Estimates Debate — Vote Education

There would not be a member of this Parliament who would not agree with the proposition that the greatest gift a community can give to its children is an outstanding education—not just in some of the years that a child is at school, but every day of every week of every year. I think we understand that in New Zealand, for over 95 percent of our children, that means an education provided by the State. In some areas of the country it is 100 percent. The State therefore has a special responsibility—a responsibility that is not being met in this Budget. Too many of our parents and too many of our children do not have sufficient choice as to where they go to school, and there is nothing in the Budget that enhances that choice. Too often, children are in communities where parents are voting with their feet. Too often, increasingly, those parents have nowhere to go but to sell up and shift to a community where the school is responsive to the needs and expectations of that community, or fork out for private school fees.

There is nothing in this Budget that addresses that issue. Indeed, it must trouble every New Zealander to know that the inclination of the Government, and of its bureaucracies and the teacher unions that support it, all too often is to be prepared to support those schools in which parents have lost confidence. It is time we addressed that balance. It is time we recognised the critical importance of the early years at school. For year after year we have paid lip-service to that, yet we are still talking about the number of children who are not learning to read, write, or do mathematics. We seem to stubbornly refuse to get to grips with the basic problem.

The problem, as I see it, is that there is a group of children who, through no fault of their own, will learn only if the methodologies by which they are taught are compatible with their learning styles. Yet, too often, we find such children stranded in a school that will not acknowledge that, that wants to treat all children the same—one size fits all—and just make the best of it, instead of our being prepared to begin to get to grips with some of these very serious issues that are of concern to parents out there.

Those members of the Government who confine themselves to listening to the teacher unions that keep them in office are not getting that message. Schooling is not just about teaching. Of course, teaching is important—and we pay lip-service to that all the time. I want to acknowledge the outstanding work being done by thousands and thousands of teachers quietly in their classrooms every day, but that must not obscure the fact that for some children—too many children—the quality of teaching, and the values and standards in schools that they need, are not being provided sufficiently well by the State. There is nothing in this Budget that recognises that teaching has changed, that teaching, more than ever, is a knowledge profession. More than ever, teachers have to be good at what they are teaching. We should never lose sight of that. That is especially important in the critical areas of literacy, mathematics, and science. In addition, they have to be good at teaching. Too often, we are prepared to separate those two issues out and get into debates about the relative merits of one as opposed to the other, instead of recognising that, today, what teachers require is the ability to teach, and to know what they are teaching.

I would like to open by commending the Government on the injection of funding it has put into the universities, with a particular focus on increasing the salaries of university staff by an additional 3 percent over and above what it was able to do with the inflation-adjusted operational funding the universities were receiving. Certainly, that injection was long overdue. For too long we have failed to recognise, particularly for university staff, how they are really part of an international labour market. We had very clearly started to fall behind the eight ball in terms of international competitiveness in the rates we were offering to our academics, in particular, so I have to give the Government a plus for providing that funding.

However, what it actually does—and this was demonstrated in a question I asked Dr Cullen in the House a couple of weeks ago—is to raise the question of why people who teach degree courses at Auckland University of Technology should be given additional funding for a 3 percent increase in their salaries, when people who teach the same degree courses at Unitec, for example, will not receive it. What is the justification for that split between two institutions that are very close on the Performance-based Research Fund scale and also on things like the proportion of sub-degree programmes?

That exposes a flaw in the structure of our tertiary institutions. We have a number of good-quality universities—up amongst the top 200 in the world or so, and some up in the top 50—and we have another range of universities that are not quite so good as those in the research field, some of which are somewhat smaller than the top universities. Then we have those two institutions, which are very, very similar in profile, that happen to be in the middle, and finally we have urban polytechs and provincial polytechs. So we can think of it as a spectrum of provision. We have made a division right down through the middle between two institutions that are, in fact, almost identical in profile. The Minister of Education, Steve Maharey, really needs to answer the question of why certain provisions that are being made for one of those institutions are not being made for the other. That is the first comment that New Zealand First would like to make with regard to the Budget. We think the increased funding for the universities was a fine gesture, but the Government has to do some thinking-through on that matter.

