Debate on Crown Entities, Public Organisations, and State Enterprises — Tertiary Education Commission

I want to raise some issues with the Minister, Trevor Mallard, about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. The board has decided to appoint Ms Karen Sewell as the acting chief executive officer. I ask the Minister to tell me whether this is the same Ms Karen Sewell who used to be the principal of Green Bay High School. The community around that school thinks that it will take at least another 5 years to clean up the mess she left. I know that she has been running the Education Review Office—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Very well.

Well, the Education Review Office reports are sounding more and more like old-style primary school reports than they ever used to.

I ask the Minister to tell us why he thinks that that appointment will restore any confidence in the role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in administering our secondary school qualifications. I can tell the Minister that my feedback has been that it will not. That lack of confidence will be built on by his silly initiatives today. Is it not just so much the Labour Government that when there is a serious issue with exams and assessments for our secondary school students, it spends months and months chewing it over and then comes up with the solution of having a workshop and a seminar? The other thing it will do is put out a pamphlet. This Minister thinks that less time spent teaching and more time spent putting out taxpayer-funded spin will fix confidence in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). I want to know why he thinks that that will be the case. I want him to tell us how he will explain to parents that sending teachers off to more workshops and more seminars is the answer for NCEA.

It is time the Minister accepted that there are a couple of critical problems. The first is that the assessment is not consistent and valid, and the second is that NCEA is not manageable. It needs more resources at the margin than are worth it. The Minister should just fix those problems. Instead, we have gone back to the line that this Minister has taken right from the day he took the job—that any people who do not like NCEA or think there is a problem with it do not understand it and, therefore, must be stupid.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: No, just this member is stupid, not everyone.

He thinks they are all stupid, so the Government will send them a pamphlet in the mail that will tell them that NCEA is actually fine. Then they will think that the Government is fine.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: If they can read.

If they can read—they are the lucky ones. I want the Minister to tell us a bit about that.

I also want the Minister to tell us what his plans are for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. I will give him a little bit of advice, if he is still thinking about those plans. He should not roll the New Zealand Qualifications Authority into the Ministry of Education. That would be a mistake. If the qualifications framework is going to work, then it needs to be administered by a body with statutory independence so that we do not see happening to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority what has happened to the Tertiary Education Commission, whereby the Government is shamelessly manipulating the funding levers to meet its own political requirements.

The qualifications framework is important for New Zealand. It should be kept separate and at arm’s length from political intervention, and that means running an independent statutory body in the way the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is set up now. If the Minister rolls it into the Ministry of Education, that will do more than anything else to undermine the existing bipartisan support for the qualifications framework.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Oh, we’ve really noticed that.

The Minister knows that NCEA is only part of it. Of course there are questions about the quality of what is in that framework, but the concept of the framework itself is supported by both parties. So I tell the Minister not to roll it into the Ministry of Education. That would simply put it under the control of people who have already made a mess of NCEA policy. Why give them the job of administering this as well? I am sure that if the Minister persists until the election he will not get a permanent chief executive officer. But as the new Minister after the election I will be able to get a new chief executive officer for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, because National will take a set of measures designed to increase the credibility of the qualification. [Interruption] Well, when the board sees a Government getting to grips with community concerns about the qualification, it will be able to go to potential chief executive officers with some confidence, whereas at the moment it is out there trying to recruit people to resuscitate a body that is on life support. Of course that is not a particularly attractive job. I want the Minister to explain to us also the rise in costs in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and other bureaucracies, because that is where he is spending all his money, instead of in the schools.

I want to focus my attention upon the same agency. There are some genuine difficulties with this particular agency. As the report on the 2003-04 financial review notes, during that period of time the New Zealand Qualifications Authority faced the challenge of simultaneously trying to introduce both level 3 National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and the scholarship examinations. When the review was carried out in February this year, we were right in the middle of the scholarship debacle. That exposed also some serious flaws in NCEA level 1, level 2, and level 3, particularly with regard to the variability of results. It has to be said that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority simply did not rise to the challenge it faced in the financial year under review. What is even more serious is that we do not believe it has faced up to the real problems that created the debacle at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, and we believe and predict that as a result of it not being prepared to face up to the issues, another debacle will occur at the end of this year.

