Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.

This bill deals with how to better tackle the effects of disadvantage in our schools through an improved funding system. This bill is based on existing National Party policy that we announced prior to the 2017 election. This bill is in line with a whole lot of work that the former Government and ministry worked on. The concept is that you can be more sophisticated and targeted around the delivery of funding to disadvantaged kids, because fighting disadvantage is at the heart of this bill.

This bill is about getting the right funding to the right kid at the right time so that they have a better chance of a happy and successful life by succeeding at school, because there is no better way to fight disadvantage than through education. The decile system was originally introduced as an attempt to target extra funding to those schools in poorer areas, to lift the achievement of disadvantaged kids at these schools. However, the decile system is a blunt tool for achieving this goal. It assumes that household income is the best and only factor in determining whether a child will or will not achieve at school and that all children who need this funding attend schools that are identified as low decile.

It has been the best way of guessing where these children are, and that is the problem with the decile system. It is a best guess based on a flawed assumption. The decile system is failing many thousands of students who are at risk of not achieving because they don’t attend low-decile schools, and it has created a class system amongst our schools. Those lower-decile schools are stigmatised as “poor neighbourhood equals poor quality school” in the eyes of the public. Not only does this unfairly stigmatise schools but it unfairly stigmatises the students attending those schools. They know their decile rating and they know what it means.

This bill amends the Education Act 1989 to remove the decile system as a means for allocating public money to schools to fight disadvantage. The bill proposes a sophisticated alternative model that more accurately targets funding to those students who need it, regardless of where they attend school, because with better data, better analysis, we can better predict which young people are at risk of not achieving, and actually by analysing the data we see that household income alone is not the best indicator of whether or not a child is at risk of not achieving at school. We now know that there are a range of factors that more accurately predict educational non-achievement. This bill creates a needs index based on a social investment approach. The needs index will consist of a number of weighted and ranked indicators that, when taken together, more accurately predict whether a child will achieve at school.

To allow for flexibility, the bill sets out that these needs indicators would be prescribed by the Minister in regulation after consultation with the relevant people and would be updated annually. These needs indicators may include proportion of time spent on benefits, father’s offending and sentence history, Child, Youth and Family notifications, youth justice notifications, school transiency, mother’s age at birth—just to name a few. Using sophisticated data, we know where these students are. The funding model doesn’t guess where they might be. This funding model identifies the child and delivers funding to the school that they attend. This way we are getting the right funding to the right child at the right time.

It is of utmost importance that we protect privacy. No parent wants their child to be stigmatised. We spent a great deal of time considering how we could protect children’s privacy in this bill. We have ensured that data collected under this bill must comply with the Privacy Act 1993. The bill ensures the anonymisation of individual data so that individual students are not able to be identified. What this means in practice is that schools receive funding for those students at risk of not achieving, but there is no identification of individual students.

In reality, teachers and principals know who these students are. We have always trusted them to direct funding to those students in need, and we will continue to do so under this bill. Furthermore, the data collected for calculating the needs index, including needs indicators of the individual students, is not subject to the Official Information Act (OIA).

Another important consideration when drafting this bill was combating the potential for schools to continue to be ranked, but this time based on the level of funding they receive for children who are at risk of not achieving, via an OIA request. This is why we included a clause that ensures information regarding the level of funding a school receives for children who are at risk of not achieving is not able to be requested under the Official Information Act. This clause protects schools from the current stigma they receive under the decile funding system.

As I have said, this bill is based on existing National Party policy, and, as part of that policy, we made a commitment that no school would receive any less funding than they do now. This bill would see many schools receive more funding, as those students at risk of not achieving are more accurately identified. Under our policy, those schools identified as having fewer students at risk of not achieving would receive the same level of funding as they do now. We would expect that the Government would make the same commitment.

The reality is that we need to get funding to these children if they are ever to take advantage of any tertiary fees-free policy. If we have $2.8 billion to spend on free tertiary for kids from wealthy families, it is unconscionable that we don’t have more funding to put into disadvantaged kids at school so that they have a chance of success.

When I asked Minister Hipkins to meet me about my bill, he assured me that after he received a ministry briefing on my bill he would meet with me. What transpired, after emails and phone calls to his office requesting a meeting, was silence. Then, at the eleventh hour, at 4:40 p.m. last night, the Minister sends me an email with a letter explaining that he will not support the bill, based on advice he received from a memo from the ministry, dated nearly a month ago, on 5 April. A memo and a letter, I am disappointed to say, make a range of false assumptions about my bill, without providing me the courtesy of sitting down to talk through his concerns.

