Education and Training Bill

I move, That the Education and Training Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 4 May 2020.

It will be abundantly obvious to all members of the House who picked up a copy of the Education and Training Bill that this represents a very significant piece of work. To deal with perhaps the least publicly appealing parts of this process first, the bill obviously repeals and replaces several existing enactments of Parliament. It creates a new legislative framework for the administration of New Zealand’s education system that is simpler, that is drafted in more plain language, and that will be easier to follow.

The laws around education in New Zealand are currently spread over several different Acts of Parliament: the Education Act 1989 is the most substantive of those; the Education Act 1964 has largely been repealed but continues to have some provisions that remain in force; the Industry Training Act 1992; and, of course, the State Sector Act 1988. The Education and Training Bill draws together all of the relevant provisions of those enactments into one easy to follow piece of legislation.

To deal with an administrative issue first, members of the House may be aware that there are two bills currently before the select committee: the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Amendment Bill, which repeals the Industry Training Act and puts the relevant clauses into the Education Act; and the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill, which is before the House at the moment, which deals with the code of practice around pastoral care of students in New Zealand’s tertiary institutions.

The provisions in the Education and Training Bill reflect the provisions in those two other bills as they were introduced to the House. As this bill progresses through the House, it will be updated to reflect the provisions in the two bills currently before the House, or previously before the House, as they are finally enacted. It is just a question of timing. It wasn’t possible to update the Education and Training Bill to reflect the consideration of those other two bills before it was introduced into the House.

To deal with some of the more symbolic or the more cosmetic changes, the bill has been reordered to put in place modern language, to streamline the content, and to improve the overall structure of the bill. It now follows a life-course progression. So it deals with early childhood education first and then moves all the way through into adult learning. The bill also makes a significant number of policy changes, and some of the changes it makes will shift existing primary law into regulation, recognising that the current education legislation is incredibly technical and prescriptive, and, in many cases, that detail is better dealt with through regulation.

In terms of the policy changes the bill makes, in preschool education or early childhood education, the bill strengthens police vetting requirements for home-based early childhood education and care and strengthens the role of the Education Review Office, particularly giving power to enter and inspect homes where education and care is being delivered. A new licensing criteria for early learning services is put in place that will allow for more active network management for new early childhood education and care services and home-based services who may be looking to enter the market. That’s going to allow future Governments to ensure the provisions are more closely aligned with the actual needs of communities.

At the primary and secondary school level, the bill clarifies that the right to a free State education includes the right for all enrolled students to attend the school in which they’re enrolled for all of the hours that the school is open for instruction. This may seem like stating the obvious, but the true reality is that for some students, particularly those with additional learning needs or disabilities, that is not the case at the moment, and that needs to change. This will help us to improve our compliance with related international obligations.

The bill renames “special schools” as “specialist schools” to better reflect the wider role that these schools now have in supporting inclusive education within the entire schooling system. The change reflects the shift in focus from the school itself to the specialist nature of the services provided to support students with disabilities and additional learning support needs.

The bill will make it easier for teachers to re-enter the profession after taking a break from teaching, whilst still ensuring that they are competent to teach.

The bill proposes changes to the legal framework for using physical restraint in schools, and I want to speak about those in more detail, because they are likely to be one of the more controversial aspects of the bill. The bill replaces the term “physical restraint” with the term “physical force”, which is a term that teachers are more familiar with, and it aligns with the use of that terminology in other Acts of Parliament. It will allow a teacher or other authorised staff member to use physical force on a student if that teacher or staff member reasonably believes that it is necessary to prevent imminent harm to the health, safety, and wellbeing of that student or of another person.

The bill makes it clear that physical force is a last resort. The term “physical force” will be defined by rules made by the Secretary for Education within six months of the bill’s enactment. These changes address the lack of certainty that the school sector has about the current provisions allowing for the use of physical restraint. Those provisions have been worked through very carefully with the teaching profession to ensure that we come up with something that is workable, understandable, and sensible.

The bill makes a minor change to the 1964 Act’s provisions regarding religious instruction, which is not part of the New Zealand curriculum, and it occurs currently where a school is not open for instruction. Under the bill, a student’s attendance at religious instruction in State primary and intermediate schools remains voluntary, and, particularly important, parents who want their children to attend it must confirm that in writing to the school. Currently, an opt-out approach applies. Parents who don’t want their children to attend religious instruction must confirm this in writing. However, that’s not always possible if the parents don’t know that that religious instruction is proposed to take place in the first place. The bill’s opt-in approach will help ensure that attendance at religious instruction only occurs with fully informed parental consent.

To protect the quality and reputation of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement—the NCEA, our national qualification system in schools—the bill prohibits the awarding of NCEA offshore, with two exceptions, being that distance schools can continue to award NCEA to domestic students based offshore, and NCEA can still be awarded in Pacific Realm countries.

At the tertiary education and vocational training level, the bill makes a number of changes in relation to the student loans and allowances provisions administered by the Ministry of Social Development, to make those systems easier to administer. The bill undertakes the legislative amendments necessary to support the Government’s response to the final report of the Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce. Several of those measures are aimed at strengthening school governance, including the fact that the statutory objectives for school boards of trustees have been revised to focus on a broader range of primary objectives. A mandatory national code of conduct for school board of trustees members will be introduced, and the bill enables that.

The bill shifts responsibility for developing and consulting and reviewing enrolment schemes from boards of trustees to the ministry, who will give effect to that at a regional level. Now, this will help to reduce the compliance burden for school boards of trustees who are volunteers, and it will improve transparency and consistency within the system of how we manage school enrolments.

It’s essential we’ve got strong leadership in the schooling system. The principal role—the role of the school principal—is demanding and complex. It’s critical to the role of the school. So to strengthen school leadership, the bill requires the Minister to issue minimum standards, or minimum eligibility criteria, for appointments to school principal roles, and these criteria will come into force six months after they are issued and will apply to future principal appointments made after that date. School boards will still be able to set additional criteria.

The bill enables the Education Review Office to make a written request for information to inform on-site reviews. This aligns the legislation with current practice by the Education Review Office.

Finally, the bill enables the establishment of a dispute resolution scheme for the schooling sector, allowing local dispute resolution panels to be established to resolve serious rights-based disputes within a school. The panels will be primarily focused on resolving disputes through mediation, but if not possible, they can, at the request of the student and their whānau, determine the dispute.

The Government is making a lot of changes in the area of education. This bill builds on the work that we have already done. It is a comprehensive piece of work. I’d like to thank all those involved in the process of drawing it together. I look forward to the select committee process. As with any piece of legislative change that is as large as this, there are bound to be further refinements that can be made during the select committee process. I look forward to engaging constructively with members on all sides of the House to ensure that that happens.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take this call. I want to make it clear from the start that National will be opposing this legislation, the Education and Training Bill, in the first reading. I believe that the Minister of Education, before introducing this bill, would have done his numbers, and the bill will definitely go to the select committee. That is my assumption at this stage. So in the select committee, I look forward to working on this legislation with various members from both sides—that is, Government and Opposition—and I also look forward to hearing from submitters what they have to say about this legislation.