The real problem is the fact that the agency has focused absolutely on standards-based assessment and has not recognised the limitations of that assessment. For example, something like 300 out of 900 students who sat the English scholarship examinations got a scholarship, but only nine out of 1,000 biology students got a scholarship. The authority tried to argue that that is because there was variability amongst the students. It is absolute bunkum to say that 33 percent of the students studying English were able to meet certain standards and only 0.9 percent of those studying biology were able to meet the standards. That raises some very, very serious questions about the whole underlying premise upon which the authority set the examinations. That is its task: to set the assessment tasks.

I have to say that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has appeared before the Education and Science Committee and been reviewed more often than any other agency, and with very good cause. Phil Smith, who is the immediate past-president of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association, made a very telling statement. He said: “If only NZQA had applied the same level of quality assurance to its own processes as it insisted that schools apply to their processes, then we would not be in the difficulties we are.”

I say to the Minister of Education that one of the things that has come through—and, as I think the Minister knows, I am not somebody who goes out and tries to attack people; I try to get to the root of a problem—is that this is the most untidy organisation I have ever come across. The information that is received from it by the select committee is, time and time again, purely and simply inadequately prepared. It has not been considered and researched. We saw flow charts, for example, that had examiners being trained before they had actually been appointed, chronologically. When we pointed this out to the people from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority they said: “Oh, we got that one wrong.” It has been a continual litany of errors from this particular agency.

We have the sequence of events that led to the announcement of the Level 3 Distinction Award, which is all reported in the review report. The issue is that on 17 January this agency reported the variability of the results to the Minister by email. It did not red-flag it. OK, that might have been a mistake—it is certainly untidy, at least. But almost 1 month later the chief executive officer could not explain why it was not red-flagged. A month after that error, which had caused the Ministers considerable embarrassment, the chief executive officer still could not explain why that matter had not been red-flagged. That suggests to me that there are some systemic problems within this organisation.

Explanations have been given for the variation in results. These are, I have to say, absolute and utter bunkum. They do not make any educational or scientific sense. Yet the public, the Minister, and we in Parliament are expected to accept that these are the rationales and that these are the proper processes. I say to the Minister that he has to take responsibility for this agency. He did not set it up. In fact, this Government did not set it up or create its culture; that was done by the previous National Government. But this Government has been administering the agency for 5 years and should have fixed it before now.

I, too, want to address concerns about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. These are not just the concerns of this House; they are the concerns of parents all over New Zealand. Since 1990, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has held itself up as a world leader in assessment; that is what it says it is. It has foisted on us the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), which parents now call “No Chance of Ever Achieving”. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority does not even know what world standards are; it is not even interested in world standards. The NCEA scholarship has been a disaster. NCEA levels 1, 2, and 3 have been a disaster. As the Hon Brian Donnelly said, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has been reviewed, reviewed, and reviewed. The State Services Commission review set terms of reference relating to standards, processes, and communication. These things should have been in the system long before it got to the stage of a State Services Commission review. They are all basic things that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority could not even get right.

The purpose of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is to provide “quality assured qualifications”. What other Crown entity is the subject of a Tui billboard? This Tui billboard ridicules one of our most important secondary school qualifications. It says: “I past NCEA Inglish. Yeah, right.”

How shameful for a Crown entity that holds itself up as a world leader in education standards to be the butt of a joke on a billboard that advertises beer! That is about how far it has gone. The chairman, Mr Fraser, has gone. The chief executive officer, Karen Van Rooyen, has gone. The Ministers will not take responsibility for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We now have an acting chief executive, Karen Sewell, who, I am reliably informed, is a very nice person. But, as one prominent New Zealand principal likes to say, she was on her way to turning Green Bay High School into the only sole-charge high school in New Zealand. Parents took their children away from that school in droves. There were no standards at that school. In fact, it was so bad that when the zoning boundaries were redrawn, $50,000 was immediately, overnight, wiped off the value of properties that were brought into the zone of Green Bay High School. That is how bad it was. And now this Minister has allowed his board to appoint someone like that.

The problem is that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is so bad now, and the level has reached such a poor standard, that it will be well-nigh impossible to attract anyone of quality to that position. Who would want to be handed a hospital pass like that?