This range of false assumptions will no doubt make up the basis of Mr Hipkins’ and, indeed, his colleagues’ contributions to this debate. Had we met, the majority of these false assumptions would have been easily reconciled. In lieu of this meeting, I will work through some of those assumptions now: number one, that my bill misunderstands the equity index the ministry has been developing and creates something completely different. Well, we do understand the equity index because it was developed under the previous National Government. We designed the overall system that the ministry and this Government continue to progress. The premise behind my needs index is exactly the same: a child is at low or high risk due to the full combination of factors in their lives, not because they have one specific indicator.

Number two, that a decision to replace the decile system would be better achieved outside of legislation. The reason I am proposing this bill is to bring transparency to this process. National announced the decile system would go; we announced the equity index. Six months into the new Government and there has been silence. We don’t know what they’re doing behind closed doors, we don’t know whether or not they’re progressing the equity index, and we don’t know what the indicators are—it is all a mystery. My bill gives greater transparency to the process of replacing the decile system. My bill would require that the needs indicators be consulted on and published, but remains flexible about which ones are prescribed and how they are weighted.

The Minister is being incredibly clever by sitting on this memo for three weeks. By not meeting with me and asking questions, he has enabled the ministry to rule out the bill based on incorrect assumptions. What he didn’t realise was that we wouldn’t get to the vote tonight, so the good news is we have a couple of weeks so that he can meet with me to clear up these assumptions and so that he can change his position.

Minister Hipkins simply doesn’t have a reason to vote against this bill. He has tried to gather up every little excuse he can find, all based on assumptions and misunderstandings, and that he knew could have been cleared up had he met with me, which is why he didn’t. This bill just doesn’t suit Mr Hipkins’ political purposes. He’s probably going to do 95 percent of what we were going to do, but he hates the thought of giving National any credit for this work in social investment. It’s clear that he wants to repackage all the work that we’ve done and wants to call it his own, and he cannot stomach working with me or the National Party on my bill that gives disadvantaged kids a better chance. And that is very sad.

Mr Assistant Speaker, I rise to take a call on the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill. [Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Sorry, members. I omitted to say, “The question is that the motion be agreed to.”

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Firstly, I’d like to congratulate the member—

💬 Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I apologise to my colleague for interrupting her speech, but I think it’s important that new members don’t get into bad habits. The member Simeon Brown was questioning the absence of a member from the House, and you should pull him up on that one.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I did not hear that, but the members all know that we are not to mention the absence of any member.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Firstly, I congratulate the member Erica Stanford for having this bill drawn from the ballot. Unfortunately—well, no, actually, I’m not going to even say “unfortunately”, because I have never seen a piece of legislation that I could never ever support as much as I cannot support this piece of legislation. And out of anyone in this House, anyone in this Parliament—full Parliament—there is probably no one that has the knowledge, the in-depth personal knowledge, that I have on decile funding. Over 28 years, I have worked at a decile 10, a decile 9, deciles 5, 6, and, latterly, a decile 1 school, and I have been principal of four of those schools. So I have a pretty broad knowledge of decile funding. I also agree with the member that it is a blunt instrument. I will agree on the point that decile funding is something that we do need to do something about. We do need a level of equity funding, but this is not the way to do it.

This is so far wrong, and I’d have to say that there is an absolute misunderstanding of decile, full stop. Decile is not just about funding. Decile funding itself is only 3 percent of schools’ operations grants—only 3 percent—and we’re talking about legislating only 3 percent of the funding that goes into schools. Decile, to me, as a principal of a decile 1 school, meant so much more than that. Decile 1 was also where we got to determine the eligibility for our professional learning and development contracts that we entered into with the Ministry of Education. It also gave us allowances.

As a new teacher in our decile 1 school, I had several staff members that were eligible for the Voluntary Bonding Scheme. So this bill talks about abolishing deciles, so does that mean we say to those teachers, “Oh, sorry, you’re not eligible any more because we’ve got rid of those deciles.”, or does it mean “Oh, we’ve got 25 children this year who come under this scheme. Next year, it might be 24, so you won’t be eligible because 25 was the cut-off point.”? We haven’t thought these things through, obviously. This is not the way to do this.

