Education Legislation Bill

I welcome the opportunity to debate the Education Legislation Bill, and before I get into the specifics I want to indicate to the Committee that I intend to take my full allocation of calls on Parts 1 and 2. I want to raise a technical matter, and that is with the way the bill is drafted—before we get into the specifics. It is a concern I have got with the way this omnibus bill, which has wide-ranging changes, has been put together. It amends seven different Acts, but it is drafted in only two parts. That actually significantly limits the amount of scrutiny that the Committee is able to give to the bill, because we are restricted in the number of speeches that we have on each part.

Traditionally, when omnibus bills have been put together that amend multiple Acts, each Act that has been amended has been contained within its own part, allowing it to be properly scrutinised. I want to indicate to the Committee, and then to the House as a whole when the opportunity arises, that this development of drafting a bill in this way is very concerning because it violates the norms of the way bills should be put together. It does mean that we will be able to have less scrutiny. But anyway, with that in mind, I intend to make the most of the opportunity that we do have to scrutinise it.

The first point that I want to raise—and I would really like some further clarification on this from the Minister in the chair, the Hon Hekia Parata—is around the issue of principals managing more than one school. There are clauses in Part 1 of the legislation that allow a principal to manage more than one school, but despite some pretty close scrutiny at the Education and Science Committee there are still some pretty big issues around how this will work. I want to say at this point that I am very supportive of things that increase collaboration between schools, but I have got some concerns that this might not necessarily be the best way to achieve that. We already know that previous legislation allowing the Minister to have one board of trustees overseeing more than one school has been very seldom, if ever, used, so the first question is: where is the demand for these provisions that allow a principal to manage more than one school coming from? That is the first question.

The second question is around how that will actually work, because the officials who presented at the select committee were not really able to explain how, in practice, the Government envisaged this being implemented. If a principal is overseeing more than one school—so they are managing more than one school—what does that do for their relationship with the boards of trustees of those schools? Each school, if it still has a separate board of trustees, would have a different relationship with that principal. Where would the accountabilities in that relationship lie? Would they be employed by one board of trustees and have a primary relationship with one of the schools’ board of trustees? If so, where would that leave the other school board of trustees, because that potentially changes the nature of things quite significantly.

If there is only one board of trustees managing multiple schools, it is not an issue, because it could employ one principal now. Under this new change, which allows different boards of trustees to employ a single principal, where do the accountabilities lie, and what would happen, for example, if the principal had a souring relationship with one school but still had a positive relationship with another school? Who would ultimately be responsible for that employment relationship? The ministry officials’ answer to that was that the schools will go into that voluntarily, so they are not going to be forced to have one principal managing more than one school.

That is all very well, and people can set out with good intentions, fully supportive of that, but the question is what happens when it goes wrong, if it goes wrong? There really are not good answers—certainly not from the officials who attended the select committee—around what would actually happen if the relationship turned sour. Could the relationship be dissolved so that the principal ended up at only one school, not at another school; if so, what would actually happen to the employment relationship, because that is a substantive change in their employment relationship, and would they, effectively, be redundant? Would one school board be able to pull out of the arrangement; if so, where does that leave the employment of the principal?

Those are actually really substantial things, because if the Parliament is going to allow this to happen, I think we need to know how this is going to work and what it is going to do for the relationship between the principal and the board, because what we are seeing at the moment is a dismantling of the principle of having self-governing schools. That has been dismantled over a long period of time, not just under this Government but under previous Governments. I do not think that we have really got a clear understanding of where that is going to leave school boards of trustees in terms of their relationship with the principals that they have.

School principals have managerial roles—there is no question about that. They manage the facilities and they report to boards of trustees, and so on. But they actually perform a really critical role as curriculum leaders within the school, and I am yet to be convinced that a principal could do that part of the job effectively across more than one school at the same time, because different schools have different cultures, different approaches to the way they manage the curriculum, and different approaches to all sorts of different things, and what works really well in one school is not necessarily going to work really well in another.

We see this debate where we have arguments that a successful school in, say, a high-decile area should be able to take over a school in a lower-decile area that is not successful, but what that debate ignores is that the things that are working well in that high-decile school are not necessarily going to work well in a low-decile school, or in a different area where the culture and the pressures from the parent community might be different. How would a principal, as a curriculum leader for multiple different schools, reconcile that pressure? I am looking forward to an explanation from the Government as to how it sees that happening.

The second point that I want to raise in this first contribution to the debate on Part 1 is around school hours and the provisions within the legislation for schools to set different opening hours. At the moment, the opening hours are fairly standard: roughly between the hours of 9 to 3, with a little bit either side of 9 to 3. That means that things like extracurricular activities are easy to coordinate—things like school sports. It also means that school transport is easy to facilitate, and it means that for parents who have kids at different levels of schooling and, potentially, attending different schools, the logistics of juggling that are a little bit easier. But what will happen, when the power to set their school hours is delegated to every school in the country, if they then start to set different school hours? So if you take the case of one family who might have three different kids—one at intermediate school, one at primary school, and one at secondary school—and if all of those schools have got different hours that they are open, that is a logistical nightmare for those parents. It is also a logistical nightmare for that local community in terms of sharing school transport.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Kia ora anō tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. Tēnā koutou te whānau o Te Whare Pāremata. Kia ora anō tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. When we broke for the dinner break, Chris Hipkins had 2 minutes, 25 seconds left. I suggest he does not waste it.

I will certainly not be wasting it, and thank you for that. When we broke before the dinner break, I had been talking about the provisions in the bill that allow a principal to manage more than one school and I put a number of questions to the Minister. I moved on then to discussing school hours and the ability for different schools to set different hours and the logistical challenges that that could create around school transport, extra-curricular activities, and the logistical challenges that could create for parents. I certainly would like to hear the Minister’s comment on that.

The issue with this bill, of course, is there is so much in it that it is difficult to cut it down to the allocated speaking time. I do have some concerns about the expansion of home-based early childhood education services to allow them to provide out-of-school care for school-age children and the potential challenges that creates and the potential risks that creates. The home-based early childhood education system sector has been one of the fastest-growing areas of early childhood education, and yet it is the area of the early childhood education system that we know the least about the performance of. We do not have good, robust data comparing how kids in home-based early childhood education progress with their education relative to kids who are in kindergartens or early childhood centres. I think that until we have better information about home-based early childhood care, I think further expanding that sector is something that we need to tread very carefully around. I would like to hear more about why the Government stopped the review of home-based early childhood education services, because there are certainly some quality concerns in at least some of those services that exist at the moment. I think, to some extent, they undermine the reputation of the other services that can be doing a very good job. So I would like to hear more about that and how the Government thinks that that can operate.

The new categories of teaching position and the changes that relate to charter schools are very controversial, and I look forward to dealing with those two issues in future calls. I have got a number of Supplementary Order Papers on the Table that deal with those issues. I am looking forward to the ability to debate those in due course, including Supplementary Order Paper 218, which I have on the Table, that provides for elections for representatives on the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, which is the professional registration body for teachers in New Zealand. I am looking forward to being able to fully explain that later on in the debate and to outline what those changes are going to achieve.

Tēnā koe e Te Heamana o Te Komiti o Te Whare. It is a pleasure to take a call to speak on this bill tonight. I want to speak about new section 75A, inserted by clause 9, but first I want to reflect on the existing sections 75 and 76 because I think they are very relevant to this new section headed “Appointment of principals”.

Section 75 of the Education Act outlines the functions and powers of the board of trustees and section 76 outlines the role of the principal. I remember, as a member of the school board of trustees, having to get my head around these two sections and how they impact on each other. That is why I raise them together in relation to this new section that is being proposed.

One of the things that the principals are, and it says here in the Act: “A school’s principal is the board’s chief executive …”. It goes on to say that they “shall comply with the board’s general policy directions;”. My issue with having the new section here for a number of boards to be able to appoint the same principal is this: those two sections establish the function and relationship. The relationship is actually with one school, and my problem with this new section is around the professional leadership of a particular school and how one person is able to do that in one school, with one community. Quite often they are not only the professional leader of their school; they are one of the leaders of their community.

My issue is how does that impact on that particular community, say, if you have—in my electorate, which is 36,000 square kilometres, most of it rural and provincial, how could one principal appointed by a number of boards within a rural area be the professional leader of each of those schools as well as a leader in their community, as established under these two sections? That is my question. I do not believe that we have seen enough or heard enough as to why it is even necessary or how that will actually function in a way that enhances those particular communities.

One of the things about schools in New Zealand is that they play a very important role. They are quite often the hub of any community. I am struggling to understand how in any particular community they would be able to function with a principal who is not always present. How is the relationship developed within each of those communities? There are high expectations on principals, no matter where they are, but can one imagine how difficult it might be for a principal to develop those one-on-one relationships with parents in two, three, or more communities? I have a problem with that.

If one were to ask the parents of children at a number of schools in provincial and rural New Zealand whether they would like to share their principal with a number of other schools, I think the answer would be no. As with other important positions in their community, people like to have good relationships with the principals of their schools.

Another issue that came up in this part of the bill is the opening hours of schools and the flexibility there—so the opening hours of schools, the flexibility around all of that, how that impacts, again, on communities and on families. In the second reading, I mentioned what would be the impact on a family that is not very well off—the families living in poverty, and working families who are living in poverty who have to rearrange their schedules because they have two or three children going to two or three different schools with different opening hours. And then there is everything else that families have to cope with, whether or not they are living in poverty. I do not think that is the fundamental issue here.

