorous process for dealing with issues around teacher misconduct and particularly any concerns around inappropriate behaviour by teachers. I think, on balance, on reflection, we could all agree that the pendulum swung too far and that what we created—what the House created—in passing those changes was a system that was overly cumbersome, one that resulted in far too many complaints ending up having to be dealt with by the disciplinary tribunal, adding significant stress and significant cost to teacher registration in a way that was not proportionate to the overall level of risk that was being dealt with. So the changes that we’re making here do swing the pendulum back to something that’s more pragmatic and sensible. It allows the Complaints Assessment Committee, for example, to resolve some of those issues without having to go through a full disciplinary tribunal hearing, and that is something that will reduce the impost on the profession and, potentially, the level of compliance cost that the Teaching Council faces. That, of course, will flow through into what they have to ultimately charge the teaching profession in teacher registration fees. So we’ve listened to the concerns that the council have raised about that current process and about the effect that has had on the level of costs that they face and therefore the level that they are having to charge teachers in registration fees.

The bill expands the mandate of the Education Review Office to look at initial teacher education provision and teacher professional learning and development. That is something that I think, again, should be welcomed. There is expertise there in the Education Review Office that can be leant to that. Professional learning and development programmes by teachers—I think people who are out there listening to the sector would, again, find a common theme in the feedback that we receive on those: that there is very variable quality there. There are some exceptionally good teacher professional development programmes out there, but there are also some that aren’t that good a quality. So giving the Education Review Office a remit to look at that can only result in better professional learning and development opportunities for the teaching workforce, and that’s something that I hope the Parliament will endorse, bearing in mind that, if we fast-forward 10 or 15 years in the future, the vast majority of teachers who will be in the classroom at that time are teachers who are already in the classroom today. So we need to provide them with quality opportunities to continue to upskill, to continue to develop during their teaching careers, and the extra remit for the Education Review Office can only add to that.

The bill deals with some provisions around the code of pastoral care for domestic students—again, helping us to refine and clarify as we continue to implement very significant changes that this Parliament put in place in 2020 that deal with pastoral care issues around tertiary students. And it also deals with the ongoing programme of work that we have in place around changing vocational education qualifications and credentials, recognising that things like micro credentials are going to become a much bigger part of our future, and the way our qualifications framework operates needs to recognise that as well.

So, in the main, most of the changes in this bill are relatively pragmatic and sensible changes. I acknowledge that there is some debate around the early childhood education provisions, but I think, on balance, the rest of the bill has attracted widespread support, which I welcome, and so I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m happy to rise to take a call on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). The one good thing about the early childhood sector—well, there’s many good things, but one of the most important things—in New Zealand is that we are spoilt for choice. Parents can take their child to a kindergarten, a Montessori, a play centre, a day care, a crèche, a community centre. They are spoilt for choice, and that is one of the most important things about our early childhood sector in this country. You have a centre that suits your child’s needs and your family’s needs in a location that you want. It might be close to your work. It might be close to where you live. It might be close to where your family live.

💬 Arena Williams: Not in South Auckland.

It might be close to your children’s schools. That’s a great point. So the point was just yelled at me, “Not in South Auckland.” Well, that’s really interesting, because this bill does nothing—does absolutely nothing—to encourage centres to set up in areas where there aren’t already centres. There’s a reason that there are areas of New Zealand where there aren’t existing childcare centres, and that’s because it doesn’t make financial sense to put them there. This bill doesn’t address that. I asked the Minister about that in his office, and I said, “Hang on a minute. This bill, all it’s aimed at doing is stopping the proliferation in wealthy areas where there are lots of centres.” And the Minister agreed. And I said, “Well, what about centres like South Auckland?”—to the member who just yelled out at me. And I said, “This bill doesn’t address that.”, and he agreed with me and said, “Yes, no, we’re going to have to use the existing Targeted Assistance for Participation (TAP) funding to make sure that we address centres in those areas.”, which is already a measure that we use. So this bill doesn’t actually address that at all.

So now we’ve put that to bed, I’ll go back to my point, which is that there is incredible choice: where you want it and the type of centre that you want. This bill destroys that. This bill gives the Minister the decision as to what centre, what type of centre, will be placed in which location. Now, the problem with that is it takes choice from local people, local communities, as to what they want and where they want it. The problem—and I’ve brought this up so many times—is that the Minister doesn’t have any data to tell him where people want centres and what kind of centres they want. I asked him about this a million times and also at the committee of the whole House stage, and he didn’t answer my question. The reason he didn’t answer is because he doesn’t have an answer.