Decile, more importantly for me, meant that other services such as Family Works, who provided our social worker in school, provided us the social worker because we were a decile 1 school. Suddenly, shall we get rid of decile, so we won’t have the social workers in school any more because they go to decile 1 to 3 schools? But the bill says we’ll get rid of deciles. That’s the name: “Abolition of Decile System”. So has that been thought through? I don’t think so. It is not in there.

As I said, I agree that deciles are a blunt measure. They are not a great measure, and we do need to do something about them. But that work is currently being done, and this would override all of that work absolutely completely. It would confuse what is happening.

Also, when I was reading the bill, I was completely confused by the bill that defined the decile system, because the bill had to define that decile system because it’s not anywhere else in legislation. So it defined the decile system to then prohibit the use of the decile system. So to prohibit the use, you had to actually define it first—I know; very funny that that would actually happen that you could do that—and then prohibit the use of the decile system to allocate public money. It just doesn’t make sense that that would happen and that we would do it that way.

As I’ve already said, using the legislation is inconsistent with the approach that the Education Act 1989 takes to school funding. It is not the way that we do that. We do not use legislation.

Here’s an example. A few years ago, when I was on the negotiation teams for the primary principals’ contract, the then Government worked with the ministry to introduce a literacy and numeracy payment to primary school principals. The Minister had the flexibility in the funding arrangements to put that into the schools at that particular point in time. There was funding that went alongside that to actually develop literacy and numeracy in the schools. The Minister could make that arrangement, and it happened quickly. It did not need to come to the House to change legislation. Using legislation to determine school funding is just a wrong way of doing it. We need a system that can be flexible and can change with needs.

Also, we know that we haven’t got this right. We know that we’ve got lots of work to do in this area. So if we put this piece of legislation in and then we find that a year down the track—and I’ll talk about how quickly things can change in school funding very shortly—that needs to change, we would have to go back through the whole legislation process again. That is not good enough for schools, who need flexibility and need things to change when things happen to schools. We need to be responsive to what the schools are telling us.

Now, what I said before was that I would talk about how things can change in school funding, and, yes, we had a Minister a couple of years ago who decided to change things up in school funding, so when it came to the 2016 Budget, instead of getting the inflation-adjusted Budget increase in our operations grant, a four-factor social investment funding model was used. They used their model of social investment funding to identify the numbers of children in each school. What a load of rubbish. That was the biggest insult to schools that I have seen. I was the principal of a decile 1 school—a school where 75 percent of my children were identified as coming under that particular system. Why did I know that? Because it said on my funding advice notice how many children in my school were identified under that social investment model. And that Opposition tells us that that data is going to be kept private. Well, it’s already shown to us that you told us in that funding advice notice how many children—sorry, the Opposition told us how many children we got.

So here’s how the narrative changed. The narrative changed from “Oh, you’re a decile 1 school.” to “How many children were on your funding advice notice?” And then the narrative changed to people saying, “Oh, I wonder who those children are?” So we had all of that happening, and yet we’ve got an Opposition who will tell us that that information will be kept private. Currently, we have a system in the decile system where we can go in to review if we don’t agree with the decile ratings that are given to us. This will not happen under this. It cannot happen under this, because, according to the member over there, Erica Stanford, she tells us that that data’s going to be completely private. Well, if the data’s going to be completely private, how can the school challenge the data and say that the number of children is going to be completely different to what it is? It just doesn’t make sense with what schools are currently expecting.

Here’s my final point before I finish here, and this is the point that really winds me up. We’ve been told that this bill will—

💬 Hon Member: I thought she was wound up before.

Yeah, you thought I was wound up before. This is the part that winds me up. We get told that the reason for bringing this bill in is that “Oh, decile 1 schools, decile 2 schools have this whole stigma.” My school’s name was Merivale School in Tauranga. Tomorrow, we take the decile 1 tag off it. Do you think that that’s going to stop people saying, “Oh, do we have an issue around poverty, and does poverty mean that things are harder in those classrooms?” Having the decile 1 target there is just a fallacy that the Opposition have used to deny poverty and to deny the effects of poverty on our children and in our schools. It really makes me irate that we have had to put up with this discourse and this narrative for so long, and we absolutely and wholeheartedly oppose this bill.