I have spoken to a number of families about this and they just do not support it. Sometimes I think, with this part of the bill, are we fixing something that really does not exist? So that is my other question on this. For this part, that is all I want to comment on, but I do hope to take other calls through this debate. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Chair. Kia ora koutou katoa, ngā mihi nui. It is an interesting bill, this one. The Green Party has issues with a number of sections of it: the joint principals proposal, the after-school care ideas, the school hours flexibility, the tertiary institutions being allowed to run charter schools, and teachers’ training. These are all interesting issues that we robustly discussed at the Education and Science Committee, and if we had come away with some very good arguments as to why these changes were needed, I think that we would have been prepared to listen to those arguments. We did get some good changes at the select committee, particularly around the home-care numbers, but they did not go far enough to allay our concerns in the Green Party so that we could support some of these provisions.

So starting with the joint principals proposal—again, supporting my colleague Chris Hipkins’ comments, there are two layers to this. There is the philosophical and ideological reason why you might have joint principals, and then there is the practical application of the law. On both counts, we have concerns. We are not sure who has demanded this. We do not understand who is calling for joint principals. We did not have submitters calling for it. But when it comes to the practical application, I have to agree with Chris Hipkins that we could not get an explanation as to how it was going to work, with the issue of dual employment by more than one board. That is just common sense. These kinds of questions about employment needed to be answered. We just needed to know how it was going to work. There are a couple of rural areas where you might see it as being a good idea, but when boards are in conflict or have very different ideas about the employment of a principal, we need to know how it is going to work, and we did not get an answer, so it was impossible to clarify that issue.

On the broader question of the role of the principal, I think this is really important because this Government has made it very clear that it sees the principal and the teacher as the key to the child’s success. We can debate that. We could have many debates about whether poverty has an impact on people’s lives and how much imagination it takes to realise that if you are not feeding kids, they are probably not learning. But in terms of the educational leader of the school, if that person is divided between a number of sites, they will be a different type of leader but it may not be the educational leader of that school. It may be that they are an entrepreneurial coordinator of a range of schools. But given that we are assisting the Government to bring in the policies around the communities of learning, which are supposedly the mechanisms that are going to bring schools together, I do not understand why we would have joint principals. I do not see the necessity for that. There is a clear opportunity for schools to collaborate through the communities of learning. There was a lot of debate about it, but it is a system that is yet to be evaluated, that is just starting. But why joint principals for many of our schools?

Like many of the people on the select committee, I visit school after school after school and meet with principals. They tell me that being a part of their very local community, having very strong, hands-on relationships with their families, having very strong relationships with other educational professionals in their area because of the needs of their very particular student population, and having very strong educational leadership of their teachers—some of whom need a lot more support than others—is their role. If that is divided amongst a number of schools, it will become a weaker role. It might be more “efficient”, but it will not be the educational leader of that community.

Then you have the schools where there are huge social problems that the school is working to address. I have been to a number of schools—I am thinking of one in particular where the principal was like the captain of a ship that could any day hit the rocks but was very clearly staying in the stream because of that professional leader. So joint leadership puts at risk the delicate fabric that some of these schools manage in order to survive. So that is one issue. We do not support that.

Then there is the issue of school hours flexibility. There are claims in the bill that this will happen only if there is consultation. We had quite a debate about the nature of consultation. “Consultation” is a fascinating word. As I have probably said before, my father says “Consultation”—or he said; he is gone now—“is a cross between a con and an insult”. Consultation often is, because it is one way in which certain interests can be listened to, but some voices who are not at the table—as we often talk about in this House—are not heard. So I was not confident after reading the clauses of the bill around the consultation for changing school hours that everybody would be heard—that all their needs would be heard, and that is what concerns me.

I am a grandmother who collects a child every Monday from school, every Monday that I can, and I read the school notices. I realise that it is my privilege to understand the education system and understand the issue around flexible hours. For me, and for others, flexible working hours for schools is actually quite disturbing. Many of us have these lives that are delicately balanced around 3 o’clock. We are balanced around 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock. My daughter’s job is balanced around those hours, my life is balanced around them, the family’s life is balanced around them, and our child is balanced around them. In order to change those hours there has to be a really, really good reason, and we did not hear it. There is already flexibility in the law around before and after noon, but to make it wide open puts at risk some of those very frustrating experiences for teachers and for parents. I do believe in innovation and change; I do think we should be open to it, but I do not think that changing the school hours, particularly for families that are running all over the place with more than one child—I just cannot see the benefit of it.

Quite honestly—I do not want to be Auckland-centric, but try to get across Auckland at 3 o’clock. Imagine if you have got to pick up kids at 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock, and 4 o’clock. It would just be a nightmare, and there is no point in creating nightmares and there is no point in experimenting just for the sake of it. We need to experiment when there is clear educational value. So we are not going to support that—I call it—“faux-flexibility” because parents do not have that kind of flexibility. I do not see the point of it.

The other issues that concern us—for example, tertiary institutions running charter schools. Again, it comes to the heart of the matter of what education is about. Is education something for children at primary school level and secondary school level? Is that the kind of education that universities offer? Universities offer a sophisticated lecture model based on individual research. They are not always best placed to understand what primary school teachers do, which is not subject-based; it is child-based. Including secondary schools as well, I would say—I hope—that they have a different way of teaching from universities. Being an expert in a subject at tertiary level does not make you a schoolteacher, and so we have grave concerns that the charter school model being opened to the tertiary institutions, which will be doing it because the Crown will give them lots of money to do it, is actually an incursion into an educational space where they are not competent. We reject that as an idea. We do not believe that tertiary institutions are competent to run the schools that are basically for children whose learning journey is about collaborative interaction, about starting off with relationships-based learning.

That is not what university study is all about, unfortunately. I wish it was. I am a participatory educator and I would love to see universities—I was totally bored at university. I found it very, very narrow in its educational methodology. I would love to see that, but I do not see it yet, and I do not think we should sacrifice our primary and secondary school kids to a model that is not about their stage of learning. As we all would agree here, everybody is at a different stage. They all learn differently. People do not learn—when they are 5 years old they have a different learning journey than when they are 25, 35, or 45. We really put these things at our peril.

The other big issue I want to talk about in the remaining seconds—but there will be more chances, I hope—is the home-care business in early childhood. The Minister talked today about the participation rate, which she is saying is nearly 98 percent—it has nearly reached the goal. The problem that we have is that participation is not quality, and I have raised this issue at a number of select committee meetings and will continue to raise it—98 percent participation sounds great, but where is the guarantee of quality? If you listen to the professionals, they will tell you that the early childhood sector cannot guarantee quality right across, and there is very—I have asked the Secretary of Education—

It will be no surprise to anybody in this Committee that New Zealand First stands to oppose this bill. I will tell you what is interesting; I will tell you what is surprising is the fact that it is obvious that the Government members have no intention of taking a call. I think it should be noted by the New Zealand public that the Government members have no intention of interacting with the Opposition around dialogue justifying the steps it is taking in this piece of legislation in any way, shape, or form. One might call it ignorance, another might call it arrogance, but that is something that should be noted by the New Zealand public—all the parents out there, the children who are going to school, the secondary school students, and the sector itself. It would appear that the Government members have absolutely no intention of taking a call and justifying themselves in terms of this bill.

With regard to Part 1 of this bill, it does several things. First of all, it enables the principal to manage more than one school. What is interesting is that a principal can, if there is a combined board—and you have probably heard this already—actually work across at least two schools, possibly three schools. I am not aware that it can only be the combination of two school boards of trustees. I am not aware that the legislation restricts it any way to just two school boards of trustees. So if you had communities of online learning (COOLs) in a cluster and they decided to amalgamate their boards of trustees, it is already possible under the current legislation for the boards to agree that there could be one principal across all the boards. The Minister might like to correct me if I am wrong about the current legislation.

However, what this piece of legislation outlines is that it is changing the way that that can be done, and in our view what that does is turn principals from being the leaders of education and learning inside secondary schools—with recognition that they are the leaders of that learning—into chief executive officers (CEOs). There is no way that the ministry was able to explain to us how the employment relationship would work in this instance. So it is not a combined board. We have got individual boards, but we have got a principal who is contracted—and I think “contracted” is a very important word—to several different boards. That is what this change to the legislation allows. That turns the principal into a self-contracting CEO. That removes the accountability from a single board, it places it inside a contract, and then each board will have to have a contract with that CEO.

I have heard this before. I heard this in the digital literacy inquiry. I heard this 3 years ago when a gentleman came to present at the digital literacy inquiry and said there is no need for a principal to even be in the same country as the schools that they are “managing”. He said it is quite feasible in the digital age for them to be in Australia and be the CEO of several schools. That gentleman did not get the relationship—and I am not going to hesitate to say that that Government does not get the relationship—of the principal to the community, the link that the principal has between the teaching staff, the support staff, the students, and the community, and the vital link and the vital contribution that a principal inside that learning community makes. So that is the first thing that this bill does that we oppose.

There are changes to school opening hours. Let us be clear: boards of trustees have been able to change school opening hours for 27 years—for 27 years—as long as they consult with their community and as long as they are open 2 hours either side of midday. There has been a change of a single word around that word “midday”, which I find very interesting, but boards of trustees have had the opportunity to change their opening hours in consultation with their community, and Matakana School would be a perfect example of that. What this bill does, however, is it inserts another body inside the community that must be consulted, and that is business. So what this does is it inserts a single entity inside the consultation bodies that must be talked to, and that is business. That is very interesting to us. There was no explanation why business needed to be consulted. It has not had to be consulted for 27 years. No business has come to me, and no school has gone to an extreme that has affected its employees and their ability to go to work, but now this Government is saying that business must be consulted by boards of trustees as part of that organisation.