This is wide-ranging legislation which covers early childhood education (ECE), primary, secondary, and tertiary education. As the Minister pointed out, this is a big piece of legislation—500-plus pages—so I believe that the work on this legislation has been happening for a number of months now. If that was not the case, then I’d be really nervous if the Minister produced this legislation in just a couple of weeks’ time.

So what I want to highlight here is that while this legislation was being worked on, the Minister introduced the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Amendment Bill and also the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill. I can fully understand the circumstances around the introduction of the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill, which was because of that unfortunate incident that happened in the South Island at one of the universities, where one student lay dead and nobody knew about that student. So I can fully understand about that legislation. But for the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Amendment Bill to be introduced while this big piece of legislation was being worked on, I don’t understand why that has happened.

So, to me, it looks like there has been a disjointed approach towards this Education and Training Bill, because it’s clear that, as the Minister said, those two pieces of legislation will be incorporated into this Education and Training Bill. Then, based on what the final version of those two pieces of legislation will be, the Education and Training Bill will be updated later on. So, to me, it looks like it could have been part of the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Amendment bill—especially that bill out of those two bills could have been part of this Education and Training Bill. So in the select committee process, we could have dealt with the whole legislation together—this legislation that deals with the education sector, so that we could deal with that big picture that is needed for the education sector.

As I said, we are opposing this legislation in the first reading, but we reserve our position going forward, because it will all depend on how we deal with this legislation in the select committee process—what kind of changes are made to this legislation in the select committee process. There are some provisions that we think will work OK for the education sector, but then there are other provisions that we have some serious concerns about.

One of the concerns that we have with this legislation is about boards of trustees losing their right to develop, consult, and review school enrolment and school zones. So this is something that boards of trustees understand better, in our view, because they understand their communities, they understand what will benefit their communities and what needs to be done through their school to deliver for their local communities. That power coming to the Minister, in my view, looks like the Minister wants to control all enrolments and zones. In my view, that is going to lead to a loss of that independence that boards of trustees of schools have. So we really want to see that local communities have that control, schools have that control for their local communities and for their local students, which is going to be lost because of this legislation. So we have concerns about this, and we look forward to seeing what submitters have to say about this provision in this legislation in the select committee process, and what kinds of changes will be made to this provision in the select committee process.

We also see that educational achievement has now become one of the four objectives for boards of trustees. So educational achievement for any parent, any student, or any school should be a primary objective, or it should be the primary objective, but now it becomes a primary objective because it becomes part of four primary objectives, and all these four primary objectives are at the same level. Given that all these four primary objectives are at the same level, we are concerned about the effect of this on the educational achievement objective. We believe that because of this, this objective will be diluted—the focus from the boards of trustees on this will be diluted—and we don’t want to see that happening. Again, this is another area where we are concerned and we really want to see how this legislation will come out after the select committee process.

As I said, there are some provisions in this legislation that we think are good, like, for example, the Minister being able to set minimum eligibility requirements for principals. We believe in quality education, and quality education comes only if people that are delivering that education are of that standard. So we really want to see that the quality of our teachers and principals is really good to be able to deliver to the expectations of students, parents, and our country. But at this stage we don’t have much information about what this setting minimum eligibility requirement means. We want to see what it means in regard to the standard, or the quality, of principals in various schools. So we, overall, would support this if it is to improve the quality, but we want to see what this actually means.

The Minister also talked about offshore institutions not being able to award NCEA. I fully understand the argument there; that is about the integrity of our education system. But the concern I have, and the concern that we have, is about various agreements that we have with various countries about export education. We know that in various free-trade agreements, we include education. We include export education in that, especially with developing countries. They want to go to developed countries to gain education, and New Zealand, being a developed country, is an attractive place for various developing countries to come and gain education. Also, in those agreements is the ability for New Zealand to provide this facility to students—this is without them coming to New Zealand, gaining NCEA in their own country. So how this provision will affect that export education sector is something that we want to know more about.

Then, as I said, this legislation covers all areas—that is, early childhood education, primary, secondary, and tertiary. In early childhood education, especially home-based early childhood education, the changes that this legislation makes do raise some concerns for us. All home-based early childhood education centres, even people that are not involved in providing that service, will have to go through a vetting process—a police vetting process. But then this legislation says that without the requirement of a warrant, police will be able to go in and inspect home-based early childhood education centres. We have concerns about that because, in our view, that makes those home-based early childhood education (ECE) centres feel like criminals, and we don’t want them to feel like criminals, because this is an area, this is a service, that is needed by all communities. Parents with young children have other commitments, so they need these early childhood education centres and home-based early childhood education centres, which are actually doing quite well providing that service for their local communities. Already we are seeing a shortage of ECE teachers. We don’t want to see home-based ECE centres put off because of this provision in this legislation and create an even greater shortage of ECE service providers.

So we have these various concerns, and, as I said, the select committee process will be really important for us to consider our position going forward on this legislation. We will not be supporting this legislation in the first reading, but in the select committee process, if the concerns that we have are addressed, then we will reconsider our position. But at this stage, we are not prepared to support this legislation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I’d like to first of all acknowledge the Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Hipkins, for his huge amount of work and leadership in this space. I’d also like to acknowledge and thank the Ministry of Education, the Tertiary Education Commission, and all of our education agencies who have spent months and months to ensure that we have this Education and Training Bill in front of us.

I’d like to say that this bill establishes and regulates an education system that ensures New Zealanders have lifelong learning opportunities so that our people are able to engage fully in society. This bill is a very important step forward in ensuring that we improve the success for all of our learners.

Thirty years ago, under the Rt Hon David Lange, Tomorrow’s Schools, which is what we have today, was brought in under Labour Government. We know that it is an education system that is no longer fit for purpose. We only need to look at the educational outcomes of our Māori learners, our Pacific learners, our learners with disabilities, and our learners with learning support needs—as well as those from disadvantaged backgrounds—to know that this is an education system that does need to be changed. And it is not surprising to me that members on the opposite side of the House are not (a) acknowledging that the education system needs to change or (b) even agreeing that these are changes that need to be made.

We are a Government that when we see issues that need to be addressed, we actually address them. We don’t bury our heads in the sand and hope that it will just magically fix itself. This bill will implement the policy changes that the Government has agreed to implement from the education work programme, which is our response to the independent Tomorrow’s Schools final report.

The Education and Training Act is one that will be more simple. It will be modern. It will be less prescriptive than the current legislation. And we have legislation that goes as far back as 1964, and it is time to make changes. The Education Act of 1964 and the Education Act of 1989 underpin the operation of early childhood education, of compulsory schooling, of tertiary education, as well as our vocational education. But some of those provisions are now pretty dated. When Tomorrow’s Schools was implemented, they thought that they would address inequality of educational outcomes. However, when we look—and I’d like to discuss our Pacific people, in particular. We know that two-thirds of Pacific people live in Auckland. We also know, when we look at the numbers of Pacific students that we have, that in 2018 we had just over 27,000 Pacific students in our secondary schools, and we know that over 50 percent of our Pacific students in those secondary schools attend only 26 secondary schools across Aotearoa New Zealand. But when you look closer at that number, 25 of those schools are in Auckland. Only one of those high schools is outside of Auckland, and it’s Porirua high school.