The select committees this year were invited to comment on the quality of intended expenditure. That was a particularly difficult task, but one area that New Zealand First would like to comment on, in terms of what we consider to be not very good expenditure, is the issue of interest-free student loans. We think they are a give-away to students, because there is no doubt that what is paid back will be less than what was given by the Government in the first place. We cannot see the justification for supporting students through that means. We see justification for supporting students, but we think it should be premised on a universal student living allowance, because that actually has some philosophical foundation in terms of the premises upon which we run our nation. But interest-free loans certainly do not have that foundation, and we believe that they are an example of poor expenditure coming out of this Budget.

We applaud the development of curriculum materials in the three Pasifika languages. The media release that came out with the Budget actually suggested that those three languages would be the languages of the nations that New Zealand is in free association with—in other words, the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau—and therefore one could say it sounded like a pretty good idea that we have some responsibility for the maintenance of those languages. However, from the select committee hearings it seems that, in fact, those are not the languages that are being supported, and that there are a couple of languages other than the three that I mentioned. So time and time again I asked at the select committee level what the principles are upon which we decide which languages we support and which languages we do not. In fact, the chief executive officer of the Ministry of Education said that there are no principles—that the ministry does not have any. I urge the Government to start to think through that issue, because 167 languages are spoken in this country. Are we going to provide emergent education, with materials and trained teachers, for each one of those 167 languages? If, for example, some Latvian parents say they deserve the right to have their children taught in Latvian, upon what basis would we make that decision? At this particular point we have no principles. I suggest that the nations that are in free association with New Zealand and whose peoples are New Zealand citizens should have their languages protected.

The Minister in the chair, the Hon Steve Maharey, should tell us why Parliament is bothering to appropriate any money for him and his ministry. Appropriating the money through these estimates for students and teachers is fine, but in the fading months, maybe few years, of his career the Minister needs to do something better than try to spend all his time oiling the social democratic consensus around Wellington about education. That is what he says it is about. He told the New Zealand Herald a couple of months ago that the problem with the National Party was that it was trying to “wreck the social democratic school system”. Well, we are not appropriating money for a plaything of the left elite; we are appropriating money so that students get the best education we can give them. The Minister should get up and tell us just where the momentum is in his education policy. Because there is none. At least with Trevor Mallard as education Minister—it might have been all in the wrong direction or all over the place, and sometimes right—at least he had some energy and momentum. No doubt Minister Maharey is so thoroughly burnt from the mess he made in tertiary education—and I hope so, because I would not want to see him trying too hard in schooling, if he were going to have the same impact as he had in tertiary education. I want to know where his sense of direction is that is not any more than overseeing the last remaining momentum of the moves that Trevor Mallard made.

I would like the Minister to give us his considered analytical, rather than political, opinion about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. This year three things have happened with that certificate. The first is that in the external examinations 30 percent of the results fell outside the National Certificate of Educational Achievement benchmarks for valid results. I did not make that up; that is the analysis. The second is that his ministry did a survey that showed there are major problems with motivation for the large bulk of students— “If you make it easy, they’ll take it easy.” And they are! Over three-quarters of students get only an “achieved” or “not achieved”. The trend to unit standards in internal assessment is picking up speed, because students think that that is the easy way to get through.

The third thing is the revelations, over the weekend, that the internal assessment moderation is actually a joke. I can recall the new chief executive of the ministry, when she was in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, saying the ministry moderated every standard every year. Well, that is just nonsense. The Minister stood up in the Chamber today and said: “Oh, it’s only 3 percent of the standards.”, and then admitted that it was a sample. If the ministry moderates only 3 percent, what happens to the other 97 percent? So we have no idea what is going on. The 3 percent is a sample—a slightly biased sample, if we believe what the rules say. Of course, the Minister has no idea whether teachers are sending in the assessments they should be—no idea at all. There is no way of telling whether teachers are doing what the New Zealand Qualifications Authority says they are. So those are three pieces of evidence, and none of them is being listened to. Each one of them has a solution that has been tried out, thought through, and implemented in other jurisdictions. But no, the Minister is so fixed on his social democratic position—keeping faith with the left in case he can have a shot at the Labour leadership—that he will not concede one single issue.