The next thing the bill does is it enables tertiary institutions to sponsor partnership schools. I think that the most interesting thing about this is that every university that came to present on the second part of this bill said: “We are not interested. We are not interested in having a charter school. We don’t want to know. We didn’t ask for this.” There was one tertiary provider that did, and that was Mr Stuart Middleton from the Manukau Institute of Technology. So one institution—one gentleman—showed up to submit that this was a good idea. It is interesting. So where is this push that led to the Government finding that this is what was needed?

If, for example, this was a tertiary provider that was able to provide a charter school—something like what happens in Finland, where they are the trainers of teachers, and parents know that it is a teaching school attached to a university—that might be another topic, that might be innovation, and that might be something that this Parliament could support, but it is not. All this is doing is allowing a tertiary institution—and we know they are fighting for numbers at the moment. We know that their finances are under the gun because, population-wise, the number of students that are going to tertiary institutions is dropping.

💬 David Seymour: Oh, there’s a conspiracy around every corner.

They need another funding stream, and Mr Seymour and the ACT Party have given them another funding stream. Not only will this Government allow them to stretch the number of students inside their tertiary institutions from 5-year-olds all the way to 100-year-olds, or whatever; the taxpayer is going to fund every piece of property. The taxpayer is now going to fund every piece of property that that tertiary institution that becomes a sponsor of a charter school creates to deliver what is inside this bill. So that is the other reason. Partnership schools dual provision—

💬 David Seymour: What’s the member been reading?

Here you go—boards of trustees can already do this now, but they will not. Boards of trustees could already allow charter schools to come inside and use their technology rooms, but they will not—they will not, for many reasons. Mr Seymour will tell you it is because the unions have somehow blackmailed all the elected officials of the boards of trustees; I can tell you that is untrue. As the chairman of a board of trustees, I have not had one single member of any union come to me and actually say: “We’re going to walk out if you are going to discuss this.”

Let us talk about this. Charter schools do not come under the discipline process of State schools. There is only one form of complaint for charter schools, and that is to the Ombudsman after a child has been removed from the school. [Interruption] The reason it is important, Mr Bennett, if you would like to be educated, is that if a mainstream school—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Good luck with that.

I know. It was a long shot, but you have got to try. If a mainstream school opens up its technology rooms to charter school students, which is what this dual provision is, the discipline process of the State school does not apply to the students of the charter school. If the charter school student causes some form of damage, attack, or assault—look, it happens—there is no facility for the board of trustees of the State school to implement its discipline process over that student. They are a student of another organisation, and that organisation does not have to follow the discipline process. There are reasons why State schools do not want charter school students in their technology rooms. The fact that the charter schools get the dollar to build the technology rooms, do not do it, and then want to go and use the ones that the State schools have built is one of the other reasons.

In terms of the early childhood education services, there were changes made at the Education and Science Committee, and, quite frankly, although we are not that thrilled with home-based learning and the coverage of home-based learning at the moment, the changes made were positive. With regard to Teach First NZ and the new category of teaching positions, I have a Supplementary Order Paper—and I doubt very much whether Mr Chair is going to extend my call 1 minute longer. But seeing as the Government members are not taking calls, I am sure that the Opposition is going to have lots of opportunities before Part 1 is voted on to discuss my Supplementary Order Paper 214, which would restrict Teach First NZ - style apprentices—because that is what they are; they are apprentices in front of our students—to secondary schools only, which is how Teach First NZ has been operating under the current pilot.

So I will leave it there, Mr Chair, because I have no doubt that although you are a fair man, you are unlikely to give me another call. But I am hoping that my Opposition colleagues will stand. Maybe—just maybe—we will get a member of the Government to stand. Oh! It does not look like it—a signal from the other side there. But maybe, just maybe, at some stage the Government members might think that this is important enough to stand up—[Interruption] Mr Bennett, stand up and show people you have not read this. Go on, stand up and show the New Zealand public that you are sitting there merely to warm a seat because you do not know what it is that you are voting on. Kia ora.

Let us change the channel—Jenny Salesa.

Thank you for the call on the Education Legislation Bill. I would like to talk about two things that this bill is going to do. First, it will enable principals to manage more than one school. It will bring in what I would call a chief executive officer (CEO) type of person to manage a group of schools. Second, it would allow tertiary education institutions to sponsor charter schools, or, as this Government calls them, partnership schools.

I would like to start with the charter schools. We strongly oppose the expansion of charter schools. This is an initiative that is still not based on evidence that it actually works for our most vulnerable Māori and Pacific students, in particular. The charter schools model was introduced here into Aotearoa New Zealand because we were promised they would deliver better educational outcomes for our Māori and Pasifika students. To date we have not seen evidence that this actually has happened. In fact, when we look at the results, there is not very much difference between the results of charter school students versus those who attend State schools.

So why is it that we are going to expand this model and put even more millions of dollars into a model that is not yet evidence-based, when, on the other hand, we are freezing the operational budget for our actual State schools? We are freezing that. We are going to go and ask the parents to put even more money from their own pockets to assist with funding schools so that they can run, and we are going to invest millions and millions of dollars more to this untested, unproven charter school model. We already know from our own experience in Aotearoa New Zealand that charter schools have not worked—at least one. This Government has closed a failed school, Te Pūmanawa o te Wairua, and $5.5 million of our taxpayers’ money has gone down the drain.

So is it very wise that, in addition to knowing there is already one school that has failed, we are going to allow tertiary education institutions to open up and become funders of partnership schools, or charter schools? Our polytechnics already have issues of their own that they are dealing with. For instance, tertiary providers, as we all know, have been caught enrolling staff members to make up the numbers—to boost the numbers. They themselves have their own fiscal issues that they are going through right now. Instead of having them focus on what they deal with, which is tertiary education—just look at the name “tertiary education institution providers”—we are going to allow them to open up their doors and to serve our compulsory sector children, as well as some of our primary school children, probably, if this Government would have its way. But it is an unproven model.

Millions and millions of our own dollars is going on an unproven and untested model that has not actually shown the results. Also, when we were sold this model—this wonderful, market-driven model—one of the things that we were told was that it would bring in private funding. It would bring in corporations with their own funds, with their own capital, to assist in delivering educational outcomes for our students. It has not. So this bill allowing tertiary providers to become charter school providers is really an admission from this Government that it has failed. It has failed to attract the capital and funds from private providers that it said it would actually do.

But I turn now to my colleague Chris Hipkins’ Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 219. It will remove the ability of tertiary institutions to sponsor a charter school. It is a very good SOP and I am hopeful that members of the opposite side will join us on this side and make sure that this SOP is actually approved.

The other issue that I would like to turn to now is principals running multiple schools—as I said earlier, a CEO-type person running a group of schools. The idea that one principal can run two, three, or four schools very well is not one that I think has come from principals themselves. In fact, if I quote the President of the New Zealand Educational Institute, Louise Green, she said: “Principals work hard to lead the school they are the principal of, and it’s not a part time job.” She is absolutely right. It is not a part-time job, so why do we think that actually having a principal run two schools—or three, or four—is something that would work, when a principal running one school is a huge job on its own?

I would now like to talk about one of the schools that is in my electorate, which the Prime Minister has awarded for currently being the best, the most outstanding school of this year: McAuley High School. You would think that when you look a principal who would be capable and competent of becoming a CEO-type principal of a group of schools, it would be this principal, Anne Miles. But she will not have a part of becoming a principal of more than just one school. She is focused on ensuring that the results that she delivers for her current students—about 800 students—is something that she actually continues to do.

She says that she is so focused on making sure that her students are served well—do you know one of the things that she does? Because it is a decile 1b school and because she sees so many student come through who do not have funding to buy school uniforms, or to buy stationery, or even to eat, this principal actually goes out fund-raising. She goes out fund-raising to assist her students. She cannot see how combining the role of running a school very well, as well as ensuring that she serves very well the current students whom she already has, about 800 of them—she does not see that dividing her time and dividing her expertise amongst many schools is something that she would like to do.

She is exactly the kind of principal whom we should be looking at, whom the Government should be looking at as someone who knows what she is doing. She is someone who within the last 10 to 20 years has improved the academic standing of the school that she is currently in charge of. If a principal like her will not have anything to do with this kind of school, a school that is actually allowed to be run by one “super-principal”, what kind of other principal are we actually going to allow to run such a school? Thank you very much.

It is great to be able to put Tracey Martin’s mind at rest and confirm that we are, of course, partly listening. I stand—

💬 David Seymour: Don’t overpromise at the start of your speech, mate.

—well, partly listening; not to everyone—to retort some of the comments that we have heard thus far this evening. What an extraordinarily negative bunch they are on the other side. Sometimes I wonder. They are parties that look for the shadows. I sense that they sit in the corner of a dark room and try to imagine all the negative permutations that could possibly occur—

💬 Stuart Smith: Sucking lemons.

Sucking lemons—well said, Stuart. There are all the possible permutations—they always cover them. They always start with the view that they are broadly supportive: “We are broadly supportive of what we are seeking to do, but now let’s look at the list of permutations and possibilities that we could imagine might happen one day that could be negative.” It is such a shame that they live life with such a dark lens over their perspective.

But to the bill and Part 1. I will just spend a moment reflecting on the comments in respect of this concept “enable”. It is “enabled” only—not “directed”; “enabled”. It is a great word, that.

💬 David Seymour: I thought “enable” was the same as “compulsion”.