So when we look at some of the effects of Tomorrow’s Schools, we see that not only are some students, including Pacific students, concentrated in certain areas—in this case, Auckland—but when you look at where they currently attend schools, we know that close to 70 percent of our students attend decile 1 to decile 4 schools. And when we look at the educational outcomes of our students, this is one of the reasons why we are making these changes. We also need to ensure that we do right by our tangata whenua—our Māori. This bill makes significant changes that are aimed at giving better effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, to ensure that we have equitable outcomes for our Māori learners. At the school level, boards are going to be required to give effect to Te Tiriti by working to ensure that their plans—their policies and local curriculum—reflect local tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and Te Ao Māori, to ensure that they are taking all reasonable steps to ensure the instructions are available in Te Reo Māori and tikanga Māori, and to achieve equitable outcomes for our Māori learners.

At the system level, this bill also enables the Minister of Education and the Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti to jointly issue and publish a statement of expectations specifying what agency serving the education system must do to give effect to Public Service objectives related to Te Tiriti.

This is a wonderful piece of legislation, the Education and Training Bill, and I strongly support it.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the Education and Training Bill this afternoon in the first reading debate. As outlined by my colleague Dr Parmjeet Parmar, we oppose this bill at the first reading, but we wish to reserve our final support or non-support for the remaining stages of this bill, for some very sensible reasons—because we like to take a sensible approach, a pragmatic approach, to anything that comes across our desk, our party, our table, and our select committee team when it comes to education.

We do believe that it’s a good idea to consolidate educational legislation, and that is what this bill is doing. However, we’ve just got some serious concerns around several topics, and, again, Dr Parmar outlined it. Zoning is one of them. I’m going to come back to that particular topic and attempt to address it in a little bit more detail in terms of where we’re coming from on that.

We wish to say that we’ll be looking for sensible changes, and support for those changes, come select committee time. I’m here in the House this afternoon with several of my colleagues on the select committee team from the National Party side, and we’ll look forward to taking this through that process.

This, of course, is coming out of some of those Tomorrow’s Schools reforms. We supported the Government on NCEA reform. What I’m trying to do here is show how we take a pragmatic approach, piece by piece, to education legislation. We’re very pleased that education hubs—the big 125 schools per hub idea—has gone from the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms. So kudos to the Government and others for seeing the sense in that.

But now we’ve got here a bill that incorporates some of the other changes that Tomorrow’s Schools reforms and others are putting forward. What we oppose in the bill—just some of the headlines—is, of course, and I’ve just referred to it, that school zone issue: developing, consulting, reviewing. Currently, school boards do that, but this particular legislation strips that away. We don’t believe that that’s a good idea—it’ll lead to less school choice, and I’ll come back to it. We don’t think that educational achievement should now just be one of four objectives. It used to be the primary objective, and now, of all things, educational achievement is only one of four. Now, if anyone on the other side of the House might think, “OK, well, the National Party’s overly hanging their hat on principle.” one need only look at local government and the careful consideration from the other side of the House around principles and wellbeings. Well, here we are, wanting to make our say and our stance on these particular principles. Educational achievement should always be the primary—not one of four but the primary; the only primary—objective for our nation’s education system.

Now, there’s a couple of items in the bill that we think—well, we actually know we’d like to see more detail on. So it’s OK to raise the discussion, it’s OK to have them in there, but where is the detail? One is the Minister setting minimum eligibility requirements for principals. So we’ve wanted to see standards lifted in this area, but what does that look like? What is the detail on that? Before we can even remotely start to give support, what will that look like? We’ll see what happens during the select committee process.

Offshore institutions will no longer be able to award NCEA—again, what does that look like? We really value export education, but can we be confident that the case is truly being made adequately for creating this particular cut-off for offshore institutions, Pacific specifically, to stop awarding NCEA?

One more area we would like more detail on is boards following a mandatory national code of conduct set by the Minister. Where’s the detail on that? That could be incredibly wide scoping, and we’ll want to interrogate that during the select committee process.

Now, there are four areas where we think there’s some good merit in the bill. One is enshrining rights for enrolled students to attend the school where they’re enrolled. So making sure that it’s locked in for students, we think that’s a good idea. Where a school board is invalidated, right now the Minister can’t appoint a commissioner to run the school. Previously, he or she had to reinstate the previous board. Now this legislation allows for that. We think that’s a good idea. We also think that it’s a good idea that you are able to—we live in a modern-day era now—advertise for board vacancies online. Previously, you had to go to the old school community newsletter. There are a few bits of legislation in these past couple of years, I must say, where the good old looking online is coming back in vogue; that’s great. And then, finally, another good area is boards consulting with staff and students when making bylaws. That’s obviously a good thing to do—making sure that consultation takes place.

Now, as I said earlier, I wanted to then head over and touch on the zoning issue. I was a school board chair for a number of years. I have—like other of my colleagues who have been involved, either as parents or as board chairs and board members—been through many a zone issue, and they are highly controversial. They are highly contested. There’s a high expression of interest in what takes place. And we’re very clear that that should be local, by local, for local. We are very clear that that should stay as it is, and that is with the school boards doing both the developing and the consulting on the enrolment scheme. That’s what we’ve got right now, and that’s what we want to keep.

So what we’ve got in the impact summary on this bill and specifically this zone issue is basically a retort that an enrolment scheme—developing, consulting, working with it from a school board perspective—is just too much for them. We’d take exception to that. I’ve been through it myself. It’s not too much for school boards to do it. It’s exactly what they want to do and be involved in, because they know the area, they know the impact. We got down to the point in one particular zoning issue where we were down to a single house, a real estate agent had said something different, the school had said something different, and the Ministry of Education had said something different. There were crossed wires, cross-communication. This particular family was incredibly distraught and then wanted to make the issue much wider to the entire community. It was a massive issue.

I very much struggle to see how taking that out to the regional option is going to work. Ministry officials will not know and cannot know the nuances that local communities do. School board trustees get elected for that stuff. They get elected because they want to know that they can back not only their community but back their school and back their families, and this bill takes that away from them. We should be incredibly weary of that.

Then we’ve also got one massive reality check with this zoning issue—massive reality check—and it’s right here in the impact summary statement. There is an admission when you read it that going to this regional option two for school zoning will make the entire process of developing and implementing a zone “longer”. “The consultation”—and I’m reading here from the impacts—“may be broader and more likely to involve multiple schools.” So now you’re making it bigger than Ben-Hur. It’s going to be longer, it’s going to be more complex, it’s not just by parents for parents and working with the school; it’s now bigger than Ben-Hur. So be careful what you wish for. We don’t like this part of the legislation. We will be interrogating it during the select committee process. We reserve our judgment for final support in the end. Thank you.