The ministry doesn’t have a rich set of data that says parents in this area really want a play centre and a Montessori. He doesn’t have access to that. He also doesn’t have access to where parents want their centres. He might know that, yes, there’s a big new development here, but he doesn’t know whether or not those people—say, in Ramarama—want their centre close to where they work in Auckland or if they want it close to where they live. He doesn’t have that data. So what’s he going to do? Well, I guess in the end all we can deduce is that he’s going to rely on data from those applicants. So he will expect an applicant to come to him with a full set of data that they have gone out and spent thousands of dollars on that says, “We know from surveys and from the data that we’ve collected that people in this area want this type of centre in this location because it’s on a route to where they work or where their kids go to school or whatever.”

Now, the Minister is going to have to rely on that. We know that from the bill, which says that he’s only able to undertake a high-level assessment of the relevant attributes of the area to be serviced because he only has limited data. That means he’s going to have to rely on the data provided by the provider that turns up. So the question then becomes: how is he going to analyse that data? How is he going to verify that data, because what happens if he has two providers turning up to him saying completely different things? What if he only has one provider that turns up with data but he doesn’t really like them because it doesn’t fit his ideology, and he waits however long—we don’t know, because he wouldn’t answer that question—for a number of other centres to put their applications in? But what if they don’t have data but he picks one of them because he likes them better based on the data that company A, who got theirs in first, spent thousands of dollars on?

So you can see what a complete mess we’re going to be in by letting the Minister decide what he wants, where he thinks it should be, based on data he doesn’t have, based on an ideology that he’s bringing to what kind of centre that he wants, and that is problematic. Furthermore—and I made this point to him; again, he didn’t answer in the committee of the whole House stage. It was around quality. Now, he talked at length in his opening speech today around the fact that he is modernising and updating the education sector, and his big problem was the proliferation of centres having a reduction in quality. Well, my argument is that if this is true, which I don’t believe it is, it’s only going to get worse, because you can imagine if you are a centre given that golden ticket in your area, to be the only provider of that service because that’s deemed to only need one centre, well, what is there for you to upgrade your service, to offer different things, to be better? Because there’s no competition. No one can move in and set up a centre next door to you. So what incentives do you have as a centre to upgrade any of your services, to offer any additional services, or to improve your quality? Well, the answer is that there is none. So we are giving a golden ticket to centres not to do anything extra over and above the minimum standards, if that’s what he’s worried about. Well, clearly he’s not worried about that.

The issue with quality is a big one. I put this to him, and he didn’t answer. The other question that I put to him that he didn’t answer, which this legislation clearly brings up, is that once a licensed early childhood education (ECE) centre has got that golden ticket in that area, what does that do to the value of their business? How does that distort the market and the value of those businesses? Again, he couldn’t answer that question.

The one egregious thing in this piece of legislation that we tried desperately to fix but is still in there in the final bill is new section 17A(2), inserted by clause 5B, where the Minister may at any time impose new conditions on the approval or amend or revoke any existing conditions. Let me make clear to this House and those people listening what that means. That means the Minister can grant a licence to a provider. They can go away and start building, start the process, and then the Minister can turn around under this and say, “Actually, I’ve decided to reduce the number of licence places you can have.”, or “I’ve decided that you can’t do this and you must do this.”, in the middle of a build. The question we put to officials and we put to the Minister was “What bank will lend on this?” And the Minister said, “Well, banks haven’t come to us. They haven’t mentioned anything.” My question back to him was “Well, did you go to any banks and ask? Because we did, and they clearly told us that this is a problem.” The Early Childhood Council said this is a problem. If we are trying to make sure that people can get set up with early childhood centres, they have to have finance, and under this bill, it’s going to make it very difficult for them to get it.

One of the other issues that we had with this bill that’s still there is that there is no time frame. I mentioned earlier in my speech today about how long the Minister might wait after he gets the initial application in for an early childhood area in one place before he waits for a few others to put their applications in. It could be months. We don’t know, because there’s no statutory time frame required for him to have to make a decision. Now, in “Real Land” out there, where people are actually doing business, the developers put up land for tender in new subdivisions. Typically, the applicant has got six weeks for that process to happen. Now, the question I put to the Minister is: is he going to make a decision within six weeks to give that licence? Because if he doesn’t, that applicant is going to miss out on that land that’s put up for tender by that developer, which means that potentially it’ll go to someone else, which won’t be an ECE centre, and that new development won’t have an ECE centre in it. So we’re talking about new-build areas, new subdivisions, which may not end up having ECE centres built in them because the six-week time frame the developer puts the land up for tender—the Minister won’t be making a decision in that time frame. I find it highly unlikely that all of this process is going to be done within six weeks.

