Financial Review Debate — Ministry of Education

This afternoon at question time the Minister of Education stood up and bragged about what he is doing for education and literacy standards. He equates throwing money at the problem with improving quality. Why did this Minister not tell us about this latest scandal of the bounty hunters programme? For people who are confused about what bounty hunters are, the Minister has been paying $8,207,000 to “community-based organisations” to sign preschoolers up at early childhood centres. The children are ticked off, and the organisations collect the money and go away—enrol children, collect the money, then go away. There is only one condition to be part of this programme: it has to be a Māori or Pacific Island child. How much do the organisations get? It worked out at $1,600 per child, and 5,275 children have been signed up. But there have been no checks on whether those people are double-dipping or triple-dipping, whether they are enrolling children at one centre and re-enrolling them at another centre. There have been no checks on how long children stay at those centres. I would like this Minister to stand up and answer these questions, which he has not been able to answer.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: No one’s asked me.

For 8 months I have been asking parliamentary questions, and the Minister’s answers come back stating: “This information is not collected.” There are no exit interviews or checks done on what sort of added value there is. I ask the Minister who these community organisations are. Who are they?

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: This member used to have it.

Well, I have a list of them here, and I cannot read them all out. There are 50 community organisations that have been paid, 50 bounty hunters, with names like Te Puawaitangi Ltd, which was paid $400,000; Whare Akonga Learning Centre, $600,000; Manaaki Management Services, $202,000—phantom children—Teuila Consultancy, $200,000; Kokomuka Consultancy, $290,000; Waikato Raupatu Trustee Co., $560,000; Ngāi Tahu, $153,000; and Kōhanga Reo Trust, $810,000. How many more children were enrolled? By what percentage did participation go up? The Minister is raising his eyebrows. He knows the answer—1 percent. It went up 1 percent, after $8 million was spent.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Not true.

Well, if it is not true, the Minister has been misleading with the answers to his questions, because it is the Minister’s answers that say participation went up 1 percent. That does not even take account of population growth. If the natural growth in numbers of children enrolling at early childhood centres is taken into account, then the country is worse off after $8 million has been spent. Members can imagine what those families could have done with that $1,600 per child. For instance, imagine how many books parents could have bought for those children. Parents could probably have paid for their own private childcare, instead of having this Minister tax them, take money from them, then give it to those bounty hunters.

Another interesting name on this list of bounty hunters is Learning Media Ltd. It got $440,000—nearly $500,000. Learning Media is a Crown-owned publishing company. The chairman of this company, who also made himself the chief executive officer, was a corporate high-flyer called Don Sollitt. In 6 months he helped himself to $200,000 of taxpayers’ money in fees and expenses. What has this Minister done? He has sent him an invoice for $9,000, because it is too hard to get the money back. Not only did he do that but he overrode the board’s decision. It had made a resolution—it was minuted—as to how much Mr Sollitt was to be paid and how he was to be paid. Mr Sollitt went to the Minister and the Minister said: “That’s all right. I will see the board.” The Minister then organised for a different payment to be made. The board was so confused that it went to the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: What? Rubbish! Go and say that outside the House.

It is in the transcript of the select committee. The board was so confused that it went to the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit, and the unit confirmed that what the Minister had said stood. So this Mr Sollitt was able to get—

💬 Government Member: The Minister doesn’t handle the money.

Well, who is running Learning Media—the board or the Minister? This is the same Minister who sacks boards of trustees without gazetting it. He is out of control, and he should resign.

I want to make reference in this review to the student loan scheme. This review states that the student loan scheme will expand and double by the year 2010 to some horrendous number—over $10 billion—so I thought it would be good if members could offer some suggestions on how we could reduce that figure. Quite honestly, if it continues into the future—as it is being continued with present and/or future students—it will be an insurmountable burden to our future generations and families.

United Future would like to retain the student loan scheme, but only in the context of using it for tuition fees. Borrowing money for the basic cost of living, which a lot of students have done, is something that we do not put up with in any other sector of our society. For instance, we do not allow, or expect, the unemployed to borrow to meet their cost of living; neither do we ask the sick to do so, yet somehow we have got into the kerfuffle of allowing students to do so, and therefore allowing the debt referred to in this review only to balloon out and expand.

Another thing that can be done to close down the bulging student loans scheme is to change the age of eligibility for allowances. Presently, as the Minister and all of us know, up until the age of 25, parental income is taken into account in assessing eligibility. This policy has been in place since 1992—some 12 years—and nothing has been done to allow for price inflation or any other thing of that order. To me, some elements of that policy seem quite unfair. One is that the allowance is based on the parental income threshold, whereas for other members of society, such as the unemployed, the allowance is based on their own, and not their parents’, income—even from the age of 18. Turning the scheme around and basing it on the student’s income would be a better form of reducing the bulging debt that is mounting up in the student sector.

Secondly, in the negative impact it has on women, the loan scheme impacts very strongly on our future society. For instance, compared with men it is more difficult for young women to get jobs and/or pay off their loans. United Future policy would be that when women have their first child, or when a child is born, for the next 12 months their loan would be interest-free. They would even be given some rebate on the loan for that period of raising that child.

For graduates who had trained in subjects that are in demand in the public sector—such as doctors and nurses, etc.—and were prepared to stay and work in New Zealand, United Future would look at a bonding scheme to allow a progressive wiping out of loan debts. That would be a very sensible, common-sense move to overcome something that really need not be loaded on to future generations.