I’m sure I’m not the only member of the Education and Workforce Committee that was looking forward to reading the odd novel over the Christmas break but didn’t quite envisage it would be this potboiler: the Education and Training Bill, all 578 pages of it. Thank you, Minister Hipkins. He’s got a bit of previous here, I might add too: we’ve got the massive State sector bill that he just put forward the other day, the vocational training reforms, and a number of other reforms that are coming through our select committee. I often think when I’m hearing about the non-delivery from this Government that you couldn’t get a more reforming Minister of the education sector. Of course, we’re looking at overhauling the Education Act 1989—that seminal Act that brought in Tomorrow’s Schools, which really did revolutionise the way that education was governed and delivered.

I would say, just from my cursory reading of the bill and the feedback I’ve had from the task force and the initial report, that the Minister has actually listened to a lot of the wider concerns there were around maybe some of the more radical parts of the reform and has listened and has pulled back from some of that. So he is to be commended.

Of course, there’s the 1989 Act, and some of that was the 1964 Act, and there are parts of the State Sector Act of 1988 and the vocational training legislation of 1992. So there’s a lot to tidy up in here, and it has been noted. It’s hard to see how it’s simplified when it’s 578 pages, but apparently it’s going to be simpler and more flexible. At least it’ll be in one statute, but it does take—one of the good things it’ll probably do in terms of flexibility—some out of core policy or legislation and into regulations to add some flexibility.

There are a number of issues. There’s new licensing for early childhood education. Jo Luxton, I’m sure, will be able to tell us a bit about that with her background, and there are new measures in respect of the Education Review Office, to oversee home-schooling. Some of the stuff is around the NCEA qualifications and protecting the quality of those qualifications and how they’re administered, so that’ll be worth looking through in the select committee, just to see how that plays out.

It’ll be easier for teachers to re-enter the profession under that, and I think this is an absolutely outstanding initiative, because we have got a teacher shortage, and we will have a number of previous teachers that would possibly like to re-enter the workforce. Of course, they’ve had a significant wage rise after having a decade of stagnation and all of a sudden it’ll be quite an appealing profession again for a number of those, perhaps, former teachers that would like to get back in.

Any way we can remove the barrier to getting more teachers in front of our kids is great, because we know that we had a shortage—I think we had a drop of 40 percent in the number of trainee teachers under the previous Government. So we’ve got a lot of catching up to do there. So this will be good—anything that can improve the pathway there—and, of course, the classrooms will be all sparkly and new, with the new R & M funding that got announced the other day in that $1.2 billion of capital expenditure that Minister Hipkins has recently announced as well. There are new schools and new classrooms going up all around the country, including, actually, at my children’s school, the Lawrence Area School, which is getting quite a major rebuild.

There’s all sorts of other stuff as well around the election process. There’s some stuff there in terms of if there is an invalidated election. It does streamline a process for the Government to appoint a commissioner. There was a bit of a grey area there, apparently, earlier, where the only real method was to put the old board back in. So it makes it a bit easier to put a commissioner in.

Religious studies—opt in. I think it’ll be interesting to see, when we get the submissions come through to the select committee, that religious studies will now be an opt-in proposal as opposed to, as it is now, an opt-out. You know, we have a much more diverse population now. We are not, the statistics would say, as heavily religious as previously, and we’re following different religions as well. So it’ll be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out. I would expect the select committee to get a lot of feedback through that submission process.

Tertiary and vocational—there’s some stuff around the student loans and the interaction with the Ministry of Social Development. Again, the select committee, I guess, will look at the sharing of that information and how that process works and whether that’s an appropriate measure—if there’s anything that can streamline that situation and make it a bit simpler for those students going to university to get their student loans.

Governance—there’s been a bit referenced a little bit around governance. There are some references to the Treaty being more appropriately recognised, a minimum code of conduct for board members, and a disputes resolution process. I actually think that’s a really good one, because they can be very, very difficult. A small school like Lawrence would be a good example. The teachers and the principal all live in a very small community. Everyone’s interacting with each other all the time and it can be quite hard to differentiate the personal and professional life and put another hat on. There are lots of other pressures. So I think a disputes panel of some sort would be quite handy. And, you know, we’ve got some social issues out there. There are students at schools who have got a lot of issues that they bring to school. I think that disputes resolution process and having an independent process is a very good one.

The other thing I noted—and I think it will get some mention—is the discipline and the physical restraint, and where that lies. As I said just previously, not all kids at school are angels; they’re troubled. The teachers often these days, I believe, are under a bit of threat, and they do need to know where that line is, and we do have to show them where that line is and decide where that is appropriate. I would imagine there’ll be a lot of feedback on that through the select committee process.

I go back, actually, to the days before Tomorrow’s Schools—that’s actually making me feel a bit old—when you got corporal punishment, the strap. I don’t think I was a bad kid, but I did get the strap a few times. I did famously get the cane once, and it was actually a travesty of justice. It was a travesty of justice. I was fiddling the screwdriver in an already countersunk hole and my woodwork teacher at the time, who must have been giving us a bit of a final warning—I was marched outside and given the cane at Ellesmere College. That woodwork teacher, rather famously, was one Gerry Brownlee.

💬 Matt King: He reckons that’s not true.

I bet I remember it better than he does. I do remember it because he may be a halfway decent shadow Leader of the House but he was rat shit with the cane, because the first strike was round the hamstrings, and I think I can still feel it. I was going to reference that in my maiden speech, but I thought I would keep it for another day, and they do say that revenge is best served cold.

So, with that said, this is a substantive piece of legislation. The select committee has got a task at hand, wading through this, and New Zealand First will look forward—and I will look forward to sitting on that select committee—to working through this very important piece of legislation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak to this bill. I particularly want to focus on the tertiary interface and the tertiary aspects of this bill, which is quite a small part, but it is certainly mentioned in the general policy statement. There are three particular tertiary parts that I want to address that are mentioned in the general policy statement, but it will be a short call.

The first part is the amalgamation of student loan information with other Ministry of Social Development information. Pragmatically, this actually makes some sense. It certainly serves a useful purpose, although we will wait to hear from the Privacy Commissioner and others around the inter-agency agreements, because, when you have informatics like this where you join different databases, there will always be concerns around the linkages that you form and whether they are appropriate linkages. Now, I believe this Government can technically make those linkages, but I don’t believe they can be safe stewards of the data that they’ve then created. I think our ongoing data breaches give clear concern, and I hope the Privacy Commissioner and others will offer some submissions in the select committee process.

I think the second interface with tertiary is removing some of the items from the Education Act, the primary statute, and putting them into regulations. I’ll be interested in some of the legislative committee advice, for example, around the implications of that. When you take something from statute and pass it into regulation, what happens? Now, for the member who has just sat down, Mark Patterson, who was commenting that there’s something useful about creating disputes resolutions, let’s quite clear: what this bill does doesn’t create it; it takes the existing provisions and simply moves them from primary statute to regulations. The main provisions that are being moved are the code of practice for the pastoral care bill, which has concluded its way through the select committee process and will come back to this House; the export education levy; and the disputes resolution schemes. So they already exist; they’re just being moved. I think, fundamentally, this is probably a good thing, but I’d interested to hear, again, in select committee, the implications of moving from statute.