This all goes to the point that the Minister and his officials did not go out to the sector and talk to them about the implications of this legislation. We know this because he admitted today that he made a number of changes. It was great that he made a number of changes, but the fact is that I had to go to his office and sit down and practically beg for them at the last minute, because officials in select committee wouldn’t listen to me. The Minister wouldn’t listen to me in select committee. I had to go to his office and beg for them. Now, that indicates to me a massive lack of understanding of this sector on the part of the Minister and on the part of the officials, because they aren’t talking to the sector. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you can’t get a resource consent in anything less than about 15 months, and the Minister was, previous to my going into his office, only giving people two years to complete the whole build. Finally, at the last minute, in a Supplementary Order Paper, he said, “OK, we’ll make it three years.” But the point is that I shouldn’t have had to do that. He should have been in touch with the sector, and he’s not, and the whole bill reflects that from beginning to end when it comes to early childhood centre licensing. That is why we will not be supporting this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). It was a pleasure to chair the Education and Workforce Committee. While we considered this bill, we had a very constructive way of working together, as we usually do on our select committee—although, I do have to say that some days are better than others.

This bill was introduced on 30 November 2021, with the first reading on 14 December of that year. The Supplementary Order Paper relating to the network management of licensed early childhood services was referred to our select committee on 14 December 2021 to be considered alongside this bill—a bill that both contains new policies and minor and technical amendments to existing provisions in the Act.

The Minister has already outlined that this bill is the next step in a programme of continuous improvement. He also spoke on the quality concerns, in particular, that the reforms in this bill are designed to deal with. They have been extensively detailed in the previous stages as well, so I won’t go there, but I will be creating a more sustainable and more diverse network of early learning services.

We received 36 written submissions and we heard 14 oral submissions, and I want to thank all those submitters for their time. It has been really helpful to receive that feedback. Several changes were made as a result of the feedback that we heard, and I want just to mention a couple of those. The previous speaker spoke about the delay to the commencement date of the timing of the network management changes to 1 February 2023, and that was one of the changes that the select committee made.

Also, the Minister in his speech touched on the police-vetting provisions. They were changed. And, in particular, the New Zealand Educational Institute Te Riu Roa expressed their concern about what they saw as a loophole in the police-vetting processes, where registered teachers who don’t hold a current practising certificate and are employed in a non-teaching role were, under the current legislation, not required to obtain a police-vet. So we heard the concerns about that particular loophole and we addressed that, and, as a result, we made an amendment to clause 65. Police-vets are now required for non-teaching staff who are registered teachers but who do not hold a practising certificate.

So I’d like to finish by commending the Minister of Education for introducing the bill. As has been said before, it is the next step in the programme of continuous improvement in the education sector. Therefore, I commend the bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. So I rise to speak in opposition to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) in this, its third reading. Much does seem quite minor and technical about it, but what it does is continue this Government’s theme of not trusting those that are out on the ground delivering education, whether it’s at the early childhood end of it or at the tertiary sector; of not trusting those that are delivering the education to make the right decisions; and of pulling the decision making back into the centre and particularly back to the Minister. In the early childhood education sector, I have no doubt this legislation will lower quality, will make it more difficult to set up new centres, will reduce competition, and will increase prices to families having to access these services. Some of the legislation also continues the Government’s theme of wasting public money and also not understanding business processes.

Let me give you the example of the police vetting, which is now requiring, prior to commencement, work applicants for non-teaching and unregistered positions to be vetted. This will be a nightmare for police. It will put unnecessary strain on police resources at a time when they clearly need to be freed up for much more serious issues that they are having to deal with. When we brought this to the Minister’s attention in the committee stage, the Minister said he was looking at streamlining this process. Now, what does that throwaway line even mean? We hear things like that: streamlining; work smarter, not harder. What does it mean? The reality is, if 30 people apply for one position, the police will have to vet those 30 people applying even though only one person will get the job. That is not a good use of police resources.

National strongly opposes the Minister having the new provisions regarding the network management of the early childhood education sector. We certainly opposed the consultation phase being truncated at a time when the early childhood sector was under incredible stress and they begged for more time and a better time for them, rather than during COVID when they were having to deal with shortages in their centres and were not able to put in submissions. But the Minister carried on with this as he is inclined to do. The Minister said, “It will all be OK, this network management planning, because there will be national and regional policy statements, and it will all be strategic and planned.” Except nobody knows what is going to be in those national or regional policy statements. Nobody knows what the Minister’s strategy is or what his planning is, and so anyone wanting to set up a new centre is shadow boxing. They don’t know what they’re going to be judged on. They don’t know what the criteria will be.

