Debate on Crown Entities, Public Organisations, and State Enterprises — New Zealand Teachers Council

This speech will not be as melodramatic as those in the previous debate. There will be no offence, I think, no personal abuse, and no—

💬 Chris Hipkins: I am going to speak in it.

True, true. Mr Hipkins, alias Metiria Turei, is speaking today so anything could happen, that is true. There seems to be a bit of identity confusion in Parliament today.

I would like to speak about the Teachers Council. Despite its lack of Shakespearean drama, I do think it is an important issue. The Teachers Council has been reviewed in the past year, and this review appears to be welcome across the education sector and across the parties. Everybody felt that this was a useful thing to do, although not all the 24 recommendations from the Teachers Council review are acceptable. The debates that have come through about the work of the Teachers Council in the past year are around whether we should create an independent statutory body such as the Medical Council of New Zealand, for example, where doctors basically look after the issues of doctors—teachers would be more than capable of doing something like that—or whether we should just improve the existing Teachers Council. I think there is a lot of support for the idea of an independent statutory body because it would recognise the importance of the profession.

The Teachers Council, as it exists right now, is about the protection of professionalism, mainly through registration and the discipline of registered teachers. The Government has said that this is ineffective. However, the Government’s response to this supposed ineffectiveness, which may have grounds, is curious. There is an opportunity for the Teachers Council to do some interesting professional work around teacher appraisal, registered teacher criteria, and professional standards, but what has been suggested for one of the recommendations is quite strange, and it relates to the underlying privatisation agenda of the Government. The Government says that professionalism, registration, and standards are extremely vital, but it is now suggesting a whole new category of unregistered staff in schools, which can undermine the whole raison d’être of having a teachers council that looks after registration and professionalism. So it is actually quite a contradictory situation.

This new authority to educate, which is broader than the current limited authority to teach, may not appear to mean anything, but, actually, like many things in the education sector, it has a strong drive towards policy that the Government is pushing through around privatisation and the lack of recognition of what a teacher actually does. This broader authority to educate can include scenarios such as this one where a former teacher who has been deregistered, possibly for serious misdemeanours, can now apply for a broader authority to educate if they have “proven expertise”. The examples that were discussed at our select committee with this Crown entity were alarming because the entity itself did not raise these issues, but some of the committee members talked about how anyone who might have a degree in physics, for example, would be suitable for teaching in a primary school.

Presumably under charter schools, or using the authority to educate in its broader sense, a lecturer can be a teacher. This is a fundamental destruction of the profession if it says that no skills in teaching are actually required; all you need to do is know how to lecture. As for myself, having been a tutor, like many other people here, I would never call myself a teacher. The point about this is that people can have knowledge and have expertise in tutoring adults, as some of us do, but that is very, very different from having the pedagogical process that teacher training offers. I am all for improvement. I think there is more we could do to improve the pedagogy, but definitely allowing more deregistered teachers under the Teachers Council and making this Crown entity responsible for a contradiction is not going to be an improvement. It was really concerning when we heard that idea. The idea that teaching is not a skilled and dynamic process that relies on a pedagogical background is very scary.

Of course, what is behind this, in terms of this Crown entity, is that it is now being possibly asked to have oversight over the new charter schools—the legislation for which passed through the House last week—where you could have up to 100 percent unregistered teachers. I would suspect that they probably will not have 100 percent unregistered teachers, but they will have some staff who are under the Teachers Council who are registered properly, meeting professional standards, and who will be managed by the Teachers Council in that form, and then they will have a category of people who are not registered and who are not required to meet those same standards. This is going to create division, confusion, irregularity, conflict, and practice that by no means—even in the Government’s own terminology, the idea of “national” or “standard”—means there will be a national standard for teachers. There will not be consistency.

There are few areas of Government operation that highlight the contradiction of this National Government in education more than the Teachers Council. On the one hand we have got a Government that says it is focused on the quality of teaching and on improving educational outcomes, yet it does so many things that go completely the other way.

The review of the Teachers Council came back and argued that teaching should be a postgraduate profession, that in order to enter the teaching profession someone should have a postgraduate teaching qualification. I think that is something that is very worthy of discussion. Yet this Government went the other way with charter schools, and said: “Actually, you don’t need to have any qualification at all. Anyone can go and teach in a charter school, and that’s OK.” So we have got a review of the Teachers Council that says all of the international evidence tells us that the quality of teaching is the thing that makes the most difference, and the Government turns round and says it will ignore all of that, and have charter schools that do not have to have qualified teachers at all. I think that is wrong.

In the early childhood area, where we were moving towards a system where we would have fully qualified and fully registered teachers, again the Government went the other way, and it has abandoned the targets that would have seen us moving to a more qualified early childhood workforce. It has simply scrapped that altogether. Actually, what we should be saying is that early childhood education is vitally important, we should have qualified and registered teachers in early childhood centres, and we should fund them in order to cover the cost of that. This Government is not doing that.

It is a double standard for Hekia Parata, the Minister of Education, to come to the House during question time today and talk about the importance of trusting in teachers’ judgments, when it is very, very clear that the national standards policy was designed because the Government does not trust teachers’ judgments. The Government says to parents that they cannot trust what teachers tell them, and it has to set these arbitrary standards in place instead. Even then, after it has set the standards in place, it is going to manipulate the results to get the outcomes that it wants.