I think the third part that certainly interests me greatly is the slow dismantling of the Industry Training and Apprenticeship Act 1992, an Act that Lockwood Smith and many others had a hand in. If we look back at that time, the problem they were trying to solve was apprentices who were coming out who had time-based competency but not competency-based competency. That was one of the things they were trying to fix, and they had issues with the training that was through providers such as polytechnics and said, “Look, we believe industry are better trainers.” So that was what the 1992 Act was trying to figure out, and, of course, this slowly dismantles it, puts the umbrella for vocational training back under this one mega polytechnic.

The explanatory note of the bill states that the bill replicates provisions from the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Bill. Certainly, I’ve been corrected for grammar in the House before, but it reads, “The Bill replicates provisions from the introduction version of the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Bill”. From the “introductory” version? Maybe others can offer a comment more than I. It just doesn’t seem to be quite the flow I would have expected. But, of course, we’re going to have that battle on a different field; that’s going to be with the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Bill, which is commented on here in the general description, and that’s really where we’re going to roll up our sleeves and, certainly, not be as condescending—not condescending, as useful as we are with this bill, where we’re saying to select committee, to the first reading, we will support it and then see what comes from that.

We have issues right from the beginning with the bill that’s mentioned here—the removal of up to 18,000 industry learners and certainly the 2,310 apprentices that will go from the Minister’s own programme business case—his own statements. So, again, that’s a battle that I’ll leave for another time and another theatre. But I just comment that the obvious tertiary interface with this bill has some useful parts to it. Certainly, we will be looking for more advice from submitters who are maybe more learned than we are here at the moment, and I’ll look forward to seeing its progress through the select committee. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. With pleasure I rise on behalf of the Green Party to offer our support for this piece of legislation, which, I’ve just heard, the Opposition is also supporting at this stage, which was news to me because previous speakers seemed to suggest they were opposing it. So maybe they just need to spend a bit more time talking to each other and reading their notes. Despite the level of detail—picking up “introduction” versus “introductory”; it did seem like there was a level of attention to detail coming from that side—it didn’t seem to flow through into knowing what their vote was, I think.

I think it’s been pointed out that this is a very significant piece of legislation, and rather large—578 pages—and the overview is setting up a learning journey: a piece of legislation that follows the learning journey from early childhood through primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational training into one piece of legislation. I guess it’s come out of a lot of the Tomorrow’s Schools conversations around the country and there is a huge amount of detail in this with a range of different policy, new policy initiatives, while bringing together pieces of legislation: I understand the 1964 Education Act as well as the Education Act of 1989, as well as the legislation covering some of the tertiary education.

I wanted just to point to some of the particular policy points that drew my interest, possibly the least of which are some of the points around updating the legislation where it is removing the reference to standards and forms. It was way back in my time in the education system where we still had those, and while I still have to have people explain to me what standard or form year 9 refers to, not many people are asking that question anymore. So it’s time that that was updated. It also removes the requirement for teachers to take an oath of allegiance, which does seem kind of a feature of another time. And it removes the ability to exclude students in situations where the principal has reasonable grounds to believe the student is not clean enough to keep attending school—a philosophy or a concept that’s quite hard to get your head around in today’s world, and it certainly seems very timely, and well overdue, to have that kind of concept removed from legislation.

Some more substantive points—and there are many of them in this. This is actually providing a more robust framework around home-based early childhood education (ECE), which is really important. This is an area of early childhood that has developed significantly over the last few years, but we haven’t had good oversight of it, and that means that the quality of care of children can’t be guaranteed in the current context. So what this puts in place is police vetting for all adults in the home, regardless of whether they are likely to be there during the hours of the home-based care, to provide that certainty. And it gives the Education Review Office the power to enter a home where ECE is taking place so that they have that power of audit and check, and I think that is incredibly important.

I think there’s some amazing work happening in some home-based ECE, and in my community where the kindergartens in East Porirua have been supporting community members to get qualifications to be able to provide home-based ECE, that’s also led to them supporting them to get their homes insulated to be quality environments. That’s provided employment as well as improved parenting know-how in the community as well as improved the standard of housing. An amazing initiative—so much kudos for them—but we need to make sure that all of those home-based ECE initiatives around the country have that same degree or a basic standard of care and that we can feel confident in the delivery for our kids.

So also, the legislation allows the Minister of Education to approve or decline applications to open a new early learning service based on specified criteria, and, as part of the application process, to request further information. It is clear that we need more oversight of ECE. It’s incredibly important in terms of our kids’ development to have quality early childhood education and certainly it’s the Green Party’s view that we have not been stepping up to the plate to the degree that we need to in that area. This legislation will make it an offence to operate in an early childhood education centre without a licence.

Some of the other aspects that I think are really important in this are around recognising the teacher shortage that we have, and it will enable the Teaching Council to renew teachers’ practising certificates where the applicant either has recent teaching experience or professional learning and development or has agreed to undertake a refresher course. I will be interested to hear the submissions around that point to make sure that we are addressing that teacher shortage while ensuring the adequate professionalism within the profession which has been well protected up to this point.

The legislation also, I think, clarifies that satisfactory recent teaching experience will include overseas teacher experience, and that just seems eminently sensible and good to have that clarified within legislation for many reasons. As we have a more diverse population, it’s good to have a teaching population that also has connections to other countries where our students may come from or indeed a teaching profession that reflects the diversity of our students. So that seems a quite simple measure that may help with that.

So the legislation also provides a mandatory code of conduct for members of school boards with sanctions for non-compliance and broadens the objectives of the boards from the primary focus being on educational achievement to now include objectives to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and relevant student rights under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the Human Rights Act. When we see in the recent report around student educational achievement concerns around that and an increase in bullying in our schools and a gap in terms of educational outcomes, and that we know as a country that we have not been able to deliver equitable outcomes for Māori, actually it’s really important that we recognise systemically that we need to change the way we do things to be able to deliver the standard of education that we expect for all of our children and particularly for tamariki Māori.

The legislation also clarifies that the right to education includes the right to hours and puts limits on the variation in how long those hours can be varied for. That’s about ensuring that children of all abilities are not being partially excluded from schools. We know that that has been happening and I do recognise that it’s going to take a significant shift for our schools to be able to deliver that, but our students, our kids, deserve it. The right to education is an absolute right and we have to do more to ensure that right is realised.

I rise to speak on the Education and Training Bill, a bill that National opposes. As our previous speaker, Dr Shane Reti, said, we do support a number of provisions in the bill and we do think it makes sense to consolidate education legislation, and to do some of the tidying up that this bill achieves. However, there are significant areas where we hold concerns and it is for those concerns that we oppose the bill. As previous speakers have said, we hope to be heard both in this House during this reading and, if it is to progress to select committee, in the select committee process. We don’t rule out supporting the bill if sensible changes are made.