Here it shows again the naivety of having no understanding of business processes. When a centre is being set up, considerable amounts of money are being spent on the planning processes, on the collation of materials, on looking at demographics and work patterns, etc. That is commercially sensitive material that they have had to spend considerable money on pulling together. So how is that going to be protected when it goes in to the Minister and his bureaucrats to look at? My colleague has already pointed out: what will the Minister do when he gets that application with all the commercially sensitive information but doesn’t perhaps like the look of that provider? Is he going to sit and wait till he gets a couple of other providers that he knows of somehow and thinks might be better? And then is he going to share that commercially sensitive information with them, if they haven’t collated it? So there is a whole question around dealing with commercially sensitive information, but we can’t expect this Minister to know about business processes because we need to keep reminding ourselves he has never run a business.

The simplification of qualifications and other credentials is the enabling part of the bill for the workforce development councils. The workforce development councils were part of this Minister’s brainchild of merging all the polytechnic sector together. That’s worked extremely well for him, hasn’t it! So he’s now got to put in this legislation, which allows the WDCs, the workforce development councils, to be able to approve these qualifications. This was previously done by people in industry who knew what sort of training industry needed. But the Minister, in his wisdom, has set up workforce development councils, and if you take a look at the composition of those workforce development councils, you have to look very, very hard to find anyone with any industry knowledge or experience—but they need to be given the opportunity, apparently, to simplify these qualifications.

Let’s look at the increasing flexibility in this legislation for the Government to set requirements on compulsory student-services fees. These are fees that the tertiary providers set. Now, the Minister, of course, can’t possibly trust tertiary providers to know how to set these fees. He can’t trust universities, polytechnics, and private providers to set compulsory student-services fees. He has to be the one in there meddling because he knows best. This is the long arm of Government trying to dictate to those at the sharp end of education delivery. Be it early-childhood delivery or tertiary delivery, it is the long arm of Government dictating because they know best. They can’t have this pesky market or competition having an influence; they want to reduce choice and, at the same time, reduce quality, because people making a decision at the centre removed from the front line of delivery never have the best information to make decisions.

So we are opposing this legislation, which the Minister tries to say is “just technical stuff”, just stuff to enable them to roll out their policy. Well, he’s quite right. It allows him to continue on with this relentless trundling of centralisation. Whether it is the tertiary education sector, whether it is three waters, or whether it is the health sector, this Government knows only one ideology, and that is centralisation—Ministers and bureaucrats making decisions. Those people on the front line of any of those services cannot be trusted to make the best decision for the people, so the Minister is putting this legislation in place to ensure that he is the only one that gets to make decisions, not those people out on the ground. We therefore oppose this Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) at its third reading. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2).

National left behind a damaged education sector. It was worrying that teachers and the schools were in despair. The education legislation was outdated, but most of the energy and the legislative changes had gone into the flawed ideological sideshows like national standards and charter schools. There was a lack of unifying vision or sense of mission. Early learning, in particular, had suffered from frozen funding for most of the decade and the rampant competitive model.

This bill is a part of the Government’s comprehensive programme to reform the damaged education sector. The Act brings all of the legislation on early learning, school, and tertiary education into one single statute. It makes amendments to the Education and Training Act to align with a new policy and make minor technical changes. It will create a more student and their whānau - centric approach.

The Education and Workforce Committee heard from a few submitters, and their views were part of the finalised bill. The committee listened to their submissions and their views and also concerns. So I’d like to thank them for their submissions and I’d also like to thank the officials who worked hard to make this look the way it is now. So it’s a good bill. It’s a bill that rights the wrongs of the past; it’s a good one. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to begin by acknowledging all of our teachers and everybody that works in the education sector who have gone back to school, as well—I know there’ll be some relieved parents out there, as our tamariki have gone back to school—but also to acknowledge the enormous amount of pressure that they’re under as well.

And I was just reflecting on a headline that said teacher sick days are up 50 percent on 2021 and there have been calls for more support, and how important that is, given that we’re living in the middle of a COVID pandemic, and the need to actually support those people that support our children to do the best and be the best that they can be within the education and school settings, as well. So enormous pressures for them, but also acknowledging that there have been some movements to provide N95 masks and better ventilations, and so on and so forth. But, also, reflecting on the need to actually have an expert-led school plan as well—and I’m hoping that’s on the agenda for the Government to make sure, so that people aren’t trying to do that guesswork in terms of how they manage their different school communities. Because when you talk to teachers, sometimes teachers are parents as well and they’ll have children in one school while they’re teaching at another school, and so if those two schools have completely different types of ways that they deal with the COVID pandemic around masking and all of that kind of stuff, that gets a bit tricky for them. So keep that on the radar, our friends in that corner of the House.