What does the New Zealand Qualifications Authority cost us? In 2003 the Government threw $30 million at it. The Minister said that all the problems were due to not enough resources, and that it just needed more money. What did the Government do? It threw $52 million more at it in 2004. What was it, I ask the Minister—double or quits? Just keep throwing millions at it, and all the problems will go away? [Interruption]

Labour’s solution to everything is to just shovel more money at it. Students already pay to sit their qualifications. Despite that, when students were very kindly invited by the Minister to be reassessed in the NCEA scholarship disaster, would this Minister rescind the $30 reassessment fee they had to pay? At least David Benson-Pope said he would consider rescinding it, but no, the Minister of Education totally ruled it out. Well, why should the Labour Government rescind it? It was just another tax, as far as it was concerned.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Minister were warned and warned that the NCEA scholarship would be unworkable. A non-competitive system cannot be grafted on to a competitive exam. The solution is to give those qualifications back to organisations in the private sector like the New Zealand Education Scholarship Trust, which for years has run scholarship with no problems at all. We never saw that on a Tui billboard. We never saw New Zealand bursary, university entrance, or even School Certificate, which had some problems, on a Tui billboard. A whole generation of New Zealand students has been subject to an experiment. It is not just an unfortunate experiment; it is a total disaster, and they have been severely disadvantaged. It is child abuse of the mind.

I am pleased to speak tonight from a more positive approach to our education system. It is really depressing to hear members on the other side of the Chamber banging on all the time about doom and gloom and not acknowledging all the good things that are happening in our education system. I will start my speech at the beginning, with early childhood education. We have seen the statistics and so much research that shows that through investment in early childhood education, there are real results later on in terms of achievement.

💬 Jim Peters: For some.

Yes, certainly not for the members of his caucus, but, generally speaking, our children in New Zealand are achieving. We are seeing the statistics about the achievement of 11-year olds now, who have had the benefit of early childhood education. That is something I prefer to celebrate. I am proud to be part of a Government that celebrates that. Why are those young people achieving? They are achieving because they had quality early childhood education that delivers. That is why we are increasing our commitment to, and our investment in, early childhood education. We have committed to 20 free hours’ funding per week in community early childhood centres for the future, and we know that that will build on the achievements we already see.

💬 Jim Peters: Only for some.

I do not know what the member means by that. I just cannot understand why members relish being so negative. I know many of them have chosen to leave after the next election, which is a very wise move, but I prefer to work and to celebrate all the good things that are happening. Increased investment and achievement in early childhood education means there is also an increased demand for training. That means upskilling and it means scholarships in early childhood education. That is a major investment of this Government, and it is one that I am very proud to see happening.

I will move on now to when children move from early childhood education to primary school, which I have seen in my electorate. It has been very, very good to celebrate, not only with children and our Government but with their parents and with the community at large. There are laptops in every school. Under this Government, every schoolteacher now has the ability to have a laptop to work with and to share with the children. What an advantage! That is something that happened under this Government’s funding. We should not forget that this Government—which does not promote vouchers or private education—stands for the right of every child in New Zealand to go to his or her local school. That is something that this Labour-led Government is very proud of. It is a real right that we see not only for our children but for their families, and our transport system is not clogged up by people trying to whip across town because a child might be a good rugby player and might have been poached by a school. We stand by the right of every young person in the country to go to his or her local school.

We should also acknowledge the building that has gone on under this Government. I have been to more school hall openings, refurbishments, general extensions on schools, and general celebrations of achievement than we have seen happen over the last decade in this country. Why? Because we are investing in our schools, and we are doing it wisely. That also means many, many more teachers and more funding for special education, because we know that that investment delivers in terms of achievement. We are not a party that says we think we are spending too much and will advocate for tax cuts that will not deliver.

I rise on behalf of United Future to look at the financial reviews of three Crown entities. When I read out the names of the three education Crown entities—the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, the New Zealand Teachers Council, and the Tertiary Education Commission—what comes to mind for parents, taxpayers, learners, and children when those three entities are made known across the airwaves, in alleyways, and in the schools and universities around New Zealand? People will reply straight away to my question by saying that the issue common to all three is that they have been poor performers.