I want to, in this contribution, take you through a few of the areas where we have serious concerns, and, in particular, I want to focus on some provisions in the area of early childhood education that I have particular concern about. But, first of all, let me turn to the changes around zoning, because, in effect, this is the Government’s major response to the Tomorrow’s Schools Review. Now, let’s just remember the context in which these zoning changes have been proposed. Of course, what the Tomorrow’s Schools task force really wanted to do was completely centralise control of our schooling system. What the task force wanted was to get rid of parent-elected boards entirely, and to instead have one grand bureaucracy operating in each part of the country dictating what a school could or couldn’t do. Now, that raised concerns across the entire community, not just in the National Party, but principals, teachers, even teacher unions were highly concerned about what that kind of centralisation would mean for our schooling system. Parents were very concerned as well. So the Government, we are pleased, has backed down on some of that, but we on this side of the House remain sceptical that the stain of that intent remains in this bill—that intent to centralise and take control away from communities and parent-elected board of representatives. The zoning changes—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: You’re disappointed the change was made, just say it.

No, we are very concerned, Mr Little, about the changes proposed in this bill in relation to zoning because this is very significant for schools and for communities.

One of the key responsibilities that a board has is the ability to develop, consult, and review its enrolment scheme. Now, we already have a situation where the Ministry of Education gets to say, “Well, we think it’s time you have an enrolment scheme”, and I’m sure I’m not the only member in this House who’s sat down with school principals who say, “We really lament that we’re having to have a enrolment scheme put on us. We know that we’re doing a good job for children who choose our school, for families who choose our school because of the particular kind of provision, and we’ll now have to exclude them because of the ministry’s requirement.” But, of course, schools at the moment do have power in this regard. They can consult with the community. They can talk to groups of interest about where that zone should sit, how it can include families that have historically been connected with the school, communities that have historically been connected. It can offer the opportunity for parents to have their say too, as elected, accountable board members have been put there by those very parents, through a democratic process, to be accountable to them about what their zone looks like and then to be responsible for reviewing it.

Well, what this bill does is it completely removes those fundamental powers. It says, “No, no, actually, we will not trust democratically elected school boards to make those decisions anymore. We’ll take those powers away and we’ll instead place them with the Ministry of Education.” I don’t blame the schools around the country, the boards around the country, the parents around the country, who are a little bit sceptical about how good a job the Ministry of Education will do with that, because, frankly, the Ministry of Education’s connection to, and relationship with, and knowledge of, individual communities is not as good as the elected parents on school boards. So National takes particular issue with the zoning changes in this bill.

There are a number of other areas where we have concerns, but I want to turn now to the changes in early childhood education, because, taken as a whole, the changes that relate particularly to home-based early childhood education will potentially treat families who choose that form of education like criminals. Home-based education is a choice that many families make for a divergent range of reasons. Sometimes it’s because families are shift workers and the normal hours of provision of early childhood education and a centre-based service don’t suit them—if you’re a nurse that’s working the night shift and you’re a single parent, you require education and care to be provided at different times; if you’re a family who are in a rural community and there isn’t actually a nearby kindy; if you’re a family that has difficulties with accessing transport. There are all sorts of reasons why people choose home-based early childhood education, and that’s the reason it has grown significantly—because it’s flexible and it can meet the needs of families.

However, what this bill says is that what should happen now is that in a family who have chosen home-based early childhood education, every single person who lives in that home has to be subject to a police vet. Now, the bill is explicit—it doesn’t matter if that person won’t be there when the child is being educated. That doesn’t matter at all. They will be vetted whether they want to be or not, whether the family thinks it’s necessary or not. The intent is clear: to take away a parent’s discretion about who they trust to be in their home and give it to the State instead. And why does that apply? There are homes all around the country where there are people living with children who don’t face a police vet. But why is it necessary? Because that family made the choice to have home-based education take place. I have some concerns about that, and we’ll explore those at select committee and we’ll see whether there is, in fact, value in that provision.

The second area I have some concerns about are the enormous new powers that are granted to the Education Review Office (ERO) here—that they are allowed the power of entry into a family home at a time of their choosing, whenever they want, without a warrant. And the concern I have here is: why is that necessary? Why can’t the process simply be that a parent says, “Yes, well, I’ll give you permission to come in at this time on that day.”? Why is it necessary for the ERO to have a universal right to enter? The concerns here relate to quite basic rights and freedoms in our community. I want to quote from the Cabinet papers that have been released. They say that this provision of warrantless entry into private homes, “potentially engages the rights and freedoms affirmed in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 and the Human Rights Act 1993.”

💬 Erica Stanford: The Greens will be upset.

I’m sure the Greens will be interested in this, and I’m sure that those on the other side of the House who have particular concern with New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues when it suits them will be concerned about this.

I am interested that there is no section 7 report on the table. I understand that advice will have been provided to the Attorney-General on this matter, and I will be very interested to see that advice and to explore these New Zealand Bill of Rights Act implications at select committee, because, at its core, what this provision means is that if you’re a family who choose home-based early childhood education, you will be treated like a criminal when it comes to people’s ability to enter your home without your permission. Warrantless entry into a private dwelling is a significant new power, and I raise my concerns with it.

The second significant change in relation to early childhood education relates to the licensing framework. Now, I, like members around the House, have spoken to teachers and early childhood services who are concerned that many new centres are opening in their community and the pressure that places on them. At the same time, I’ve spoken to parents who are thrilled that, unlike with their first child, with subsequent children they haven’t had to wait on huge waiting lists. They’ve been able to get early childhood education when they need it, they’ve been able to choose from a diverse range of services, and they’ve been able to choose a service that suits their particular needs. So we shouldn’t say that having lots more services is always a bad thing.

What this bill says is that, in future, rather than centres having to apply for a licence subject to particular objective criteria that will be assessed by the Ministry of Education, there will now be a two-step process, and the first step of that process provides considerable discretion to the Minister to decide whether the applicant for a new centre is suitable and whether there’s a need for a new service. Now, I am concerned about the complexity that will create and I am concerned about the potential for that to create ambiguity, when people are deciding whether or not to start a centre, to know whether or not they’re actually going to get that permission at all. It is fundamental when we give discretions like this to a Minister that we’re clear about the way in which they exercise them, and my concern would be a Minister using this power to simply pick on providers they don’t like, to say no where it suits them, and, frankly, to be subject to lobbying by competitors who don’t want a new competitor entering the Wellington market or the Christchurch market—who don’t want a new centre opening up because it won’t suit their bottom line.

So we have concerns. We oppose the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am absolutely thrilled to stand here in full support of this bill that the Minister of Education has brought to us, before the House. Before I begin my contribution, there’s just a couple of points I want to raise and discuss. One was brought up by Parmjeet Parmar, who said that people that provide home-based early childhood education (ECE) will now be subject to police vetting, which will mean that police can enter their premises to check on them, whether they’ve been police-vetted or not—false and incorrect.