Some, clearly, do. But the bill enables a principal to look after one school. We have heard, over the last hour or so, around how this could be a problem. Indeed, I think it was Mr Hipkins who said that this is a challenge because schools have different cultures and different successes in terms of their learning environment. How terrible it would be if a principal could be appointed from one school—one would assume, in this case, a successful one—and then be able to apply their capacity across both schools to lift the performance of our children!

Well, that is what this bill is entirely focused on. This is about leadership. This is about principals who have demonstrated to their particular school that they are a leader. They are delivering a culture of performance to our children, and that should be encouraged and embraced. If the opportunity that this bill enables is that that principal can then apply that leadership, strength, and capability across two schools, then that is to the benefit of more children. It is not saying that it has to happen; it is saying that it enables it. Standing on the other side of the Chamber and saying “Oh, well, this is bad.”—from my perspective, I cannot see that you have children at the front of your mind when you make comments like that. Leadership is important, and it should be encouraged and the opportunity provided for our principals to be able to apply their skills over more than one school.

I would also like to make a comment in respect of the opening hours. Again, we have heard a tirade of potential permutations and complexities that this could bring to communities. With respect to the Opposition, let us start trusting our parents who sit on boards of trustees. This is an enabling piece of legislation. It is not directing them. It is handing it to our boards of trustees and saying that if this works for your community, then you have the capacity to consult with your community and to evolve and make it happen. It is not a dictate; it is enabling. Again, that word—“enabling”—seems to have missed the lexicon of understanding on the other side.

It was quite extraordinary listening to Tracey Martin saying that there is a word when we talk about community that says “business”. Oh my goodness—that means that business is part of the community. Yes, because those businesses are filled with parents. So it is not a problem for businesses and the broader community and the role that they play to be part of a consultative process, which is comprehensive. In fact, as someone relatively new to education, I was astounded at the layers of consultation that we have embedded in this.

This is good legislation. It is enabling legislation. It trusts our parents and it puts our children at the centre of education excellence. It should be encouraged, as opposed to being blocked at every turn by parties that always see the negative and love the shadows and enjoy the darkness. I support this bill.

What a pleasure it is to follow that happy member, Todd Muller. Members opposite will remember the days in their first year of this House when the air was fresh and they were tiptoeing through the tulips using words like “leadership” with gay abandon, and no matter that Judith Collins was sitting right in front of them, gnashing her teeth, thinking: “Don’t say it too often, Sonny Jim. You’ll be a dead man.” But, apart from that, at some point it is going to dawn on members opposite—one is tempted to say “these dudes”—that Government is finite. We are only 1 year from swapping sides in the House. Then we will see how positive the chipper Mr Muller really feels.

Mr Muller is right about one thing. Colleagues, do not get too excited. Those members are just so excited about being in Opposition, because they will actually get to give speeches in the House rather than saying: “I move, That the question be now put.” Imagine having sweated so hard to get into the place and the whips tell him: “It’s your big moment, Todd. I know you used to work in the Prime Minister’s office. Here, read this: ‘I move, That the question be now put.’ ” Sometimes they get an IQ test for John Key’s Cabinet. If you get it wrong more than twice, it is another year on the backbenches. This brings me to the member for Hamilton—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): And back to the bill.

Now the member for Franklin is eyeing up the race. He is like a greyhound coming into the benches, and he is off and running—“I move, That the question be now put.”—thinking that if he just says it fast enough, it will truncate his on-ramp. But, honestly—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I think the member has had about 300 metres of slack, and he should get back to the bill—or get to the bill.

Mr Chair, you are characteristically generous and correct. Let me turn my attention to the amendments in Part 1, which amend the Official Information Act (OIA) 1982 to exempt a tertiary educational institution that is a shareholder in a charter school from the provisions of the Official Information Act. I will sum up the Opposition’s view of that clause: why? If it is spending public money—which, of course, let us acknowledge that dozens of tertiary institutions are currently rorting from this hapless Government and its useless Tertiary Education Commission—why would we not apply the Official Information Act? I challenge Minister Parata to take a call. We are very privileged to have the current Minister of Education—for as long as it takes Nick Smith to want a new job other than housing—to be in the chair for this. We would ask the Minister to explain the logic of why you would accept a provision that exempts from the Official Information Act an institution that is taking public money for the purpose of investing in a charter school.

As if that is not enough, it is also exempted from the provisions of the State Sector Act, which governs every other expenditure item on the public account. And, as if that is not enough, the Ombudsmen Act—well, that is perhaps less serious, because, let us face it, this Government has been so single-mindedly adept at starving the Office of the Ombudsmen of resources that it takes about 2 years to get an OIA through, and that is just fine according to Mr Key’s Government, because democracy, it seems, is a “nice-to-have”, not always a must-have. At least, as long as you can spin it out, the better it seems to be.

Charter schools—why do we have charter schools, colleagues? What reason could there possibly be? Could it be that we enjoy spending five times the amount of resources per pupil on a charter school pupil that we would on a regular, State school pupil? By a kind of National Government Cabinet logic, if everybody was in a charter school, we could spend five times as much on every student. No—no. In fact, if charter schools represented just 20 percent of students, we would have double the education budget, but I do not think anybody has told Bill English that. Charter schools have been proven to be a failure. Whangaruru is the flag bearer for a desultory performance and a lack of clawback where public funds that were clearly not being properly used were unable to be returned to the Crown.

I have been witnessing tertiary education institutions, which are subject to the clauses of this bill, routinely being caught out overstating student numbers, overstating course duration, using dodgy immigration agents, promising the world, and ending up in real trouble. Why would we give them—

I would like to thank the member who just resumed his seat, David Cunliffe, for a genuine, engaging, and humorous address. If only he could have done that a few years ago, he might still be the leader of the Labour Party, but such is how things go.

I would like to address my comments to a couple of provisions that have already been widely debated by members tonight. I would like to pick up on some comments that Catherine Delahunty made—that every student is different and that one size cannot fit all, and that it is the role of the education system to bring out the greatest potential in every single student, which is something that Peter Fraser, that great Labour Party education Minister was so fond of eloquently saying.

When we come to Part 1 of this bill, there are several aspects of it that are very much in pursuit of that objective. We in this House do not know precisely what each and every child needs. When we talk about “evidence-based”, what we are often talking about are statistical methods of trying to establish what the average child needs, not allowing communities to use the knowledge they have about what their child needs. So I agree with Catherine Delahunty in her empathy for each and every child being different and special and needing to be educated to the greatest of their potential, as the great Peter Fraser once said.

💬 Jenny Salesa: Not by tertiary people.

But Jenny Salesa might want to ask herself why it is that so many Pasifika groups and so many Pacific parents are enrolling children at partnership schools kura hourua. That is the answer to the Hon David Cunliffe’s question as to why we have partnership schools kura hourua. We have them because, in the first instance, community groups, no longer satisfied with the service they are getting from the State school network, go to considerable effort to put in applications and establish the school, and, in the second instance, the parents of those children come along and enrol their children to attend the school. I would just submit to members opposite that they might get a little bit above 26 percent if they were prepared to resonate with and listen to the communities that are making their choice, even in the electorates of the members who have been speaking.

The part of this bill that enables a principal to operate several schools was touched on by Jenny Salesa. Jenny Salesa said she was aware of a principal—who, no doubt, is a hard-working, noble, empathic principal who goes well above and beyond the call of duty in her job, and is the kind of principal whom all of us should be very grateful to have here in New Zealand, because we know, to the extent that we want to take aggregate evidence, that the quality of school leadership is one of the most important determinants of how our children will succeed in times to come. It might be, if we were to alter Jenny Salesa’s anecdote, or thought experiment, just a little bit—what if such a wonderful principal was actually ambitious to extend and expand her skills to a second school and help more children?

What is so special about the number 800—the number of pupils who Jenny Salesa tells us are in that particular school? I have schools in my electorate that have 2,400 students and more, and 2,400 is three times 800. Is it the case that that principal has too few students, or is it the case that the principals of those schools have too many? And what on earth is the Government going to do about it?

Surely, the most important thing the Government can do is actually allow choice and allow people to use their local knowledge. There may well be principals who wish to look after several schools and extend their knowledge and help even more children, and what exactly is wrong with that? Why would we ban people from having a particular freedom just because not everyone wants to use it? Did we hear any members of the Labour Party using that kind of argument when we had the marriage equality debate? I should certainly hope not. This bill is about enabling people to use their freedoms to better educate children.

Then we come to another section of Part 1, Subpart 8, which enables—and let us just focus on that word for a moment, members; “enables”—tertiary institutions to become sponsors of partnership schools. We heard Tracey Martin say that she believes that there are good examples of schools that are run in parallel or in combination with tertiary institutions where the exchange of information and knowledge between the tertiary institution and the compulsory sector school actually benefits the students—and that is another phrase that members opposite should focus on. Let us just tally up a few words here: “enable” and “benefits the students”. This is what education is supposed to be about. So why would it be so bad if, for instance, Stuart Middleton and the Manukau Institute of Technology, or any of the other universities or tertiary institutions in New Zealand, were able to open a partnership school and start helping New Zealand’s children in a wider range of ways?

Well, we heard from David Cunliffe—actually, he was guilty of misleading the House, whether he meant to or not, when he said that partnership schools—

💬 Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. The member—I know he is relatively new, but he should know that that is an unacceptable thing for him to say, and I am sure that you know that that is an unacceptable for him to say.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): No, I do not. I see that this is a fairly robust debate. He has made an accusation. I have heard many accusations made from across the Chamber during Committee stages about all sorts of things, and I have not found in favour of the member’s point of order. I will call on David Seymour to continue.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I am pretty devastated by that remark, on two counts: firstly, that I might have misled the House, and, secondly, that it might have been unwitting. I would ask you to take that into account and ask him to withdraw and apologise.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Well, I note that the member has said that he has not taken offence, which is good, because I do not see how he could, bearing in mind the robust speech that he made earlier in the debate. I call on David Seymour.