All three entities have been in the news, as I understand it, for very wrong reasons. All appear to be unable to control their own appetite for increase and for their own purposes. All impose on those they are looking after—monitoring, and auditing—what they are not prepared to see imposed on themselves. In fact, they are less able to control themselves than the schools, universities, or whatever that they are in charge of. Worse still I have noticed, as have a lot of people, that there is a tremendous overlap between those Crown entities. There is duplication and sheer waste when, for instance, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, the New Zealand Teachers Council, and the Tertiary Education Commission all work separately to assess and appraise private training enterprises. I know of at least two teachers colleges where that has happened. There is a lot of duplication and waste. That is what comes to mind for a lot of people.

It has already been said that it is a fearful thing. It is of concern to myself and others, and I think to some on the Education and Science Committee, that it is intended that the Ministry of Education take some of those entities under its wing. We in United Future do not sense that their independence should be squished and squashed away, and lost. They need true statutory independence to do their jobs.

Some members have been talking in the House about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) programmes, which in my mind and in the mind of everybody in the National Party started as a dream, in order to bring forth learning into our schools. But NCEA has not ended as a dream; it has ended as a nightmare for a lot of people and certainly for a lot of students and employers around this nation. Do I need to say more? Well, others have said a lot, and tonight I want to quote from the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) advisory officer, Julie Ellison. She said that there was enough evidence in the report the PPTA had, to show that some very poor-quality moderators were operating. That is only one comment she made. More dollars have been spent on NCEA, with fewer outcomes than people have deserved.

What is the New Zealand Teachers Council renowned for? It has produced more chief executive officers than any other Crown entity in the last 2 or 3 years that I have been in Parliament. It is amazing! The only thing it has ever produced, as I see it, is a code of ethics. When I asked in the select committee what that really meant—did it mean accountability?—they said it was definitely not a code of accountability. Then I asked why they went to all that trouble, over $103,000 worth, to produce a toothless wonder in reality.

So many people out there are declaring that the Teachers Council needs a complete rewrite—a complete rerun—because it is a toothless wonder. As for the Tertiary Education Commission, it is becoming a very, very protectionist organisation for a few, what I would call, State institutions. For instance, I have on the table in front of me an application of concern from Unitec, for that institution to obtain university status. The amount of money that has been spent by all parties, at this time in our maturity, to come to an obvious answer is laughable.

One of the entities we are talking about tonight is the Tertiary Education Commission, and I would like the Minister—now that he is in charge of tertiary education—to explain just where the Tertiary Education Commission fits in. It is my hope, on behalf of 2.5 million taxpayers, that he will do a better job than his predecessor the Hon Steve Maharey. I think that any history of public administration in New Zealand will record that member’s efforts as among the worst of any Minister—[Interruption]—and it is laughable that the member for Ōtaki is probably going to vote for him when Labour eventually changes its leadership. In fact, I think that Mr Maharey’s tenure as the Minister in charge of tertiary education should have put paid to any leadership prospects he had.

💬 Darren Hughes: Give us a tutorial now.

Just settle down.

I want the Minister to tell us now what is going on with the Tertiary Education Commission. Mr Mallard is getting headlines again, as in the Christchurch Press today, with talk of redundancies at Christchurch Polytechnic. Mr Mallard is wandering into the polytech sector like a bull in a china shop, and he is causing a great deal of strife by proposing changes that he will have to back off from. In fact, if he has not been told to back off by the Prime Minister already, then she will probably do that before the end of this week, when her media-monitoring unit counts the polytech headlines around the country.

What has happened is that the Minister has made a number of aggressive and irritable speeches, saying that he is going to cut back a number of course types. Now, on the face of it, that looks like a reasonable thing to do—except that a couple of months ago he announced a whole series of reviews of courses in tertiary institutions. And that sounds as if it would not be too unreasonable, except that prior to that the Government made an agreement with those polytechs about how they would handle the community education allocations in particular. That would have made some sense, except that before that the polytechs had done their charters and profiles in great detail for the next 3 years and they had been signed off by the Government.

So people are trying to run a polytech and provide skills for an economy that needs them, and there have now been four different interventions from the Minister and the Tertiary Education Commission. I do not necessarily sympathise with the sector generally, but I have to say that that is just grossly negligent public management. It is a case of ministerial whim; every time Ministers feel a bit of pressure, they go out and say they will do something else—whatever it is. So the chief executive and the council are sitting there, trying to work out which plan the Government will carry out—because all those plans came from the Government.