The next thing I want to bring up is what Nicola Willis, the National Party spokesperson for early childhood education, said, which was that people who choose home-based early childhood education are now going to be treated like criminals. Well, I suggest that member do a little bit more research into home-based early childhood education, because it does not just mean that a home-based educator may come into my home; it also means that my child may go into a home-based educator’s home, and why should children that attend home-based early childhood education not have the same safety requirements as they do in the early childhood centre? Early childhood teachers and staff all have to be vetted before they start work in an early childhood centre, so why should it be any different for children who attend home-based education? That’s the second point I wanted to raise.

The other thing I would like to talk about—there are so many things to talk about, but I actually don’t have a lot, so I will stay in the ECE space, because, prior to coming into Parliament, I was an early childhood teacher for well over 20 years, so I do know just a little bit about that sector. The new licensing criteria that is going to be a two-stage process makes perfect sense, because we have centres opening up next door to each other all over the place in the city. The regions are missing out, and, therefore, parents aren’t able to access, necessarily, or have a good choice of, the early childhood centre that they may like to send their child to. So this will allow for better planning and better network organisation. Therefore, parents will be catered to, communities will be better catered to, and whānau will be better provided for and will be included in all these decisions. These things will be for the benefit of all these people—our children, our communities—and I absolutely commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to rise to take a call on the Education and Training Bill in its first reading, which we are opposing, as we have said on a number of occasions. Be we are reserving the right, should this bill be tidied up in select committee, to, in fact, support the bill, because there are a number of things in the bill—I mean, you would expect that with such a brick of a bill there are some things in there that we do support. I mean, in essence, it’s a consolidation of a number of education Acts. It brings together early childhood, primary, and tertiary education into one, single piece of legislation, and there is merit in these ideas and we supports parts of the bill, as you’d expect.

But the bill also aims to implement some of the Government’s response to the final report of the Tomorrow’s Schools review by the independent task force into law. Now, the Tomorrow’s Schools task force had a number of very controversial recommendations. Nikki Kaye travelled the country. She talked to principals, boards of trustees, and chairs, and she spoke to parents, and she heard their feedback. She came to the East Coast Bays, in fact, and sat down with all my principals and chairs of boards of trustees. They gave their feedback loud and clear, and we were able to put the kibosh on some of those very gnarly and backward-looking recommendations and they’re off the table now—like the education hubs. But there were a number of proposed changes to boards of trustees’ powers. Some of them, again, we managed to put the kibosh on, because they were backward-looking, but there are a few of those changes to boards of trustees’ powers that have wound up seeping through and getting buried in this brick of a bill.

I want to focus on zoning—like some of my colleagues have done today—with a particular emphasis on a case in my electorate. As has already been mentioned, at present school boards are responsible for both developing and consulting on each enrolment scheme, and under the Education Act 1989, the Secretary for Education can provide written notice to a school to say “Hey, there is some growth coming up.”, or “You’re overcrowded at the moment and you need to change your enrolment zone.” The board of trustees then have to go out and develop an enrolment scheme and undertake consultation in their area. So they gather evidence, they undertake public meetings, they do surveys, and there’s a formal consultation process.

Now, in the task force’s opinion that we’ve read, the board of trustees—in their opinion—jimmy things around to try and get better areas for their school, they are not focused on the long term, they’re only focused on short-term trends, and basically, in a nutshell, boards of trustees don’t trust parents to know their own area, because that’s what it boils down to. In the local example of my primary school, which is about to hit a thousand—by the by, that’s because the Minister has put on his wish list that there be a new school in Albany, but he hasn’t actually committed any funding or said it’s going to go ahead. So it’s just this sort of Santa list that might happen some day.

So they’re about to hit a thousand students, and it had to change. They’re having to go through a process of changing their enrolment zone—so I’ve been through this recently—and they’ve done a great job. The reason they’ve done such a great job is because that board of trustees, made up of parents—local people—know their area. They know that the bit that the ministry wants to carve off, on paper, looks right. It’s closer to another school which isn’t full, and that would make sense—you would take that bit out and you would put it over there. But there are so many local conditions that the ministry simply doesn’t understand, and in this case, it was a cultural reason, because there is one particular ethnicity that lives in that area that is very, very much connected to the school that they’re about to be kicked out of, potentially.

I do not believe these considerations will be taken into account by the ministry. It is this local knowledge that is so very important. I’ve been through this so many times with the ministry, where they think they know where growth is happening but, in fact, it turns out to be completely wrong. I’ve got schools in my electorate with classrooms that are sitting empty, and other schools that are begging for classrooms and can’t get them, because the ministry isn’t able to account for growth properly. In this case, the board of trustees knew exactly where the growth was. They knew, and the ministry didn’t even know, where the new subdivision was about to go.

The thing that I want to focus on, though, is that the Tomorrow’s Schools report basically says, “Look, there’s always a problem when the ministry and the school eventually come to a compromise over these zones, and that’s not good.” Compromises aren’t good. But remember, “school” in this instance, in this equation, represents the community and their views, so, actually, a compromise is a good thing.

Now, the regulatory impact statement says that they’re trying to avoid this compromise, which basically means—we can decipher this—that it’s going to be the ministry’s way or the highway. That’s what it’s going to be. It’s not going to be about what the community, what the teachers, what the parents, and what the local people want. I can tell you, it’s going to be the ministry’s way. It’s not going to be the highway, because we know very well that this Government doesn’t build roads. We back principals and parents over bureaucrats.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a big reform; it’s a very meaty piece of legislation. It is a big reform. I just want to take us up a little bit to talk about principles, because it’s always important, when you are doing a reform, to start from a position of principle.

What the Minister, Chris Hipkins, is doing with this piece of legislation is a part of a much bigger education framework programme, which is ultimately about high-quality, inclusive education. It’s about adapting to a modern world, and taking all of the existing pieces of legislation that are looking at the reform of Tomorrow’s Schools, and the early learning strategic plan, and creating new reform around that. I want to take us back to the late 1930s, actually, and another great reformer, Peter Fraser, a Labour Prime Minister, and his secretary of education, Clarence Beeby, who said that “The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their ability, rich or poor, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers. So far is this from being a mere pious platitude that the full acceptance of the principle will involve the reorientation”—

💬 Hon David Bennett: It worked well, didn’t it?

—“of the education system.”

💬 Hon David Bennett: He ruined so many lives.

Now, I know that the member David Bennett doesn’t like—

💬 Simeon Brown: Socialism. He doesn’t like socialism.

—referring to first principles. Oh, and I heard somebody yell out “socialism”. Well, goodness, this is ultimately what underpins this legislation. It’s powerful; it’s important; it’s meaty. I’m glad that we’ve clarified that the Opposition is opposing it, because we were unsure.

