Education Amendment Bill

I was going through my mail just before, and this little story is relevant to the title and commencement of this bill: I spent a wonderful hour with the pupils of St Josephs School in Ōāmaru a couple of months ago, speaking to them about leadership and challenges. I have just received the replies from the students. They are year 8 students in a school of year 7 and 8 students. It is excellent to receive these replies. They are absolutely delightful and they speak from the heart.

I want to read to members one little paragraph from a pupil: “Once I have compared your job to my role as a year 8, there is not much difference in them, because we both have people relying on us. We also have to make decisions that would affect others.” So that is a little bit relevant, because I believe that education is about children. There is so much to enjoy and to celebrate in education, and to see the level of literacy and the level of good thinking going on in those year 8 children is wonderful.

The Education Amendment Bill should be about children, but I believe that some parts of it are more about an increase in bureaucracy, an increase in regulation, and a decrease in the role of parents. I believe that the bill proposes to impose extra costs on early childhood centres. Those costs come as costs in time, extra costs in money, and costs in teacher resources.

I will confine my comments mostly to Part 1. When parents drop their children off at an early childhood centre, they really need to know that the teachers are caring for their children and looking after them—and that “care” word is very important. They need to know that the early childhood educators at those licensed centres are not just filling in forms, not spending too much of their time in a cramped office—because that is what they always are, very cramped—filling in forms and accounting for themselves, measuring, reporting, and prescribing minimum standards. What we want in our early childhood educators, those people looking after our kids, is for them to be out there with our kids—playing with them, reading to them, reading with them, talking to them, and doing numbers with them.

When I was in Alexandra several months ago—this is another story—I visited an early childhood centre, and it was a wonderful place. The sun was shining and the kids were all playing under a shady tree and having a wonderful time. But the supervisor of the childcare centre spent all her time showing me what she has to do to account for what she does—and this was before the provisions of this bill have been brought in, which will add further to the work she does. For example, she showed me a box full of notebooks. Each one of those notebooks described the progress of a 2-year-old. Well, OK! Then there was another set of notebooks that had other pieces of information in them. It seemed to me that we already have plenty of regulation in the early childhood sector.

I am also concerned about section 317(2)(b) in clause 43, which states: “authorise the Secretary, after consultation with those organisations that appear to the Secretary to be representative of persons likely to be substantially affected by these regulations, to prescribe criteria to be used by the Secretary to assess compliance with the minimum standards imposed by these regulations:”. So it is not the parents who are making the regulations and minimum standards for early childhood centres, and it is not the parents who are making decisions about the care of their children, but a ministry representative. Now I am not sure that I support that. In fact, I do not support that.

Parents will not be making regulations and minimum standards; the Ministry of Education bureaucrats will be. I do not support anything that takes power away from parents in this regard. The ministry will have the ability to make regulations that take responsibility away from Parliament. I do not think that a bureaucrat is the best person to set standards for the care of my child. I think that parents need to have a very strong say in the care of their children. A basic principle to me is that all of us are in danger of regulating all the fun and risk out of childhood.

In speaking to the title of the Education Amendment Bill, I thank Jacqui Dean for her very appropriate comments. We know that this amendment bill is just an exercise in more bureaucracy, more control, and more regulation, and there is a bit of carrot in behind the stick in the sense that if the early childhood sector does conform appropriately to the criteria and the regulations, then it will get the funding.

I do hope that we do not strangle the innovation, the flair, and the individual skill of the teachers who are so committed to and passionate about our education sector. I think that there is an enormous risk of putting so many regulations in place that an enormous amount of time will be spent on compliance. Sometimes that compliance can put an enormous burden on a small rural community or a provincial area. I am also quite sure, because of the way this bill has been handled during the Committee stage, that we will see it come back very quickly with a large number of amendments. I make that comment because of the genuine effort that was put into the Supplementary Order Papers and how beneficial they would have been in relation to moving forward, not only as a country but as an important sector of society—education.