This bill is a small, technical bill, and it’s got a number: the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). All of these bills always seem to have the same name—you’ve got No. 2, No. 1, with the third readings of, it’s like listening to a trilogy. This one focuses on allowing the police vetting provisions; amongst many other things, strengthening teaching council disciplinary processes; requiring compulsory student services fees; and enabling NZQA to exercise discretion about whether to cancel the registration of a private training establishment in relation to immigration breaches, and so on and so forth—important things that need to be wrapped around and sorted out, and we support that.

But I guess my reflection on listening to the debate today—I understand the importance of having that certainty for people that are setting up early childhood education (ECE) centres, and for business to have that certainty to go about and do those things. But, on the other hand, it’s important for us to remember that that should be about what is the best for our tamariki, what is the best for our mokopuna, what are the standards that are in place to make sure that they’re being taught in the best ways possible, and the ways that that can be organised to support them to do that.

Sometimes, I listen to the debate and I think sometimes you could just transfer out ECE for burger joint—you know what I’m saying? You could be talking about anything. It sounds like you could be setting up a McDonald’s franchise, but, actually, we’re talking about tamariki, we’re talking about childhoods, being able to support services for our children. And that’s what the focus should be. And so bringing that all under one umbrella makes sure there are those small, technical fixes to make sure that there is some sort of overall coverage and focus on whether that stuff that is being carried out is a good thing. So, on that, we support this bill.

I rise on behalf of ACT to speak to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2), the third reading.

It’s amusing to hear from the Government how terrible education was prior to 2017. I was teaching then; it wasn’t. Actually, quite the opposite. The purpose of this bill is to make amendments across a range of matters in the Act, to give effect to new policy decisions, and to make other minor and technical changes. There are some good things in the bill, but unfortunately the bad outweigh the good, and ACT will not be supporting it. I’ll go through quickly some of the changes.

The police vetting provisions: the proposal is to ensure all non-teaching and unregistered employees of early childhood education (ECE) services and schools must be the subject of a vet before they begin working in the service or school, and to remove the two-week period in the Education and Training Act to apply for a vet for non-teaching and unregistered employees after they start work. On the face of it this makes sense; less confusion, and we all like keeping kids safe. But the practicalities really haven’t been considered and police must just be shaking their heads.

Teachers council: there’s not a lot of love lost between the teachers and the Teaching Council. They’ve lost the trust, and it’s not an ideal relationship. But to strengthen teaching council disciplinary processes is a good thing. Complaints are taking far too long to process and to reach an outcome, and this is unfair on everyone involved. Complaints—along with registering teachers—is the Teaching Council’s core business, and any streamlining in these areas is very welcome.

Then there’s the compulsory student service fees, where the proposal would give Government more flexibility to regulate these fees, enabling a wider range of options; to regulate, to support broader Government objectives. The current disaster that is Te Pūkenga must make everyone worry that the Government wants to interfere more in the running of tertiary institutions, and I think we should just park that and watch this space.

Enabling national student numbers to be used when there is funding to support work-based training makes sense—more streamlining.

The change to the private training establishments to enable the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to exercise discretion about whether to cancel the registration of a private training establishment in relation to immigration breaches we believe is overkill. It reeks of a not so subtle attempt to get rid of private training establishments by stealth, and we don’t support that.

💬 Education Review Office: the bill seeks to amend the Education Review Office’s mandate to enable it to review professional learning and development, amongst other things. No teacher thinks this is a good idea. Departments and schools know the professional development that they require and they’re currently doing it. It’s another example of consultation being completely ignored by this Government. There are other changes to make—minor and technical amendments—but the main sticking point with this bill is the network provisions in the ECE sector. The reasons for this have been explained in previous speeches much better than I ever could. The extra power the Minister wants points to a much bigger agenda that this Government has quite openly admitted—control and centralisation. It shows a huge mistrust of the private sector—“We know best.”

Lastly, we cannot support the exclusion of kōhanga reo and Māori immersion services from the network management. We have a lot more faith in Māori providers than the Labour Party do.

Madam Speaker, this bill has some good points, but the overreach is just too much, and ACT opposes this bill. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to make a short contribution on this bill, and I do want to acknowledge our teachers across Aotearoa. It’s really important that our community understand why this bill has been introduced by the Government, as the Education and Training Act was passed in 2020. The amendment bill makes minor urgent amendments to that Act, and the provisions in this bill cover a wide range of areas. For South Auckland, where I am from, there are a number of early learning centres—specifically in Māngere, there’s over 25, and I just wanted to make that point.

I’m just going to focus a few comments on the early learning sector, and as a response to the matters raised during the select committee process. I wasn’t a part of the Education and Workforce Committee at that time. The recommendation of commencement has now been moved from 1 August 2022 to 1 February 2023 to give it more time, as you’ve heard from the chair of the select committee.