Firstly, can I just say to everybody watching that that was the most extraordinary speech, and I have a prediction: it will go viral. It will go viral for several reasons. It will go viral because the member opposite, Jan Tinetti, didn’t read the bill. It will go viral—I’m not allowed to say that the Minister of Education wasn’t in the House, but what I can say is that it is extraordinary that he has not spoken on this bill.

This is a bill about disadvantage. This is a bill about helping some of our most disadvantaged children and schools. And to get a lecture from the Government about the fact that we don’t care when they’re voting down a bill about disadvantage is extraordinary. Can I acknowledge Erica. She’s a fantastic new member of Parliament. She’s done extraordinary work on this bill. Can I also acknowledge the Hon Hekia Parata.

But let’s cut to the chase. The reality is that most, and many, principals and students who’ve talked to me about decile, they want it scrapped. The Government MPs also want it scrapped. We know that, because they’ve said it previously. So the big political debate is what you replace the decile system with. So to have a speech again from that member about the fact that somehow decile might be OK, and actually there’s a problem with replacing it, totally ignores her party’s previous position on it.

The second point—the question is then what you can replace it with. Again, we have been really clear, and it is extraordinary that the Minister wouldn’t even bother to meet with a member who has spent hours developing this bill. Ministry officials have spent hundreds of hours on the equity index, and this bill implements what people have spent an extraordinary amount of time on, as part of the funding review, to deliver.

So we get this letter, at the ninth hour, that says a whole lot of reasons that are based on totally incorrect assumptions around the bill. The facts are that this bill enables not only the scrapping of the decile system—we had put forward more money to enable disadvantaged kids to get more—but also, a fairer distribution under this bill. It does intelligent things like try and ensure that in the future you can’t have the publication of some of this information, which the member raised in her speech. We’ve worked through with the Privacy Commissioner, and also the Official Information Act (OIA) provisions, all the very intelligent things that the Minister is going to have to deal with.

Erica hit the nail on the head. The reality is we’ve come up with a very sophisticated policy idea that is coming through this Parliament, because we believe it affects disadvantaged kids, and we do need legislative change around some of the OIA provisions. We can’t understand why on earth a Government that lectures us constantly around child poverty and disadvantage could possibly turn up to this House and vote against this bill even getting a first reading.

You know what? We do know why. When it comes to partnership schools, they’re scrapping them. When it comes to the fact that there’s been this record increase in Māori and Pasifika achievement, they won’t acknowledge it. When it comes to a bill that will help some of the most disadvantaged children in New Zealand, the Minister won’t even do the courtesy of meeting with a member that has implemented one of the most sophisticated mechanisms for disadvantaged children. And that is one of the saddest things that I have seen in this House.

Mr Assistant Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. There’s another thing that’s sad. It’s that the previous Government didn’t implement this when they had their nine years to do it. It’s sort of like all of a sudden the National Party cares about disadvantage, and all of a sudden now they care about children who are struggling.

Anyway, it’s a pleasure to rise to talk about the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill. As we know, the bill amends the Education Act to abolish the decile system and replace it with a needs index. There is quite a bit that has been mentioned by the other side that I do agree with. There are challenges with the decile system. My colleague Jan Tinetti also alluded to that. Some of these issues are around a perceived sense that some schools are more worthy than others, and at times that can affect things like house prices. People can get a false perception of the value of a school, and that certainly is a reality. It’s absolutely unfortunate and it’s absolutely false. As we know, there are excellent teachers working across schools, all across our country, in a range of different deciles.

Just a couple of key things that this Government has focused on, and that’s creating an inclusive education system. There’s an aspect of this bill that does worry me quite a bit, and that’s about how it’s not inclusive for the students. By pegging the funding to the student, you’re basically singling out the students who are the ones who, in this case, would be the lower achievers—the ones who are struggling. I don’t think that’s fair on those students.

Addressing the impact of socio-economic disadvantage on student outcomes and reducing the disparities between those from disadvantaged circumstances and other children is critical to achieving the aims of this Government, which are around having an inclusive education system.

There is no doubt that there are students who are having a tough time of it. My wife and I fostered a boy a few years ago. He was having challenges around education and in other aspects of his life. Sad to say, he actually slept with a knife under his bed. He was only 12 years of age, and he slept with a knife under his bed, and that’s in New Zealand.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.