Now he has a new chief executive of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority who does not know anything about education. They have appointed Bali Haque, who has been one of the strongest political proponents of it in every controversial media story, as the senior civil servant in charge of it. So now nothing is going to happen. It is all perfect, it is all right! The fact that thousands of students get the wrong result does not matter nearly as much as maintaining the Wellington pinko consensus about education and how it is working!

It is the same consensus that is preventing parents from getting access to information about their schools. We have had a bit of a tussle over the last 12 months or so over the SchoolSmart website, and apparently it is going to bring down civilisation if parents find out that the school their child is at is going off the rails. Everyone else is allowed to know—the Minister, the bureaucrats, the Education Review Office—but parents are not allowed to know.

To make a total nonsense of that position, RateMyTeachers.com shows up in New Zealand. That is a website where they rate their teachers. It has all sorts of gossip and malicious material on it, and they should filter out more. But that is where the technology is taking us. The last time I looked was a couple of weeks ago, and there were 50,000 ratings of teachers in just about every secondary school in New Zealand. Actually, on average most teachers rate above average—once they have enough postings on the ratings out of five, most of them are over 2½. That is not a bad thing. But it makes a nonsense of the Minister’s trying to sit on valuable, tested, and reliable data that would be available, instead of malice and gossip from kids. Of course, the union has come out and said it will take legal action, and figured out very quickly that that looked really stupid. So now we are all allowed to sit in the comfort of our own homes and read gossip about any teacher, anywhere in the country, and what the kids think. We can know that in great detail, but we cannot know the valid, objective data the Minister of Education has.

The Minister stood in the Chamber and said, firstly, that we could not have it, because it was collected on the basis that it would not be divulged. That is wrong. There is no formal arrangement. He did not know, or he deliberately misled us. Then he stood up and said that all those groups agree that it should not be made available. Well, I have written to all the groups. School trustees do not agree. They are trying to get access to it. So, far from being opposed to its being available, they want access to it. The Post Primary Teachers Association has no formal policy position on it—except that it does not like it. It suspects that it will now become public. The New Zealand Educational Institute has got formal resolutions. The Secondary Principals Association will not reply, and I think that that is because it cannot decide.

Even if they all did agree to keep that information secret, they cannot all agree to break the law. In fact, it is official information and should be available under the Official Information Act. But what does the Secretary for Education do? I sent him a request under the Official Information Act and, first, he said he had lost it, so I sent it again. Then he took about 5 weeks to read my two-paragraph letter and then said that I could not ask him; I had to ask the Minister. Well, it is on the Minister’s plate. The Official Information Act request was for the website—not access to it—in electronic form, and he has to decide whether he will make it available.

The Minister does not care about the information; he just wants to make sure that his mates in the unions and the upper reaches of the Labour Party believe that he is a true believer, and he is not going to let anyone wreck his social democratic school system. Does it not make one wonder what they talk about when they all get together in the Minister’s office about how they are going to defend the social democratic school system from nasty right-wingers like parents!

💬 Hon Steve Maharey: Like you.

Well, I am. I believe that parents should make their decisions about schools on the basis of the best information the Government can give them, not prejudice or decile rating. Because that is the system that the Minister prefers.

What this Government does is to put an index of brownness on every school and make sure that everyone knows what it is. That is the only objective data the Government provides to every New Zealand parent—that is, a decile rating. Nothing could be more misleading about educational achievement or progression of students than the decile rating of a school, but this Minister thinks that is fine, because he does not care. All that matters to that Minister is that he is quietly managing his portfolio and keeping Dr Cullen off his back in order to maintain his credentials as a potential Labour leader—and the momentum is gone.

I think that is all the speakers in the debate so let me just review a few of them, if I can, for a moment. I thank those who have participated in the debate. As I think Mr Peachey said at the beginning, this is one of the areas we ought to be talking about, and I will reflect for a moment on what I think the argument was that he was putting forward about the nature of modern education—meaning to offer a lot more choice, flexibility, and responsiveness to pupils, their parents, and the community. There are a number of ways we could do this.