The amendments will improve the quality of services by introducing new requirements to demonstrate capability, by strengthening the fitness and proper test of early childhood education (ECE), to ensure that the early learning centres’ national and regional policy statements will provide a map where supply and demand will meet the need and meet the strengthening test of applicants, for suitability, and other amendments.

As you’ve heard, the bill focuses on early learning to further improve quality of services of these new requirements—that require to be demonstrated. As the Government provides significant investment to ECEs, we need the enablement of the network management, with the intent to ensure to provide the approvals process and provide that rigour.

So under the new bill, the amendments set out that the Government requires the early learning network to create a strong, sustainable, and higher quality services, with a diverse network of ECE services across the motu.

This amendment bill is an important step towards improving success across Aotearoa for our learners, and it’s the first of a number of bills that the Government has prepared to progress the education work programme. It will contribute to the continuous improvement of the education sector—clear, consistent, and consolidated by the Government. I commend this bill to the House.

I call Nicola Grigg—a five-minute call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to continue the National Party’s opposition to this bill, the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). I’m yet to hear one solid defence from that side of the House as to why New Zealanders should sign up to this idea of network planning for the early childhood education (ECE) sector. Erica Stanford made a really pertinent comment earlier about choice. This bill does nothing but remove choice from families and from communities around New Zealand.

If I think specifically of my own electorate of Selwyn, we’ve got 55 ECE providers there at the moment. We are the fastest growing region in New Zealand. The numbers that I hear bandied around about kids that are lining up waiting for ECE centres to come online are quite scary in a funny old way. But these provisions within this bill are going to give the Minister the ability to set and change any conditions to an ECE licence approval that he sees fit at any time. What gives the Minister the right to assume that position? This is a classic Labour “we know best” approach to everything. This is the long arm of the Government reaching into our communities and messing around with private providers and market delivery in this sector. It will have disastrous anti-competitive results and it will reduce the quality of the services provided to the small children of New Zealand.

When I speak to providers around my region, there are three major concerns that they’ve had with this bill. One, as has been mentioned, is the timing. Who on earth would put through a major sector reform during a pandemic, other than Andrew Little? Oh, Chris Hipkins will as well. Two: the delays caused by COVID, supply chain management, child space shortages. And, three, as I’ve just mentioned, is the Minister’s unilateral right to revoke pre-approval.

All of the fears and concerns that Erica Stanford spoke about so eloquently earlier are playing out in Selwyn and particularly in Rolleston. There is a real cause for fear in providers in Selwyn. I’ve got an email here from a local operator that I’d just like to quote, because it really does say it all: “I can’t stress how much pressure we are getting from upset and angry parents because they cannot find childcare to return to work, nor have a choice in where they enrol their child due to a minimum of year-long wait lists.” I contend that nothing in this bill will alleviate that.

Another operator I know has spent three years and close to $5 million building a new centre that has been delayed by COVID and supply chain disruption. It’s still yet to be completed. It already has 40 children aged under two enrolled. But like so many others in the building sector, they are waiting on jib, they’ve been disrupted, and they can’t confirm their opening date. They’re in the dark around time frames, when they can apply for their licences, and they worry that their inclusion is going to be risked, and they do not want to see their $5 million investment go up in smoke.

There is another ECE service near to that that is turning away 15 to 20 children a week. It is, as I mentioned, the fastest growing region in New Zealand, and such prescriptive legislation does not allow for market flexibility. The network management provisions are due to come into force in just a couple of days and many are still in the dark as to how to ensure their licensing will meet the new requirements. I’ve been privy to quite an extraordinary statement from the Ministry of Education itself, and it goes like this: “While there is no guarantee of obtaining a licence to operate under the current system, we appreciate that the new network management requirement adds some uncertainty into the process of establishing a new early childhood service. It’s our intention to provide the sector with as much information as possible as the policy develops.”

Well, if a Government is going to pass a law like this that is going to send so much uncertainty into the region or into the country, you would think that that policy had been developed and was watertight. My time is concluded, but I do not commend this bill to the House.

I call Sarah Pallett—a five-minute call.

Thank you so much, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a short call on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) with great pleasure. Although I was not sitting on the Education and Workforce Committee whilst this bill went through its various processes, I really want to take a moment in time just to commend them for their hard work, and I look forward to speaking later, on further work that they’ve done.

This is the next step in the comprehensive programme of continuous improvement for the education sector. Whilst, as I said, I didn’t have the pleasure of sitting on committee for this particular piece of legislation, I read the bill with interest, and I was particularly interested in the strengthening of the processes around police vetting, because, unlike Penny Simmonds opposite, I simply disagree that it is a waste of police time to vet people before they have or are likely to have unsupervised access to children. I find that attitude utterly baffling.