Thank you, Mr Chair. And, for the record, the member was not unwitting, but what he said was that partnership schools receive five times as much funding as other schools, and any reasonable member of the House who believed the moniker “honourable” before the name of David Cunliffe might have come to believe that partnership schools are deliberately funded at a higher rate than other schools. Well, that is simply not true, and the official information is out there that partnership schools are not funded a dollar more nor a dollar less than a State school with the same number of students.

Some members will disingenuously mislead the public by saying that because most partnerships schools are new and all schools get additional funding in their early years as they grow, somehow they are receiving more money that way. But that simply is not the truth, and it would be better for the quality of public policy debate and for the education of New Zealand’s children if the Labour Party members could focus their debate on the facts, rather than inventing their own facts when the real ones do not suit them. But tertiary institutions sponsoring partnership schools will be an enormous advance for education in New Zealand, and I am very proud to see that in this bill.

In the short time I have remaining, I would also like to speak to Supplementary Order Paper 220, which would bring the legislation into line with actual practice. An important part of the partnership school policy is the Partnership Schools/Kura Hourua Authorisation Board. That is the place that people in the community, including Su’a William Sio’s community, including Jenny Salesa’s community, including Carmel Sepuloni’s community—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Please don’t tell us what’s good for our communities, David Seymour.

—all of which have had applicants from—no, I am telling the member that people from within her community know what is good for them and have chosen to make an application, and they make that application with the partnership school authorisation board. That member should stop telling people in her community what is good for them, because they know what is good for themselves, and they are applying to operate partnership schools at the partnership schools authorisation board. Try a bit of empathy; the polls might go up.

The fact of the matter is that this policy depends on having a clearly signposted, professional, robust process that applicants who wish to open partnership schools can enter into to be approved if they have sufficient quality. Where there have been difficulties with charter school policies overseas, it has often stemmed from poor-quality authorisation. In the past, in the legislation, it requires only one member of the partnership school authorisation board. Legislation should reflect real practice, and in real practice one member is not sufficient to carry out the processes that I have just described. That is why I am advancing a Supplementary Order Paper that will change the legislative requirement to have five to nine members of the partnership school authorisation board, rather than merely one.

In conclusion, this really has been a debate about one side of the House, which would like to enable educators to have a wider range of permutations of arrangements for helping children, and the other side, which can see only the worst in giving people freedom and giving communities choices. I am very proud to stand on this side of the House, where we believe in communities, we believe in education, we believe in freedom, and we are not afraid of it. Thank you.

I thought it would be helpful if I rose to answer some of the concerns that have been raised by members in the Committee and alleviate those concerns for them. I want to talk about a number of issues that have been raised in this part of the bill. The first is the concern about enabling principals to be in charge of more than one school, were their boards to be agreeable to that. What this provision reflects is the underlying driver for this entire bill, which is how we create flexibility for schools and their communities to make choices that better meet the needs of their children and young people. All children are different, and they have different needs. Parents should be able to determine what the best options are for their children.

In terms of principals being able to manage more than one school—again, it is not a compulsion, and it is not a prescription. It is an enabling of this to occur, and it is a facilitation of a choice. It is providing flexibility for those communities that deem that to be the best way of meeting their needs to take up that opportunity. Clearly, no principal who thinks this is beyond their ken would put themselves in that situation, nor would boards that did not feel that they had the range of skills required for carrying out that responsibility.

The member Jenny Salesa has identified a remarkable principal who is leading an excellent school, and who was recognised through the supreme award of the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards this year. But the fact that that principal makes that one choice does not compel all other principals to make the same choice. That is the choice that she freely makes, but others may wish to make other choices, and what this provision does is enable that to occur.

There has also been concern expressed that this would then require principals to become chief executives, rather than leaders of learning. Well, newsflash—they already are chief executives. They are responsible for running the budget, their staff, their property, and their communications with parents, and leading the curriculum and all of the teachers within their school to ensure that kids get the best education, and that they are able to demonstrate that. I do not know why being a chief executive is described as some kind of disparaging term. A principal is the chief responsible for executing responsibilities within their school. Again, just to alleviate the concerns of the Opposition, no principal is going to be compelled to take up this opportunity, but it is going to be there should a community wish to do so.

In the same theme of flexibility, the bill provides in Part 1 for there to be flexible hours. It makes very clear that there needs to be blocks before noon and after noon, but then the school can decide, in consultation with its community, whether it might wish to be a little bit more flexible. We saw that that flexibility worked extremely well in Christchurch, for instance. In fact, with all the challenges that burdened that community, it not only coped but flourished with flexibility and with the sharing of resources. I can tell the Committee that the achievement levels of the Greater Christchurch region have continued to go up, so it was not compromised by the notion of flexible hours.

Let me come to the point of consultation. Some concern has been expressed by two members tonight about consultation. On the one hand, Catherine Delahunty was concerned that consultation might not be wide enough, and on the other hand Tracey Martin was concerned that it might be too narrow and prescriptive. The possibility was entertained that those involved in commerce who pay tax, which in turn funds schools, might actually also be included in the consultation. Again, to alleviate that member’s concern, let me just read out what the actual provision does say in terms of that consultation. It says that “a board may vary the time at which any 1 or more half-days take place (for example, by starting a second half-day before noon) if the board—(a) has adequately consulted parents, staff, the local community, and any other person who the board considers may be affected, about the proposed variation and it is generally acceptable;”. There is no prescription as to who is in or out of the consultation, Catherine Delahunty. It leaves it to the judgment and discretion of the people concerned, which is that school and its community, and that is as it should be.

Another assurance I can give members is that, as I announced recently, over half of all schools now—catering to 410,000 students—are in communities of learning. Communities of learning, by definition, track an end-to-end pathway from early childhood, through primary school, secondary school, and on to a connection with whatever tertiary options could be made available to young people in that community. That means that as those communities of learning make determinations about what hours work for them, families who have children in early childhood education in primary school, or in secondary school will be part of a whole pathway of a community to make a decision about what hours work for them. But let us not resile from everyday reality now—right now it is complex for parents who have chosen for their children to be in different schools to get them all there by 9 o’clock. That is a complexity. It is just on the other side of this particular challenge.

Members have been concerned about providing more opportunity for other providers to offer partnership schools or kura hourua, and what this bill also offers is the opportunity for tertiary education institutions to participate in that process. It does not require them to do so, but it enables them, if they wish to take up the opportunity, to have another option of providing educational choice to communities that might want it. I would like to remind members of the Committee—if they knew, and if they did not, I would like to tell them—that when kura kaupapa were first promoted, the amount of opposition about whether this option should be allowed or not, how it would compromise learning—

💬 Chris Hipkins: And which Government promoted them?

Good point—good point. I am not questioning which Government. The example I am giving is that as new models have been introduced into our country, there has been opposition at different times.

One of the reasons why our education system is characterised as being a world-leading one is the range of diversity of options, the priority of parental choice, and the focus on ensuring that, whichever option it is, young people are getting the best education possible. That is what kura hourua offer—another option. Nobody is required to take them up, just as no one is required to go to a kura or a State integrated school or a single-sex boys’ school, but parents should have that choice. Why would they not? Why would we not, in this act of democracy of Aotearoa New Zealand, provide those choices? So, again, underlying not just this part of the bill but the others that we will go on to debate are these very core principles of flexibility, of choice, of parents being able to exercise that, and of ensuring that there are different models and different options available to young people.

I have just one final remark about the opportunity for a principal to lead more than one school. We already have examples of that. So, for instance, there are already appointed 26 community of learning leaders whose jobs include leading across communities of learning that can have six to 12 to 20 schools in it. They have taken on those opportunities with their eyes wide open, their energies raised, and their enthusiasm engaged as they focus not only on how they lead learning for those young people but how they also stretch their leadership ambit. We want more challenges for leadership in our education system. We want to see ourselves growing that quality because we know that the quality of teaching and leadership makes the most difference within schools.

So I am hoping that I have alleviated the concerns of the Opposition that these are all about enabling choice. They are not about directing, instructing, or prescribing them, but, rather, it is about choice being available to parents, who know their children best. Thank you.

Members, I just want to draw a couple of things to the attention of the Committee. Before the Minister spoke, because you have got such a lenient and convivial Chair, the wheels got a little bit wobbly. I just want to remind members that the Committee stage is about discussing the parts of the bill that are under debate at any one time—to consider, for instance, the submissions that were made before the select committee, and to pose questions to the Minister and for the Minister to respond. What I noticed in a number of contributions in the last half an hour is that there has maybe been a little bit too much humour and conviviality. We have taken a few slaps each side. Now we are going to come back.

Over the past few days you will have noticed various presiding officers referring more to the Standing Orders. So we are going to look now to contributions in this Committee stage that actually adhere a little bit more closely to the Standing Orders—that examine the parts that are before the Committee and scrutinise the legislation that we are considering.