I remember some time ago I had the privilege of being in Minneapolis - St Paul when they offered full choice, total choice, to people just within the city. As people know, Minneapolis - St Paul straddles quite a large area, but it is a compact area. I arrived there just after the educational authorities had stopped their experiment with choice of the kind that used to go with the model whereby one allowed people to go to any school they wanted to. The reason they had stopped was that within 6 months of allowing people to take their children wherever they wanted to and make that free choice to go to any school, their bus budget had blown out by US$22 million. That is, of course, why countries do not opt for that kind of choice, because if they did, they would be paying for people to transport themselves all around the schools. The other thing they found that was a corollary of that policy was people immediately shifted into black and white schools, which Minneapolis - St Paul now has a legacy of.

I think that that does not mean we should not be offering choice, flexibility, or responsiveness, but I guess the way we are approaching it is to ask ourselves how we can make sure that every school is able to take pupils in the classroom and tailor the learning to what they actually need. That has to be our ambition.

I notice that the OECD is now talking about that being the ambition for the countries that it represents—that the educational policy should move away from the mass form of education of the last century, which we all know was the vision we had here. We all went through it. We sat in large classes and we got pretty much one-way traffic from the teacher. It did not matter whether we learnt fast, slow, or whatever our learning style was, we kind of took what was given to us. I think that was totally cutting edge education in those days.

These days I think we would say that, unless we can more and more begin to address the speed at which students learn, the style in which they learn, and their interests, so that they maximise their opportunities at school, we are not doing a good job for them. But my ambition, and this Government’s ambition, is to try to deliver that level of choice, school by school by school—not to have us say that some schools are not doing so well, so that we end up with ghettos where some kids cannot get out, and the kids who can migrate have gone off to schools where they can do it.

So I do not think we disagree on the ambition, I say to Mr Peachey. I think our vision this century has to be how to have the kind of teaching and leadership—

💬 Hon Bill English: Why do you always agree with us?

Well, I always agree with people who make common sense statements—I am coming to Mr English in a moment. Mr Peachey raises interesting points and so does Mr Donnelly, but Mr English is a different kettle of fish. We are saying we agree, I think, on what we need from education, but we have to have some interesting debates about how we get there. So let us keep that discussion rolling.

I say to Mr Donnelly, just to respond to the university staff business, that I was delighted to see that staff are to receive some more money. It is ridiculous that people can study for a post-doctorate qualification for 3 years—they might have been off doing some insecure research somewhere—and they start on $45,000. I mean, who is kidding who? Few people will stay in the university system in this country if those are the kinds of wages available to them. And, of course, we have to put up with the fact that, as a country, we cannot afford the kind of library facilities or infrastructure that there may be in some of the better universities around the world. Let us not applaud other universities too much. If one is in the French, German, or other university systems, one can be in some pretty ratty universities, but the best universities can offer enormous advantages to students who have gone on to get a good PhD and so on. So we have to fight for our share of those people, and getting a lift in their wages is one of the ways of doing it.

I would encourage universities to come under a multi-employer collective agreement. That is the answer, I think, to having differentials between different universities.

💬 Hon Bill English: More social democratic nonsense.

I think it is a good social democratic idea—and I thank Mr English for reminding me. But that is one of the answers to try to make sure we get that kind of compensation across the sector. That does not stop a university saying that it will pay Mr Donnelly the same amount of money that it is paying Mr Peachey, but on top of that, Mr Donnelly is somebody the university wants to hold on to because of his research record, so it will pay him some more. At least it gives a basic comparison across the sector, and I think a multi-employer collective agreement would do that.

Maybe a universal loan is something that New Zealand First wants to put up in the next round post the next election, and Mr Donnelly certainly would not find me resisting the general argument of why we would want a universal allowance. It is an idea that we have clearly signalled we would like to go to if we could afford to prioritise that kind of expenditure. So that is something that stays on the ground.

The languages policy is something that worries me quite a lot. We do not have a great languages policy at the present time. We do know that we will cover the three official languages—sign language, Māori, and English. We know we have the languages policy around the larger Pacific Island languages, which means that we will not do total immersion, but what we are paying for is to ensure that those languages are able to be taught. In areas where there are large numbers of Tongan and Samoan students and so on, students should have access to their language, but the member is right. In Counties-Manukau at the present time, 164 languages are present in that community, and there is no way that the New Zealand educational community will be able to say that because someone comes from Somalia and there are 30 people in that person’s community in Wellington, the educational community will be able to provide a full effort for that person to be involved in that curriculum.