Lastly, United Future suggests that a voluntary long-term solution would be to look at long-term savings schemes that are in existence and could be put into place for those who could afford, right now, to put money aside for their children’s tertiary education. When the time comes, those students would have saved in advance, through their parents or whomever else we wished to put into the scheme, and could spend their post-degree years earning money without having to pay off debt. We think that putting some of these suggestions into the equation would help dramatically the figures in this review.

Members would have noted that I took some time to get to my feet, because I was waiting for the Leader of the Opposition to speak. We were told that the major issue for the National Party is education, that it is interested in standards, and that education is a key issue. What did Dr Brash say? Did he get on his feet? There was not a word, not a whisper, not even a whimper from the Leader of the Opposition in this debate. Do members know why? He does not care. He does not care about education, he does not care about standards, and he especially does not care about literacy. One just has to read Dr Brash’s press statements to know that he does not care about literacy.

This is a Government that does care. This Government cares deeply about literacy issues, and that is why—

💬 Rodney Hide: Tell that to Hagley Community College.

The member is talking about Hagley in a spirited way, and I want to deal with that issue now. The Ministry of Education made a mistake in approving a prayer room.

💬 Rodney Hide: What about the Minister?

I have apologised to the school for the mistake the ministry made, and I have apologised to the school for the comments I made when I was not aware that a ministry official had made such a silly decision. I think the issue has just about gone away now. It was wrong.

💬 Rodney Hide: The Minister got it wrong.

I got it absolutely wrong, because I would not have believed that ministry officials would make a decision to approve a prayer room—as they did.

💬 Rodney Hide: They didn’t.

The member said they did not, but I have seen the letter, and they approved a prayer room. They were wrong; they should not have done that. It is not the sort of thing we do in our education system, which has a tradition of being secular. I think that fair points have been made around the country about not approving Christian prayer rooms, Hindu prayer rooms, synagogues, or other arrangements. It is not appropriate, it should not have happened, and I regret the fact that it did.

Let us get back to the important stuff now, and that is literacy. I think it is particularly interesting that people are coming from around the world to look at asTTle. When I mentioned asTTle earlier today, the Leader of the Opposition, who was in the Chamber, had not heard of it. He did not know what it was about. Someone who has talked about having national testing, and having a school certificate for 7-year-olds—as has just been abandoned in the UK as an absolutely useless exercise—might have looked at the things within New Zealand that people from around the world are coming to look at.

AsTTle has been developed between Auckland University and the Ministry of Education. It is a computer-based programme, and it has an assessment bank. It currently runs from years 4 to 6, and will run from years 7 to 10 later in the year. At each level in English, literacy, and numeracy, there are 5,000 questions. It is a computer programme that randomly selects questions to be answered by kids. It gives parents and teachers incredibly good information about how their kids sit vis-à-vis other kids in their class, other kids in their school, and kids from around New Zealand.

More important, it shows where teachers’ strengths are—areas where they are doing well—by looking at their whole class results, and it shows areas where they are weak. It is then used for the professional development of teachers. Rather than being something that just tests the kids and leaves it there—the way a pencil and paper-type test does—asTTle then points the teacher in the direction of the next piece of work that students should do. It points the teacher to the Ministry of Education website, which has thousands of units of work on it, and shows the work that a kid with the strengths and weaknesses at this level should do next. Developed at this sort of level, this programme is used nowhere else in the world. People are coming from around the world to look at our literacy leadership.

We had carping comments from the ACT member earlier on. I accept that amongst the spending on promoting participation, some contracts were wrong. Where there were wrong claims, just about all of that money has been recovered. I hope we will get all of it back. Every single one of the contractors who made a claim that was not appropriate has been fired. Not one of them is there now. I think that is appropriate.

I found out about those problems in 2002. It is fair to say that there was a little bit of anxiety on the part of the ministry, which asked what it should do. It had a really important objective to promote participation in early childhood education, and there were people employed on contracts to do that who did not look as if they were shaping up. The ministry asked if it was to be politically correct. I said: “No. If there have been rip-offs, get the money back and don’t re-employ them.” I think that is vitally important, because approaches like that have to have integrity.

But is it not worth focusing on what has happened in New Zealand? I know that members opposite believe that we should not think of people as Māori or Pacific Islanders, but we know that Māori and Pacific Island participation rates in early childhood education have been much lower than for the population generally. As a result, that has flowed through to poorer performance in the early parts of primary school. It has flowed through to poorer literacy. It has flowed through to more truancy, more failure at secondary school, early leaving, fewer qualifications, and not as many jobs.

We all know that early childhood education is vital, and that we should be encouraging people into it. In the time I have been Minister, the participation rate in early childhood education for Māori children has increased by 3 percent. I think that is good—it is real progress. Better than that, since I have been Minister, the participation rate in preschool for Pacific Island children has increased by 7 percent. What we are doing is targeting the areas we think are important, in order to improve our education system and enable it to go forward.

Why do we want to do that? I am not the softest, most liberal, wussy, caring person, with a Liz Gordon approach to life, but I want to look at our future as New Zealanders. We have a population that is changing. I happen to think that people of my generation—the under 50-year-olds—have been targeted by Dr Brash for the superannuation cut. He will not have superannuation for us. I know that the only way people who went to school with me can have superannuation is if Māori and Pacific Island people who are currently in the education system and currently pre-schoolers are working. The only way they will work to their fullest potential is if they have good education, and high-quality early childhood education as a part of that.

It is worth saying right at the end that for the first time in 30 years—having been started in the previous financial year and completed in this one—we have two new State secondary schools. One is at Botany Downs and the other is at Alfriston. They are wonderful schools, and all members should have a look at them.

Report noted.

Ministry of Transport