Kia ora, Mr Chairperson. I am pleased to take a call in this Committee stage. I want to focus, in terms of Part 1, on Subpart 2. I want to thank the Minister of Education for giving an explanation, particularly around the clause that I am going to address in my contribution, and that is clause 9, which inserts new section 75A. She did touch on the appointment of principals, and I appreciate her assurances to the Committee that this is around a flexibility, that no one needs to take it up, and that it is really, I guess, up to the board of trustees whether it wants to take this option up. Of course, I am speaking about the appointment of principals, and the particular clause, where it talks about how “(1) The powers conferred on a board by section 65 include the power to appoint a principal. (2) Two or more boards may appoint 1 person to be the principal of 2 or more schools administered by the boards. (3) A combined board (as defined in section 92) may appoint 1 person to be the principal of 2 or more schools administered by the board.”

I understand the principle of flexibility. For me, representing what is also the Minister’s own homeland of the East Coast, it makes me think how applicable that particular provision of, perhaps, one principal over one or two schools would actually be in practice. I think it is important that as legislators in this Committee we take the intention of bills and we apply them in a practical way to see whether they would work or not. Of course, I am talking about Ngata Memorial College, the Minister’s own high school, and the principal there, Heneriata Milner, the mother of Nehe Milner-Skudder. I am talking about Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Waiu o Ngati Porou, which is just down the road. I am talking about Campbell Dewes school, Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Kawakawa mai Tawhiti in Hicks Bay, not to mention the Minister’s own sister, the principal of Tolaga Bay Area School.

I guess, in response to the Minister’s assurances that this is about flexibility, it would be useful to hear from the Minister, and I was hoping she would say, when she got up to clarify some issues, what research her ministry has undertaken to say that having one principal over multiple schools actually equals better educational outcomes for our children. I name those particular schools because the Minister is well aware of the diversity—not just in terms of geographical diversity but in terms of the history behind those iconic Ngati Porou schools on the East Coast—and I wonder whether the Minister can see that this flexibility will address the real issue facing many of our people on the East Coast, which is one of a declining population.

What enthusiasm I get when I attend those schools with those principals and with those teachers and with those tauira around retaining their hapū identity and their Ngati Poroutanga. I just put that there to the Minister to see whether she can assure us that those particular iconic schools from her own area of Ngati Porou are protected under this. As she said, it is a flexible issue, but there is nothing stopping someone, somewhere down the track, with this particular provision, from saying: “Well, look, we don’t need your school, Campbell. We don’t need your school, Heneriata. We can just combine them. We’ll have one person there.” I can assure the Minister, as she well knows, that there will be a huge reaction to that possibility.

I then want to turn to Subpart 7 and clause 20—charter schools. We are not averse to looking at different ways of providing education. The problem, though, in relation to the partnership schools, is the process by which we have engaged with the local community. I want to talk about the partnership school that was announced in my electorate, Te Aratika Academy. Te Aratika Academy was announced by the member David Seymour as coming to Napier. In his release, he also talked about a special Māori character school. We actually have three existing special Māori character schools in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti/Hawke’s Bay: Te Aute College, Hukarere Girls’ College, and St Joseph’s School.

My point around supporting innovative ways and my point around the process of this particular announcement is that we have three iconic Māori special character schools in the Hawke’s Bay. So when this announcement was made, of course, as with anything that helps Māori males—because this is what this charter school is geared towards—in year 11 to year 13, then my immediate reaction was: where are those year 11 to year 13 young, Māori males from Hawke’s Bay going to come from? Of course, I was going to go and call the principals of the Māori special character schools in my electorate: Hukarere Girls’ College, Te Aute College, and St Joseph’s School. Of course, only one of them is for Māori males—that is Te Aute College. It was interesting that the principals had not even been consulted about this announcement—so much so that they felt that their, I guess, experience, particularly at Te Aute College, to contribute to the success of a charter school in their own area was overlooked.

The Minister might want to comment around tidying up her processes around announcing charter schools around this country, particularly if she is going to use the issue around Māori special character schools when we already have them in those regions.

💬 David Seymour: In that case, no one’ll go to it.

That is my point. Nobody had called those schools. Seriously, we want the school to be successful, but the reality is that the process is flawed—totally flawed. That is what this announcement showed to that particular member.

But back to the Minister in charge of this bill—those are my concerns: clause 9, in Subpart 2, around the principals and clause 20, in Subpart 7, where it talks about charter schools. Minister, it would be good to hear from you around—and I do not want to mention another announcement in my area, Te Whare Tawhiti o Tākitimu, which is apparently going to come out tomorrow. Just like the Minister, I am passionate about ensuring that every Kiwi child in this country gets the best education that the State can provide, but we cannot just gung-ho change things to something new without proper research. My point is around asking what research the Minister and her ministry has been provided that shows one principal can adequately lead multiple schools. The other issue is: please, tidy up your process around announcing charter schools, particularly in areas where there are already Māori special character schools. Kia ora tātou.

I will just take a quick call to take up the invitation from the member for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Meka Whaitiri. She referred to a number of schools and kura with whom I am very familiar, as she indicated. Let me just be very clear about this. In fact, area schools, of which Tolaga Bay Area School is one, are several schools in one. Tolaga Bay Area school is a kōhanga as well as a total-immersion preschool; it is a primary, intermediate, and secondary school. In many senses, we already have examples of this with area schools all around the country.

The member asked whether there is evidence on this. Actually, yes there is. This practice occurs in a number of areas in the UK as well as in Europe, but we are more interested in New Zealand, simply around facilitating the opportunity for those communities that think it will work for them to do so. To take Te Wānanga Whare Tapere o Tākitimu, another example that the member referred to, its whole kaupapa is about kōhanga reo, kura kaupapa, whare kura, and it is interested in a whare wānanga. So there we have an example of one principal in charge of, in effect, four schools, but within a different model arrangement. So I hope the member feels reassured by that—that her electorate already has shining examples of what it is we are talking about. Thank you.

Earlier, David Seymour, the ACT Party leader, made a comment that Pacific people are all going towards charter schools. He gave a false image, really, because in the Government’s report there are only nine charter schools. Two of those are run by Pacific organisations. I tell you that, at the beginning, I think the Government gave the message to our community, to the Māori community, that charter schools ought to be embraced because they were going to save our young people—that they were going to provide an opportunity for our young people to lift the standards and quality of education. That has not happened. In fact, in the Government’s own regulatory impact statement it says that so far the diverse range of sponsors that was envisaged for the model has not eventuated. That is a failure statement for this exercise. I say that because, right from the outset, the Government promised that charter schools would each have a particular sponsor that would provide an education programme that would be different from what was provided by our public education system, but that is not the case.

Most New Zealanders pay their taxes and collectively do so because it is our expectation that the Government provide an education for all of its citizens because of the public good that that provides. But what I am seeing here are two models: one is the private sector model; the other is the public sector model. The Government has said that there would be these slush funds from the private sector that would set up charter schools, but that is not the case. The case is that they still continue to use public funds. What we are seeing from this bill is an extension of a failed system, which I do not believe—I do not believe at all—is going to achieve what this Government says it will achieve.

I look at clause 9, inserting new section 75A, and I am asking myself why—what is the driver behind having one principal be the principal of two or more schools? This was an exercise that did take place at Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate. It attempted to have one board and one principal for its three schools. It did not work. It also was applied here at Southern Cross Campus, where there was one principal for three separate, distinct schools. They have gone back now. Each school demanded to have a principal for its particular school. It is a specialist role that principals are required to perform, and the needs, particularly the needs of our communities, are so great that you require a hands-on, full-time principal, not a part-time principal, because that is how I am seeing that clause apply: you have a principal who is responsible for two or more separate schools—it could be a college; it could be a primary school.

What drives that? That is what I am asking. What evidence is there that this is going to improve the lot of our young people? Many of the problems that often occur in our communities stem from the fact that still today, in the 21st century, our education system has not accepted the fact that our young people—Māori and Pasifika—have significant assets that they bring with them to their education. Too often, teachers and some schools—and, I would say, too often this Government—look upon our kids as if they have a deficit or they have something bad to contribute to this society. I think this Government needs to get its head in the right space. It will be the Māori and Pasifika communities who will far outnumber the white community in Aotearoa New Zealand. If we want this country to realise its full potential, we have got to give these kids the best opportunities there are, and I do not believe that this is the way to go about it.

I move, That the question be now put.

Ni hao, Mr Chair, in Chinese Language Week. I want to stand to support Supplementary Order Paper 218 in the name of my colleague Chris Hipkins. It is about the composition of the Education Council. To look at where we want to move to, I think it is really important that we look at the current composition of that council. Currently there are nine members, all elected or appointed by the Minister, five of whom have to hold current practising certificates. I just looked at the definition of that on the Education Council website and it says they have to be employed in a teaching position of at least 0.5 full-time teacher equivalent, they have to have been in a continuous position for more than 6 weeks, and they must be employed as a teacher. But there is actually no explicit commitment to the five of those teachers representing specific sectors of our education system.

So if we look at the Education Council’s purpose, it says that it is the professional body for teachers and that it is about improving the quality of teaching and education leadership, focusing on the needs of children and young people and the public interest. As this bill has outlined, those constituent teaching groups actually comprise representatives from the early childhood education profession, the primary school profession, and the secondary school profession. I would like the Minister, I guess, to reassure us that the current rules around who can be appointed by her to the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ) actually ensure that we have representatives from all those sectors.

I particularly want to support the proposition in Chris Hipkins’ Supplementary Order Paper 218 because it is about people being elected to office. We are now in the middle of local board elections, and when you go on the website, it encourages people to stand, because we need committed people with a wide range of skills who want to contribute to their communities. I think that at the heart of this Supplementary Order Paper and the proposition within is that the meaningful constituencies within the teaching profession should be specifically represented. That is, in fact, what this Supplementary Order Paper would enable. It would enable, for example, a teacher representing the early childhood sector to be elected by their peers. It would enable a teacher representing the primary sector to be elected by their peers. It would enable a teacher representing the secondary sector to be elected by their peers.