Well, can the Minister tell us what he will do? Will he stick with the original agreements about charters and profiles, or will he stick with the next agreement his predecessor made about community education? Or will he throw both of those over in favour of pursuing the raft of reviews that are being done by former corrections officers and people with PhDs—people who have never had a job but are reviewing our tertiary institutions? Or will he follow the statements he has made recently that he is sending a package off to Cabinet that will involve taking tens of millions of dollars out of the polytechs? I would like him to tell me that.

The other thing I would like him to tell me is just what he is doing about the viability of those institutions. Will he go around the same circle that Steve Maharey did, where everyone stands around, collaborates, and wrings their hands? He coughed up money for the polytechs just because he could not stand not being nice to them. So he bailed them out. Then, 3 years later, they were all back in financial difficulty again. Clearly, the Government has failed to get to the nub of the problem in relation to the viability of polytechs, and I want to know why the Minister will not take a sensible and measured approach to the matter. Why does he feel that he has to go out there and aggressively strut in front of the sector to show that he means business?

I did not think it was possible. I really did not think it was possible. I did not think that Bill English could be a worse ditherer than Don Brash—but he is, absolutely. I did not think it would be possible for someone in this Parliament, much less in the country, to dither more than Don Brash, but we have had it from Bill English. He rammed into the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology and criticised it for all its courses—

💬 Darren Hughes: He didn’t enrol?

Well, no. I think they have some standards!

But now something is being done about it and some changes are being made. The jandal has flip-flopped. The wrist has gone the other way, and it is almost unbelievable. We knew we had a tired and confused Leader of the Opposition who was very patchy in his approach and pretty hopeless overall. But what do we have now? We have the former Leader of the Opposition working really hard to try to make the present leader look good. [Interruption] Well, I think Bill English is more of a “Mr Sad” tonight, because what he has seen is what a number of us have seen recently—

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: Are you talking about the estimates?

Actually, I am talking about the reviews, and in particular the review of the performance of Bill English. He has been well reviewed by his caucus colleagues. He relied on Nick Smith to count the numbers, yet he complained about a few polytechnics being out of balance. Well, relying on Nick Smith to do the numbers is, I think, a fair sign of where that all sits.

But I turn back to the reviews. I think there is not much doubt that Career Services is a particularly tidy organisation. I do want to congratulate Patricia McKelvey on her Queen’s Birthday honour. She has made an enormous contribution to education in New Zealand as the principal of Wellington High School and recently as chair of the board of Career Services. I think she is also on the council of Victoria University. Career Services is a very tidy organisation, and I think it is fair to say that if all the other education Crown entities were of the same degree of tidiness we would have some more focus on educational rather than administrative matters in New Zealand.

I want to thank the Hon Russell Marshall for agreeing to take on the position of chair of the Tertiary Education Commission. He is someone who has a lot of respect in the sector, someone who was my predecessor some time ago, and someone who worked very closely with the Hon Richard Prebble when they were friends in the Labour Government. They worked very closely together on important issues at some stages, and less closely later on. I look forward to the new chief executive arriving for the commission, I understand, at some stage next month.

I notice that Mr English has taken a line that I think is rather unwise around Karen Sewell, who is a well-respected public servant. She is someone who, I think, has given, following the Rodger review and the initial work of Judith Aitken, the Education Review Office the reputation of being an organisation with an iron glove.

💬 Hon Member: She is soft.

No, a velvet glove and an iron fist. On some occasions she is a little soft but, as the member who used to be the principal of a college in Northland knows, on occasions the Education Review Office is forced to tell the story as it is. It is full and frank, and not always desirable, and I tell Mr Peters that people are not always comfortable with the reports of Education Review Office.

💬 Jim Peters: Because they are not always reliable.

I know on some occasions people get really bad reports, and I am amazed that we have gone all this time with the member as a member of Parliament and no one has had a good look at them. But I have had a read of them. I think it is particularly—

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: Would you like to table them?

Well, I think they are on the public record.

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: Oh please!

The member could go all high-tech and look them up on the web if he wants to. [Interruption] I know we have a couple of very retiring members further back, and I am surprised we have had a valedictory speech from Rodney Hide but have not had one from the two members who are going voluntarily. I invite them to take a call and tell us what they care about.

Reports noted.

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