Looking at it all now in hindsight, I still have some huge fears that we have not appropriately linked and strengthened the hand of the teachers in relation to the abuse and intimidation of staff. It is very easy for that to occur in a way that is removed from witnesses. It could be done electronically or in private, yet there is no way that we can link or empower the school back to the Crimes Act. So that is one part that really does concern me.

The introduction of the National Student Number, going right down to the early childhood learning situation, is also quite an important situation. It was an enormous opportunity for us to move forward, and to be able to measure and manage. One tries to bring up a family in a way that recognises the individuality of one’s children, whether they are boys or girls. I just feel that we are missing out here on that opportunity to be able to empower the parents to have the input and show that inclusiveness as far as moving forward as a unit closely associated with the school or the early childhood centre and on into the tertiary education sector.

I do believe that we will continue to have situations where people will fall through the cracks. As a teacher from Blenheim said to me only the other day: “If it comes to Friday and you’ve got an accelerant child and you’ve got a very average child, it becomes one size fits all.” I believe that in the sense of the amendments in this bill, effectively all we have done is a snow job—a whitewash. We have paid particular attention to rules and regulations, and the only carrot that is sitting in behind it all is that the Government will fund the schools. If the schools do not do as the Government tells them, they will not get funded. I find it very difficult to get any pleasure whatsoever from this Education Amendment Bill.

This is a broad-ranging bill, and we have not traversed many of the areas it covers—for example, the area of school housing and the effect of that on rural schooling. Colin King has referred to student numbers but not necessarily to the element of why they were brought in and some of the benefits, even notwithstanding the fact that Supplementary Order Paper amendments were not passed. So I hope people will indulge me on this.

First of all, I say to Allan Peachey, who criticised the Education Standards Act, that when that legislation went to the Committee stage it was called an Education Amendment Bill. A member of the National caucus recommended that the legislation be renamed the Education Standards Bill. So enamoured was he with that particular bill that he put a motion, and the House voted in favour of it. The person’s name happened to be Alec Neill. I never could quite work out how that rush of blood went to his head.

However, first of all I will cover a couple of areas around the so-called potential over-regulation. At the moment we have the Revised Statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices (DOPs) for Chartered Early Childhood Services in New Zealand. That will go through Cabinet and through Order in Council, etc. I can tell members here and now that within that, one thing requires all early childhood providers to keep a record of every meal that is delivered at lunchtime on every day to every child. Now, that set of Desirable Objectives and Practices actually went through Cabinet in 1998, when a certain Tau Henare sat around the table and agreed to approve that particular level of regulation. It exists at the moment. The whole idea behind this was, in fact, to collapse the Desirable Objectives and Practices—to relook at the whole licensing criteria in a much more rational fashion. A process has been going on for 2 years whereby all the Desirable Objectives and Practices have been looked at and the question asked of whether they are still current and still necessary. In fact, we are trying to rationalise the whole thing. So rather than increase the regulation, this bill actually has the potential to reduce the amount of regulation, if the consultation process is gone through correctly. I am very pleased that a couple of amendments that I got through will take out the most draconian risk that exists in the way the legislation is drawn up. But I am comfortable that the process will not lead to smothering levels of regulation within the early childhood sector.

I mention student numbers, which have been only briefly referred to. The bill introduces student numbers down into the compulsory and early childhood sectors. One of the real problems we have at the moment, particularly in the compulsory sector, is keeping track of students—the students who fall between the cracks between one level of schooling and the other, or between moving from one place to the other. Our major problem in this country is not truancy; it is transiency. It is when people move from one school to the other and often have a number of weeks’ break. There is no way, under the present system, of keeping track of those students. There used to be a system of white cards, if members recall—anyone who was in the system would know it. Now there is not, and those students simply fall through the cracks. This legislation actually gives a lot more power to agencies to be able to put in place mechanisms to look after that major problem that we have in our society.