We have the national constituent organisations that would enable that process. We have the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA). We have the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI), which is made up of principals, teachers, and support staff. We have the New Zealand Principals’ Federation, because another constituent group is a principal representing the primary sector, and also a principal representing the secondary sector. I see no reason why this particular Supplementary Order Paper should not merit, at least, some consideration and a comment or kōrero from the Minister about why she disagrees with this proposition. Essentially, if the Education Council is about a professional body for teachers, then I would have thought that at the heart of it should be representatives of all the specific teaching professions, as I have outlined.

Within the Supplementary Order Paper, there is also a comparison between the education sector and the health sector. So there has been a Minister previously, under this Government, who recognised that having representatives from the health sector on the governance board actually made sense, so I think that the Minister should look at that and make some comment. I think, from our perspective, elected representatives bring something to a democracy—we are all here; we are all elected representatives.

We, on this side, I think, stand for local democracy. We stand for specific representation, and we want to enable the PPTA, the NZEI, and the New Zealand Principals’ Federation to actually have a say in the quality of teaching and education leadership specifically in our country. So I would implore the members of this Committee to consider this SOP. It is a very good SOP, so I commend my colleague Chris Hipkins for bringing it to the Committee, and I commend it to my fellow members. Kia ora.

I want to thank the Minister of Education for her contribution to the debate earlier when she addressed some, but not all, of the questions and issues that members had raised. In particular, the question that she did not address, around principals managing more than one school, is about what the employment relationship would be. Would the principal be reporting to one board of trustees on behalf of a number of boards? How would that actually work? The Minister did not address that. She also did not address what would happen if the relationship between one of the school boards of trustees and the principal broke down but the others were happy to continue with the arrangement. What would happen to the employment relationship in those circumstances?

She did not actually address those issues, and, to me, that cuts to the heart of a lot of the concerns I have about it. How is this actually going to work? The Minister talked, in her contribution, about an area school, and drew an analogy with an area school. There are two essential differences with an area school, one of which is that they are governed by a single board of trustees and the second of which is that they are all, typically, geographically located on one site. What we are talking about with this change is that a principal could be managing a number of schools in different geographic locations with different boards of trustees that have different pressures on them. I want to understand how that is actually going to work in terms of the employment relationship, which is not an issue that the Minister addressed.

We then come to the issue that has not yet been canvassed, and that is Supplementary Order Paper 176, introduced by the Minister after the public hearings process had been completed by the Education and Science Committee, which introduced an entirely new category of teachers called “trainee teachers”. The provision that this bill puts in place gives the Minister power to require a school to create a teaching position called a “trainee teacher” and it could only appoint somebody to it who was taking part in one of the teacher training programmes. There is no guarantee that this position would be in addition to, rather than instead of, one of the positions that the school currently gets within its teaching allocation.

That would be one of the issues where, if the Government were to give me that assurance, I am open to the debate, because I think that there is a huge scope for more on-job training for teachers. That is certainly the feedback that principals give, and, actually, a lot of the initial teacher education providers themselves acknowledge this. But if those trainee teachers are going to replace teachers who are fully qualified and already in the classroom, then that creates a concern.

It also creates a concern that there do not seem to be any restrictions around how widely this will be applied. For example, there is an evidence base around Teach First, and the evidence base is largely positive. It has been evaluated by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, and the evaluation came out positive. It deals only with secondary school teachers. The relationship in a primary school would be very, very different, and yet there is no restriction that would prevent one of these trainee teachers replacing a primary school teacher. So there are really big issues around the Supplementary Order Paper as presented by the Minister and as now incorporated into the bill that have not been adequately canvassed.

I want to be really clear: I think that we need to do a much better job of initial teacher education in New Zealand and that there should be a larger on-job, practical component to initial teacher education, because that is what a lot of the experts working in this area have been saying, and we should certainly take note of that. There is goodwill within the educational community to addressing that issue and to actually creating some practical solutions, but what this legislative amendment does potentially tears away all of that goodwill.

We managed to negotiate with the Government an extension of the time frame for the report back of this bill so that the select committee could have a week to hear submissions from people who have an interest in this particular area. They did not have time to adequately prepare their submissions, but we did at least, as a select committee, have an opportunity to hear from them, and they were overwhelmingly opposed to it. Even within the group of people who were opposed, there was some support for some of the concepts contained within the Supplementary Order Paper, but they were concerned that they were being rushed, that they were being poorly thought through, and that they did not have the evidence base that they needed to back them up in order for people to be able to support them.

This is quite a significant issue, because that part of the bill has not been through the parliamentary process that it should have gone through. It is almost akin to passing it under urgency, because it is not going to get the proper select committee scrutiny that it should have received, although it is not being passed—

I move, That the question be now put.

I am—[Interruption] When I stand up, other people sit down. I am not going to accept the closure motion, and it is for reasons very close to those that were alluded to by Mr Hipkins. When a bill has a significant change occur at the select committee and it has not been properly advertised for submission, that means that it is treated differently at the Committee stage and, therefore, there is an extended debate, in particular on that part of the bill. I think that when there are reasonable questions that are asked about that sort of area, they should be answered, or the debate will run on for some time.

I just want to pick up on the point that my colleague Chris Hipkins has just raised and that the Chairperson has just referred to, which was that the process was far from ideal, and that is why we do need to discuss the Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that relate to it. I think that it is very important to recognise that sector representatives were very upset that they were not going to have the chance to input on this point. There was a considerable struggle to get them heard, and there was a very, very short time frame. It was far from ideal.

The whole issue around Teach First or similar programmes is innovative on one level, but it also has some complexities, so it does need to be looked at and scrutinised by the education sector, because it bears the brunt of the application of it. I am supporting SOP 214, which Tracey Martin has written, which is an amendment to clause 13E, because what it does is replace the word “school” with “secondary school” in each place. This Supplementary Order Paper actually amends new section 91O “to provide that employment-based trainee teachers may only be employed to teach in secondary schools.” The Green Party is supporting that because, as others have said, there is no research or evidence to say that this kind of untrained or partially-trained or “in-training” person, with these kinds of broader opportunities and powers, is safe in the primary school medium. I myself have doubts about the idea that it is great at all secondary schools as well. It is obviously not in all schools, and it has been useful in some ways, but to me it is more about the failure to have any workplace planning.

The “in-training” has been leapt upon by some schools because they do not have sufficient teachers, and that is because we are not planning, we are not attracting, we are not actually thinking ahead, or, as leaders in this Parliament, making sure that we have got enough teachers attracted to the profession and trained to do the jobs that they need to do. This is what happens when you leave it all to free will, the market, and the mantra of choice: you end up with a whole lot of messy, random situations, which get patched up. This is a patch-up job.

Teach First may be inspiring for some kids in some circumstances, but, really, if I was a trainee teacher who paid for a 3-year degree, I would be quite resentful about somebody else coming in and being able to do that. That is about the fact that educational learning requires some depth. I am particularly passionate about children with learning differences, and just being passionate and having been to university and being trained on the job does not assist you. We have enough trouble with teachers who have had 3 years’ training, let alone those who have not had that in certain fields in the school. So this bill, and this particular part, is of concern to me because I do not think that the case is proven. I do think that Tracey Martin’s SOP is valuable, because it protects the group of younger students. So if that is all we can achieve, I am supporting it—it is not ideal, but it is worth supporting them.

I also want to support Chris Hipkins’ SOP 219, which deletes subpart 7 of Part 1, “removing the proposed ability for tertiary institutions to sponsor partnership schools.” I would like to support the speech that we heard from Meka Whaitiri. Kura kaupapa would love to have the resources that could go to tertiary institutions to run charter schools and that go to other institutions that are setting up. Kura kaupapa would love to have those things—they do not. One of the reasons why some people told me that they were looking at charter schools was that they could not get sufficient funding for their kura. Talk about flaky—you take an idea that is awesome, that works, and that upholds culture, and then you underfund it and you come up with another idea, which is basically a privatisation model, and shoehorn it into a situation that provides privilege. Of course people are going to want more money. They need more money to run these schools. It is very, very challenging.

In terms of these issues, I would also like to comment on the fact that we now have this authorisation board, the advisory board. It seems quite difficult to get the quality of applicants required to run a school. Actually, it is difficult. Schools are complex organisations. They require a sophisticated understanding of the community and of education. So randomly saying “I did not like the local school; I think I will start up a new one.” has been shown around the world to have not worked very well at all, and we have already had those examples. I am supporting the Supplementary Order Papers that will actually rein this in, because we do not have the ability under this bill to stop this but we can rein it in.

As I call Tracey—

💬 Tracey Martin: Martin.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Martin—sorry. I just want to inform the Committee that the Silver Ferns won 61-38.

Kia ora, and on that wonderful note—

💬 Tim Macindoe: Why so close?

Ha, ha! Just back to the bill, I want to thank the Minister of Education for standing and somewhat clarifying it. Both the single member of the Government who has stood to take a call on this bill and the Minister have mentioned trusting parents and parental choice. They used those words a lot: to “trust parents” and have “choice”. I hope that in the decision around Salisbury School the Minister will apply that parental choice and trust that parents know what is best for their girls, and that she will adopt the Salisbury solution so that those parents continue to have choice and can be trusted in that choice for their girls.

First of all, I will make sure that I put it on the record that New Zealand First will not be supporting Mr Seymour’s Supplementary Order Paper 220. We have no doubt that Mr Seymour’s Supplementary Order Paper, with the benefit of the Government’s support, will go through into law, and I want to just put on record that when New Zealand First is in a place of influence we will repeal it, and we will repeal all legislation to do with charter schools.