My belief is that the best way forward is to guarantee our three official languages, and to look at those languages that have large constituencies where people may want to be able to speak them. In the case of the Tongan language, for example, in an area like Auckland we could have schools where 80 percent of the students come from Tongan families, and we could offer quite substantial language tuition in those schools. Elsewhere I think we should simply offer language tuition in the way that we traditionally have, where people can learn French, German, or whatever. That policy has to become clear in the very near future because we are in deep trouble if we do not resolve that issue. So I think that is a very, very good point.

I will just turn to Mr English, who is known as the new conservative. I do not know whether people know this. I thought it was an oxymoron—new, conservative—but an oxymoron is what Mr English wants to represent himself to be. Of course, we know that all this talk about leadership here tonight is really just a projection, I think Freudian psychoanalysts call it, because he is concerned about his own leadership opportunities, and we have seen that time and time again in the House as he tries to prepare for it. It is hard, as the newspapers say. How does one come back from having destroyed the health system and the economy, and from having been the leader of a party through the worst campaign anybody can remember in its history? How does one come back from all that? That is why I think it has been so difficult for Mr English this evening. It would be good if he did not go through all those kinds of things and force people to argue with him, but of course that is what he did this evening.

He did raise some points that I want to mention. I think that the majority of people right throughout the education sector regard the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) as being the best way to go. Mr English may want to return to norm referencing, but the educational community does not. The educational community wants to move on with standards-based assessment, and it knows the bulk of it is going well. It wants to see effort put into refining the system so that it becomes as good as it can be.

Mr English claims constantly that people do not recognise issues. We do. There are things wrong with the system at the present time. It is only 3 years old; there are many things we still have to do. There have been 226 changes made to it already, and a lot more changes will be made in the future. But what we have at the present time is a system that is working well. After the assessment season last year it has worked well. We have had good, fair, consistent assessment across the bulk of students.

When we go back to the kinds of debates that have been raised here, we see these kinds of spurious debates all the time. Mr English, for example, tells us about a piece of research. I am not sure whether he noticed this, but the Government actually commissioned the research—both lots of research. We asked for them because we want to improve the system. We were told by Luanna Meyer, from a good research team, that the system is fundamentally sound, but that we have some improvements to make. Those improvements mainly rest upon the way teachers use the NCEA system. Professional development, as they begin to understand how to use the system, will mean that the system will be used a whole lot better.

It has always been a problem to motivate students. I would ask how many people in the House who have a university degree did not at some time during it get what was called a “gentleperson’s C”. Lawyers often ask themselves how much work they really need to do to get through a law course—I imagine that Mr Simon Power now and again said to himself that he would pull back on one course because he needed to put a little more into something elsewhere. He might like to stand up later and tell us what his transcript says he got at university. I imagine that it is outstanding, but I imagine also that the odd “C” appears because he kind of cruised through some of his courses.

Did he lack motivation in the way Mr English wants to define it? Did he get lazy? Did he sit back and say that he did not want to do it? Of course not. People who go through all the assessment we have in this country will make some choices, and it is up to teaching, teachers, and leadership. We have a chance to use the system to motivate students to do better. People in the House who, like Mr Donnelly, me, and Mr Peachey, have taught in classrooms know that that is the job of the teacher. This system does not de-motivate people; it actually stretches them more than any system has ever done before, because it offers them the chance to reach a level of excellence that they have never had before. It is down to the teaching. That is what Luanna Meyer told us in that research, and that is what we will have to focus on.

I will move on to what we are spending our money on. Let me just remind Mr English of the things we are spending our money on. We are focused on great teaching, great leadership, adequate resourcing for our schools, keeping kids at school until they are 16, and making sure that clear boundaries are set for good behaviour in schools so they can focus on what they are doing. We are focusing on foundation skills so kids can read and write. We are focusing on the teaching and learning in secondary schools, where we think major changes are yet to be made. We are focusing on parents and the wider community engaging with their schools to ensure they are doing as much as they possibly can. Those are the things we are focused on.

If we do all of those things well, we will take a good system and turn it into a great system. Going back to Mr Peachey, that has to be the aim of every member here—not the nit-picking of the man who calls himself a new conservative and is waiting to try to take over the National Party.