It’s a process that costs approximately $70, if an individual wishes to do it themselves before they seek employment, and it takes about 20 working days—20 days where significant harm could be done. I don’t feel that it’s unreasonable for parents to expect that people who have unsupervised contact with their children have undertaken a thorough police vet, and I commend this bill to the House.

I liked the colourful turn of phrase from my friend on the other benches Teanau Tuiono, when he said that when listening to the debate tonight and the Opposition’s comments, you might think that we were discussing burger joints. But these are Government-funded education centres.

I feel a little bit for the Opposition, because they know that the system for these Government-funded education systems is not working and is not resulting in having those early childhood centres (ECEs) where we need them. So they’ve decided to defend a fiction—a fiction where in all parts of the country we have choice, where parents are spoilt for choice. The member for East Coast Bays said that parents are spoilt for choice, but she didn’t consult her colleague the member for Selwyn, who then quoted extensively from an early childhood centre from a growing region in our country where the population is increasing and where ECEs are saying, “We do not have enough capacity. There is not enough choice for parents.”

I would suggest to members that the solution to this is a planning network. Perhaps we could call it a network planning model, where the Minister, who is elected by the people, takes responsibility for the parents around the country and makes sure that we can send our kids to our local ECE centres, because do you know what the system does now? The system pushes women out of the workforce. Women like me from South Auckland who are Māori and like my colleagues who are from South Auckland and are Pacific have the lowest rates of workforce participation in this country.

Not having access to ECEs that work for our whānau and our communities means that women are locked out of working and are limited in their opportunities for further development, and it keeps people poor. That’s why I commend this bill to the House.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill, the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) third reading. National’s not supporting it because, fundamentally, it grants too many powers to the Minister to interfere and, frankly, foul up a lot of the development of the early education sector. And I think all New Zealanders will be conscious of the fact that the early education sector is important on two levels. It’s important for the opportunity for the youngest New Zealanders, preschoolers, to have some access to an element of education, to get them prepared for the compulsory sector. But it’s also very important for families as well, so that parents with young kids are able to have those children looked after while they carry on working. And we’re all conscious of the cost of that, which is very significant for many families—for all families. So it’s a very busy, difficult time. Our family have certainly been through that period, like many members of the House. So we’re very conscious of the need for the sector to be responsive, to be as affordable as possible, and reflecting the very wide variety of needs within the communities and within families across New Zealand.

So the sector has developed, over the years there’s been quite a lot of competition in the sector, a lot of variety. Our main concern with this legislation is that what we have is this impulse towards centralised control that we’ve seen, time and time again, in very many different elements in this Government, the most classic example being the polytechs, which have all been combined into one—disastrously, so far. We see it in water. We see it in health. We see it everywhere we look. This kind of agenda that we see from this Government is extended to the early education sector, where the Government is giving the Minister quite far-reaching powers to impose new conditions on the approval of applying for new licences.

So most New Zealanders will have not known about, or have forgotten, the way that New Zealand’s economy used to operate in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and up until the time of the reforms of the fourth Labour Government. But it was a licensed economy where just about everything that you did, you couldn’t just do. You couldn’t just set up a trucking business and go out and compete, find customers, and steal customers of other providers, if they weren’t doing a good enough job, by offering a better service, lower rates, or just an all-round more useful offering. You couldn’t just go and open a business. What you had to do was you had to go along, hand in glove to the Government, and ask them for a licence to operate. And the Government would say, “Well, sorry, Mr so-and-so, there are too many providers doing this already, and no you can’t”. Or they might say, “Well, OK, yes. We’ll let you do it under these conditions.” And it was a terrible system because all it did was protect the incumbents, and if you had a licence, you literally had a licence to print money, because the opposition would be kept out.

Right throughout the whole economy, New Zealand was operated in this way. It was a feudal system that if you had the licence in a particular area, whether it was driving trucks or whether it was selling tennis racquets, or whatever—whatever different element of the economy was licensed in this way. And it was a kind of dirty deal against consumers, because the consumers, the people who actually bought the stuff, were the ones paying the very high prices. At that point, New Zealanders were paying extremely high prices for all sorts of goods and getting relatively low-quality goods, whether it was washing machines, stoves, or TVs—you name it, it was all divided up into licences.

That is what this Government is doing to the early education sector. They seem to have forgotten all the lessons about the problems that it leads to and are reintroducing this principle into the early education sector, where the Government and the Minister, advised by officials, will say, “Oh, well, actually, no, we think there are enough providers in this particular neighbourhood; you can’t open up a new business.”, which is just great for the incumbents, not so good for the consumers. In their wisdom, the Government seems to think they know better. And then it creates an enormous amount of uncertainty because once a licence is provided in this legislation, the Minister may, at any time, impose new conditions on the approval.