I also mention school housing. One of the most disastrous things that any Government ever did to rural education in this country was to bring in market rentals of school houses in the 1980s. At the area school I was at, I think we had something like 12 teachers in school houses. We were absolutely dependent on school houses. Within 6 months we had one teacher left in a school house. The school houses were left to go to rack and ruin because they were handed over to property management groups that did not give two hoots about them. The groups did not maintain them, so teachers did not want to go into them, anyhow. Now, of course, the houses have been transferred over. The ideal opportunity for them to be transferred over to boards of trustees to operate was in 1989. They were not, and as a result of that we have not only lost a lot of those school houses but alienated teachers in rural areas.

In my time, school houses were a great incentive to get teachers into rural areas. There was a salary bar, as well. Once teachers were in rural areas, some people, like myself, loved it and stayed teaching in rural areas; others spent 2 or 3 years there, maybe 5, saved up their money, and went back and bought a house in the city. But it certainly fed the rural areas with staff, and we have had continuous problems in terms of that ever since the Government got rid of school houses in rural areas. The Government has handed over the houses to boards of trustees, albeit far too late and, as I said, in a deplorable state. But it also wants to establish some mechanism for renting them, and New Zealand First agrees with that.

I rise to speak to the title of the Education Amendment Bill. It is with some distress and some sadness that I notice that the amendments so eloquently put forward by the Hon Bill English, by other National members Allan Peachey and Colin King, and by my parliamentary colleague Mr Pita Sharples have been denied by the narrowest of margins. Indeed, “narrow” is the word, for it describes fairly precisely the width of the present Government’s mind: narrow. It is distressing that so much was said before rising for dinner—so much that represented wide consultation with good dialogue—that demonstrated cross-party interest in perhaps supporting the amendments. Indeed, Mr Donnelly was keen—or at least there was a suggestion that it would be a good idea to refer the bill back to the Education and Science Committee for additional discussion and amendment.

Would the Labour-Progressive - part-time New Zealand First - part-time United Future Government perhaps show some illuminating intelligence, some luminance, some width of thought, or some understanding of what New Zealanders listening to the debate would earnestly want them to do? Oh no! Like automatons set on an inexorable path towards ultimate failure, the Labour-Progressive - part-time New Zealand First - part-time United Future Government marches on to its own demise with its eyes wide shut. To accommodate the requirement of the Hon Harry Duynhoven, who wants a thorough source of quotes, I quote that expression, “eyes wide shut”, from a range of books written by John Le Carré, in which he uses the phrase to describe those who walk in a blind manner, missing the obvious—a good analogy for the present Government.

💬 Dr Richard Worth: Who was the publisher?

Collins, I think—and it was not printed in New Zealand.

But let us look at the title of this bill, the Education Amendment Bill 2004. Does it really amend education? Does it actually do anything for education without the excellent amendments from this side of the Committee? No, it does not. It simply amends which box to tick, because this Government is rapidly becoming known as a box-ticking Government.

We heard earlier an impassioned speech from my colleague Allan Peachey, a man who is not exactly lacking in educational record and who is not exactly a low-level academic. In our family, I have seen my wife commit years of her life, her own time, to excellence in education. Teachers of that stamp will not be stopped from delivering, in spite of the efforts of the present Government to stop them. The problem is that the restrictive regulations imposed are merely an impediment. Members should think about it. They stand in the way of teachers delivering excellence. My colleague Mr King hopes that perhaps common sense will prevail over the time of this Government, but the tragic truth is that it will not. I guess, though, that we in the National Party can be grateful for one thing: by denying the amendments, which would have been useful and would have made this bill of some purpose, the present Labour-Progressive - part-time other-parties Government has established a point of difference between us and the public, and the public will show us the favour at the next election.

We have heard today a mayday call. Earlier today in the Chamber, reference was made to the mayday call. The origin is from the French word “m’aidez”, which translates as “Help me!”. During the debate, I heard the voices of children saying: “Help me!”. Labour members did not hear them, do not hear them, and will not hear them or anybody else. They were not always deaf, but, boy, are they now—and the voters know it.