I want to speak to my Supplementary Order Paper 214, which amends new section 91O, inserted by clause 13E. The new section is around, as they are called, employment-based trainee teachers. I want to be 100 percent clear that there already are trainee teachers who, as part of their 4-year teacher training, do what they call “section” inside our schools—inside our primary schools and inside our secondary schools. This is an amendment made by the Education and Science Committee—the new section allows for a completely new category of apprentice, in a way, and they are called “employment-based trainee teachers”.

It was interesting talking to the gentleman from Teach First NZ who came to discuss this move by the Government. He said that it was news to him 4 days before the Supplementary Order Paper was placed on the table of the select committee. It was news to him because the Post Primary Teachers Association, Teach First NZ, and the Ministry of Education had reached an agreement that the Teach First NZ graduates would be able to apply, like any other qualified teacher, for a teaching position as it was publicly advertised in the Gazette. This piece of legislation removes that requirement. This piece of legislation protects and provides a monopoly currently for Teach First NZ graduates, by the Secretary for Education, so that they have a protected position at the same rate as a trainee teacher who is getting a student loan and is going through the 4-year degree. They will be paid at the same rate as that person after they have come out of their qualification, because the Government is going to protect it for them.

My Supplementary Order Paper, however, recognises that because we currently have a skill shortage in science, maths, and English inside the secondary system, Teach First NZ, with the very strong support of Auckland University, has provided graduates who have been successful inside that secondary level. However, there is no New Zealand data at all on graduates, so they might be a biology graduate or an engineering graduate or an arts graduate who has done an 8-week course over the Christmas break period and then is in front of a classroom. They are in front of the classroom, and, unlike a current trainee teacher, they are in sole charge of a classroom. The best way to describe it for parents is that these are apprentices. What we have usually done with apprentices is married them with teaching experts, and we have made sure that they learn from that experience at the same time as they interact with our young people.

My Supplementary Order Paper is seeking to recognise that there has been some successful practice of Teach First NZ in secondary schools—that those students pedagogically should have the standards, should have the basics, and should have a strength of knowledge, and that when they get a graduate with a degree in, say, biology, to go on an 8-week course over a Christmas period and then get support from Auckland University, it is likely that that will go well. It has been shown that this has gone well, but we cannot be confident that it will translate to a 5-year-old, a 6-year-old, or a 7-year-old.

I challenge the members of the Government to stand and say that they are prepared to take the risk, and I challenge the Minister to answer upon what research this has been based. On what research are we going to place our primary school children under this apprenticeship scheme? So I ask for the support of all those members who actually care about education and care about whether our primary school children have the best people in front of them—not people training on the job—to support this Supplementary Order Paper.

I want to continue on this issue of the new teaching position that is being established by Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 176, now incorporated into the bill by the select committee by majority. I want to turn to page 9 of the bill, and I want to start, first of all, with the definition around line 19 of an “employment-based trainee teacher” and what this new position would cover. It “… means a person who is undertaking an initial teacher education programme that includes a period of employment by a board”. The first thing that I would like the Minister of Education to explain more about is around the initial teacher education programmes and the approval process for those: are we to take that to mean that it has to be, for example, a New Zealand Qualifications Authority or a Committee on University Academic Programmes – approved initial teacher education programme, or could anybody simply establish an initial teacher education programme in order to meet that criteria? The wording is loose. It does not contain anything around what the initial teacher education programme might have to involve or who might approve the initial teacher education programme.

The “employment-based trainee teaching position means a position established by the Secretary under section 91O(1)”, which I am going to now turn to because there has been a change to this to the way it was first presented to us, in that there is a minor wording change. So what it now says is “On receipt of a request from the board of a school, the Secretary may, by written notice to the board, establish an employment-based trainee teaching position for the school.” The question that I have, and my reading of this, would be that that position could, therefore, be established only on request from the school board. From my recollection, the original wording, as presented to the Education and Science Committee, did not have the words around on request from the school board. This was a change made by the select committee, and I would like to seek some reassurance from the Minister that the effect of this change will be to ensure that that position cannot be established against the will of the school board of trustees. Because, under SOP 176 as presented to the committee, the Minister was going to be able to impose one of these positions on a school board of trustees. This change that has been made by the select committee—and I agree with the change—basically says that the school board would need to request that. I want to seek some reassurance that that means that there would not be any other circumstances in which a board, for example, could be compelled to request that by the Government. Certainly, the Government could do that in any number of other ways by simply saying to a school board: “Well, you won’t get this unless you actually ask us to do that.” I want to seek some reassurance that no school board would be compelled to establish such a position if they did not think it would be in the interest of their students. I think that that is important.

The second thing is that this wording under new section 91O around, basically, how these new positions are going to be established—so it will be the Secretary for Education who establishes them—does not make it clear where the funding for those positions is going to come from. It does not make clear at all whether the funding for these new positions comes from the school’s existing staffing allocation or from an additional allocation. I think that there are important reasons to consider that, in terms of how schools operate, because if they have, for example, trainee teachers through an approved initial teacher education programme, say through one of the colleges of education that exist now, those trainees will be in the classroom in addition to the teachers who are regularly there. Even if the teacher steps out for a while and says to the trainee teacher “You are going to run this class for a bit, and I am going to go off and prepare some lessons.”, or whatever, that teacher would still be there and still have the ultimate oversight over what that person is doing.

This new provision potentially allows a trainee teacher position to be established instead of the regular classroom teacher who might be there. If that trainee teacher is good, then maybe that is not such a bad thing. If that trainee teacher needs some help and some guidance and is not quite ready to be doing the job that they have been appointed to do, then those kids’ education is going to be compromised. They are not going to be receiving the standard of tuition that their parents should reasonably expect they are going to be receiving at their school. So the question I have got for the Minister is: is the funding for this position in addition to, or instead of, the existing staff allocation time? I think that that is very important. Those are the two questions that I would like the Minister to turn his attention to.

It has been a very interesting debate, and I will now move outside my comfort zone and general field of knowledge, out of the health portfolio, to try to address some of the members’ questions.

Some of the issues being raised regarding initial teacher education arise from a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) introduced at the select committee stage; so everyone is aware of that. Members are concerned, as I understand it, that that provision may create a class of teacher. The SOP relates to providing certainty for Teach First NZ field-based trainees. It arose out of Teach First NZ but will now apply to any field-based training, but the fact is, there are no other programmes out there, so it sounds pretty hypothetical. It is highly regarded and well evaluated as a teacher training programme, and schools are very keen on having these graduates in their schools—just to tell you a bit of what you probably already know.

The Education and Science Committee also recommended an important change to initial teacher training in New Zealand, improving the quality of initial teacher education as part of that broader programme to lift teacher quality and leadership, and to strengthen overall workforce capability. Those are probably a number of things you also already know.

The point is that initial teacher education positions can only occur at the request of the board of trustees. They make that request to the Secretary for Education. This is the key bit. These positions are supernumerary and for that purpose only. They are just for the field-based training. The Ministry of Education funds the programme and enables enrolment in the school. The requirements in the State Sector Act and the collective agreements as regarding the advertising of vacancies still need to be made. So I hope that clarifies any questions members may have.

Following my colleague Chris Hipkins on this very issue of employment-based trainee teacher positions, the question that he asked was about the school teacher entitlement and where this position fits in. I do not think the Minister addressed that issue, so I am asking again.

I am also reflecting on the New Zealand Principals’ Federation and the contribution it delivered to the Education and Science Committee around this issue. I will join it up to the other issue that I raised in my first contribution, about principals managing more than one school. It would be quite interesting to know about employment-based trainee teachers in a school that is managed by one principal—say, a principal managing three schools, and they have these employment-based trainee teachers at each of them. That would be interesting.

I go back to the original point in my first contribution. How would a principal be able to manage a school, under the current conditions, but adding another layer of required support for employment-based trainee teachers? I want to quote—and it will probably become one of my favourite quotes—from the New Zealand Principals’ Federation in its submission, talking about these changes: “On the surface, they might be described as a collection of ill-conceived baseless changes which lack any intelligent rationale.” It goes on to say: “They might otherwise be described as changes without openly expressed rationale yet intended to enable further expansion of certain policies and direction. As such, they would be deeply systemic changes, with the potential to alter the very shape of our education system.”

My point, in relation to that statement and these changes, is that they are creating systemic changes within our education system without, as has been pointed out, research and without the Government presenting to the New Zealand public a broad explanation or policy about the direction that they are taking New Zealand’s education system. This bill is making a change to the Education Act 1989, which is a landmark piece of legislation in our country. I acknowledge that not everyone was on board with Tomorrow’s Schools or with the Picot report, but the reality is that the Act has endured for 27 years. That report and what happened in 1989 with this piece of legislation was open to everyone to have their say.

My question around the changes in the bill and, in particular, with this employment-based trainee teacher provision is: where was the public debate on this issue? It did not happen. It did not even make it into the first reading of this bill. It was added in through a Supplementary Order Paper. I say to the Committee that it has not been fully discussed to the extent that it could have or should have been. I ask the Minister to address the issue around teacher entitlement and the establishment of this type of position. Is it included in the current teacher entitlement that each school has? Thank you.

I move, That the question be now put.

Yes. I have no hesitation in putting the question, and I will reiterate that the reason I have no hesitation is that there was a fundamental question asked by, I think, all three Opposition members who spoke recently, and that was clearly answered by the Minister in the chair.