In the case of the national standards in writing, there is only one standardised assessment tool. That is the e-asTTle assessment tool. This year, in term 1, when that produced results that the Government did not like or that the Government did not think were reliable, it simply went in and scaled the results. It went in and changed the results, to give it the outcome that it expected. So how is that in any way a national standard? How does that reflect a national standard, when the Government is going to just change the results of the assessment in order to get the outcome that it thinks it should have got in the first place? It is an absolute hoax.

National standards are neither national nor standard. Although we can have an enormous amount of faith in the professionalism of teachers, teachers exercising their professional judgment against a pretty vague standard in one school are going to make a different judgment from teachers exercising their professional judgment against a vague standard in another school. Unless there is something in place that ensures consistency across those, it is not the professionalism of the teachers that is at question. It is the very concept of the standards in the first place that undermines our education system and that means that parents cannot have faith in the information that they are being provided.

National standards are not a reliable indicator of a student’s achievement, they are not a reliable indicator of a teacher’s professionalism or the quality of the teachers, and they are certainly not a reliable indicator of how successful and effective a school is.

💬 John Hayes: So you don’t want any standards?

No, I absolutely think there should be standards, but these are not national, nor are they standard. In fact, good schools already were reporting quality information to parents, and, in fact, some schools are now reporting less information to parents as a result of national standards, because they are reporting only the standards and they are not reporting all the other information that they used to give parents.

So parents are being duped by national standards, because the information they are getting is unreliable. It is not consistent. There is no guarantee that a child being assessed at one school against a standard is going to get the same result if the parents take them and have them assessed at a different school, because the standards themselves are vague, they are inconsistent, and there is no moderation process. For Hekia Parata to try to draw a comparison between national standards and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is absolute hogwash, because NCEA has a moderation process in place. There is no such moderation process in place for national standards.

National standards are not an exercise about lifting student achievement or about education; they are bad for education. Internationally they have not worked. They are not working here in New Zealand. We should be focused on making sure that we have a system that works for Kiwi kids. National standards do not.

I am very happy to take a call on the Teachers Council, to talk about the Teachers Council review and pick up where my colleague Chris Hipkins finished off. I want to focus on two aspects of the review. One is the independent statutory body, and what was asked for there, and also the postgraduate teaching qualification that was mooted. I think the postgraduate teaching qualification shows demonstrably how all over the place this Government is when it comes to education. It does not have a consistent plan. It is not about educational outcomes.

At about the same time that we were talking about the need for greater qualification for teachers in our schools, the Government talked about undervaluing postgraduate education in this country, by withdrawing student support for those students wanting to undertake it. On this side of the Chamber we have talked at great depth about the contradictory nature of the moves around postgraduate student support and how they undermine the Government’s rhetoric around an innovation-led economy and the knowledge economy. Well, it shows very much how contradictory that is even within the portfolio of education and how there is just no coherent plan around what is needed.

One thing that we on this side of the Chamber are absolutely sure of is that qualified and registered teachers are absolutely key to the success of our education system. That is why, to us, the Teachers Council is so important as the body that carries the register of teachers in this country. It is why, when the council came to the Education and Science Committee and submitted on the issue of charter schools, we were so interested in what it had to say. Government members were not in the least bit interested in what the council had to say, because it said the idea of having unqualified and non-registered teachers was not at all a good idea.

The New Zealand teacher register has not only national but international recognition. It ensures that our education system is relevant within the global context. This is vitally important. Actually, Treasury has advised that quality teaching is the most important factor in student achievement and that teacher registration, although not perfect, gives some assurance of quality. That is what we are very concerned about, and it is what is missing in the mode of education in charter schools that this Government set up last week. We do not have that mode of assurance that teacher registration gives us.

This is something that we view with great alarm, because it is qualified and trained professionals who provide the foundation for a high-quality education system. We need not look very far for the fine examples of Finland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and Scotland, where successful teachers require a depth of specialist professional knowledge in areas such as curriculum assessment, pedagogy, and learning. With teacher registration, the need to keep your registration up to date is absolutely vital to ensuring that we have this. This body in the Teachers Council, through the register, ensures that we have the most important aspect of quality going into our education system, and that is quality teachers.

We on this side of the Chamber very much value the teachers we have in this country and the expertise they bring, so we listened when they and their bodies came to our select committee and told us that they were really alarmed around the notion of teachers not needing to be qualified and not needing to be registered when it came to being entrusted with the education of young New Zealanders in charter schools.

So we think that the review of the Teachers Council is a vital document for us to reflect on as this Government makes fundamental changes to our education system. This is not small tinkering around the edges; this is fundamentally different. We are saying that you do not need to be a qualified or registered teacher to now stand in front of our children and teach them. You do not need to follow the curriculum either, although we know that one of the things that the Teachers Council is vitally concerned about is making sure that teachers have access to professional development where they can keep up with curriculum development. These are all things that the Teachers Council needs to be the administering body for, because one of the things that I think many of the parties that have looked at the review of the Teachers Council have said, actually, is that in terms of this independent statutory body, the new professional body does need to have much oversight over the profession.

Report noted.

New Zealand Antarctic Institute