So just imagine, you’ve decided to set up a new early education provider in a community, you’ve got your licence because, thank goodness, the Minister has decided that you deserve it and there is enough room. And so you go, “OK, good. I’m going to start. I’m going to invest a million dollars setting this up in order to provide a good offering to the community.” And then, halfway through, “I’ve got all these loans, I’ve figured it out, it’s going to work, you know, it’s quite a complex exercise—I’ve figured it all out.” And then, halfway through, the Minister may impose new conditions. He might say that you need to do “x”, “y”, or “z”. What an impossible situation. Willie Jackson wouldn’t put up with that in any way, shape, or form in many of his operations—there’s no way he’d put up with it. They may amend or revoke any existing conditions. They might say, “No, you can’t do it this way. We’re going to do it this way.” And what a hopeless position to be in.

It creates uncertainty. Anybody that understands the way the world works will know that you don’t get investment if there is uncertainty—a huge amount of uncertainty. Well, you get less investment where there is uncertainty—a whole lot of things that you can’t control. You can’t control, unfortunately, the rampant inflation that we’re having to deal with as a country. Governments can have an influence over that by the way that they spend, and the quality that they spend, and the quality of the monetary policy, and all those sorts of things. But one thing you can control is Government regulatory risk. And what’s being introduced here is greater regulatory risk because, explicitly, the Minister may, at any time, impose new conditions, or amend or remove existing conditions. And so that, naturally, will frighten a lot of people off and make them less likely to invest.

I’m looking at some notes here by my very learned colleague Erica Stanford on this topic, and she’s written “killer”—killer—in the line. And the killer is it’s a killer of investment. Because, under those conditions, who is going to take the risk? No one, of course. Who will lend to a business when there are such arbitrary—arbitrary—rules there that the Minister can impose? The Minister can change, in an arbitrary manner, the conditions on approval. The sector have pointed this all out at length during the select committee process. Has the Government listened? No, not at all.

The bill also—and we talked about this briefly yesterday in the Education and Workforce Committee phase—talks about the curriculum approvals in the polytech and the tertiary space. The point that we made there, of course, was, you know, this is a sector that has been fouled up by this Government with the review and the centralisation of the whole polytechs, some of which were not working well, some of which were doing very well. Now, they’ve all been combined, and the projected deficit is $112 million for this year—it will be worse. And then, they’ve brought a new curriculum, such as for the nurses—these same nurses that the Minister of Health says speak with a forked tongue, which was insulting and has irritated them to no end. Those same nurses pointed out that the curriculum development—they hadn’t been consulted properly, and Te Pūkenga–New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology has withdrawn it so far. So it doesn’t fill us with a great deal of confidence in the way that this is operating.

So this legislation is a missed opportunity to reverse some of those changes. But what it does introduce is the ability for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to deal with some micro-credentials, which will make a small step. But I do implore this Government to think twice about both the early childhood education reforms, at this late stage, and the polytech reforms which, so far, are not making much progress and certainly not filling us with confidence with the ability of this Government to centralise in—

The member’s time has expired. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Just looking at all these smiley faces up in the gallery, I realise that I am one of the last speakers before my good friend Dan Rosewarne embarks on his parliamentary career with his maiden speech. Before I speak on this Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2), I also want to acknowledge that such is life, and that when somebody new comes in, sometimes people also leave this place. I want to acknowledge my colleague David Bennett on the other side of the House, who has recently announced that he will be stepping away from his role at the end of this term. On behalf of the people of Hamilton, I just really wanted to quickly thank David Bennett for his years of service to our beautiful city, and also especially as a progressive member of this Parliament, for his support for both the marriage equality bill previously, as well as the abortion legalisation bill. Thank you for that, and congratulations, once again, on your new child, as well.

Now, coming to the Education and Training Act, which came into force on 1 August 2020, it was one of the most significant education bills to come into force and it solved a lot of issues that we saw in this education workplace. But one of the things that I heard on my recent visit to a BestStart early childhood education centre in Hamilton was that there were only some centres which have already been built. The infrastructure was already in place, but, unfortunately, there was a bit of anxiety around whether they would be affected by some of the things that are being proposed in this bill. I just want to quickly acknowledge the work of the Education and Workforce Committee in helping delay the network management commencement from 1 August 2022 to 1 February 2023, because that will reassure people who have invested in helping set up these early childhood centres already.

But this is a great bill and it solves a lot of issues in the education sector, and I would highly recommend this to the House. Thank you.