Of the 578 pages, 621 clauses, and at least 40 substantive changes that are contained in this legislation, the Opposition have said that they are likely to support four, that they think that they’re a good idea. Hopefully, after we hear a lot of submissions and consideration on this legislation, they’ll come to a different position. I’m looking forward to that. I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Education and Training Bill, which I think has been described as a brick. It reminds me of the Yellow Pages—of course, those have now ceased, thank goodness. But it’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill, which the National Party does not support, but there are parts of it that we do.

I’d like to just start by making a few comments about why we’re here and why we’re debating this bill. The Minister Chris Hipkins, in his speech, spent the first seven minutes talking about how this is a rewrite of six pieces of legislation, bringing them all together, and it’s about trying to update them and bring them into plain English, and all of this. But he took till the eighth minute till he actually referred to the Tomorrow’s Schools review. I would have thought that would have been the first thing he spoke about when he came down to the House and said, “Look, we’ve had a Tomorrow’s Schools review. We’ve gone around the country and we’ve spoken to people, we’ve sought their feedback, and this is the response that the Government is making to that to that review.”

But no, it took till his eighth minute of his speech till he actually made any mention of the review of Tomorrow’s Schools, which was undertaken by the Government. Why was that? Well, the reason is because this bill represents a major back-down by the Government, a major back-down by a Government which was intent on centralising our education system and taking power away from parents and from principals and from local communities, and centralising that power into hubs, which would then control what happens in our schools up and down our country.

We don’t see those hubs in here. That is because of the advocacy of schools, parents, and boards of trustees, up and down our country, who campaigned against the Government’s proposals. I just want to put my word on the record to acknowledge the efforts of all those people who worked so tirelessly to ensure that the power would remain in local communities for our education system.

On this side of the House, we actually believe that local communities matter and that local schools, boards of trustees, and parents have an important role in our education system and in educating our children for the future. So this bill represents a major back-down by the Government, and for that, I’m very pleased.

I come to some of the aspects of this bill that we cannot support on this side of the House. The first part that I’d like to touch on is the part which changes the purpose for school boards of trustees—their primary objectives. Now, under the current legislation, school boards of trustees have as their main objective to raise educational achievement in their school. Under these changes, they will now have three additional primary objectives including inclusion, the physical and emotional safety of their students, and Treaty obligations. Now, we don’t say that those objectives are wrong—in fact, they’re a very important part of what it is to have a school and what we expect of schools and the role that they play—but, essentially, what this bill does is put all four of those objectives on exactly the same level. So the objective of educational achievement will go alongside the other objectives of inclusion, the Treaty, and physical and emotional safety.

I think it’s important to note the research which was recently put out by The New Zealand Initiative to highlight the reason why it’s important that we have educational achievement as the primary objective of our education system and for our schools and the schools boards. It’s important because one of the things The New Zealand Initiative did was a survey to try and ascertain some key questions and key answers around what New Zealand’s general knowledge was. One of the questions which they asked was: how long does it take for the Earth to go round the sun? Only 53 percent of New Zealanders could answer that question correctly. Which country was the first to give all women the right to vote? Well, 85 percent of New Zealanders got that answer correct.

💬 Marja Lubeck: Who was it?

It was New Zealand, Marja Lubeck—New Zealand. But another question was: in what year was the Treaty of Waitangi first signed? Only 32 percent of New Zealanders actually answered that question correctly. The point that this raises is the point that knowledge is important in our education system and our schools exist for the purpose of educational achievement and raising the educational achievement of the young people who are in their care and that they have responsibility for. I think if you talk to parents up and down the country, that is why they send their children to school: for their educational achievement. Those other aspects are important but they should be ranked in order of importance, and that is one of the issues that we will certainly be focusing our attention on during the select committee stage of this bill.

The second area—and it’s been traversed already—is around school boards being responsible for setting the zones. This bill strips away the power from school boards to set enrolment zones for their schools and puts the power to set these enrolment zones in the hands of the ministry. The point that I would make here is that one of the key roles of the board of trustees is to set an enrolment zone, to decide what area that school will serve and then to be able to go through the consultation process, to listen to parents, to listen to the needs of the community, and then to set that zone. Of course, the ministry already has the responsibility of finally signing that zone off, but now the ministry takes the entire process and the power of running that process, as well. I know how controversial this can be. There are currently two schools in my electorate which are going through the process of putting in place enrolment zones; it does cause controversy in the community. But when you have such local decisions, such as setting a school enrolment zone, it should be up to local people to make those decisions, to be able to talk to local parents to be able to understand the local streets and the people who live in those streets, to be able to hold public meetings, and to be able to engage in that process. This bill takes that power, and says, “No, the ministry will do that job better than the boards of trustees.” The ministry will come into the community and will tell the community what is best for them; the school will no longer be able to say what is in the best interests of the school community in consultation with families. I think that is something which is a real shame, and we will oppose that. I look forward to submissions from schools and parents and boards of trustees from around the country, to feed in their views on this particular issue.

A third area that I want to comment on briefly is around the changes to the NCEA requirements, which are trying to, essentially, ensure that offshore providers aren’t able to provide NCEA qualifications. I think this is something on which there are questions which need to be answered, in particular what impact this will have on our export education as a country. That’s a significant part of our economy—around $5 billion of income to New Zealand’s GDP from export education—and I think we’ve got to be very careful about these changes and we’ve got to understand the reasons why and any potential unintended consequences that that might have on the international education that this country does and does very well and which I am very proud in this House to be supporting.

Lastly, I do just want to touch briefly on some of the changes which we do support, and one of those is around refresher courses for teachers who are returning to teaching and to education. I think this is something which, when I’m out and about in Pakuranga, and you’re talking to principals or you’re talking to people in the community, they raise as something which does need to be looked at, because we do need to make it easier for people to be able to return to education, return to teaching. It is such a valued role in our community, and it is something which needs to be made easier so that we can get the teachers in front of our students, in front of our learners, so that they’re able to provide the teaching and the education that they need.

Other changes around renaming the “correspondence school” to the “distance school” I think is a positive change, and also allowing more integration there around the online and distance teaching they do online and, basically, recognising that in this education bill. Also there’s changes there around dispute resolution. Whilst these seem to be positive, hopefully that doesn’t end up being some sort of semi-judicial process.

Overall, yes, there are some changes, but, as I said at the start, this is a major back-down by the Government. They’ve backed down from one of their biggest reforms they hoped to have in the education system. It’s a victory for parents, but there’re issues in here which we need to continue to oppose, and we look forward to the select committee process. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Thank you, Madam Speaker. An absolute privilege to be the last speaker in this first reading debate on the Education and Training Bill. Now, it has been said that bigger is not necessarily better, but I have to say that in this case this is a very significant piece of legislation. I actually take offence to the previous member, who’s just sat down, Simeon Brown, for calling this a back-down. This is a huge amount of work led by the honourable Minister Chris Hipkins and his team to make sure that we are actually addressing a lot of those long-term challenges that the previous Government shied away from. This Government is not scared to pick up those challenges and make sure that we are making the education legislation fit for purpose.

The Minister has already said on a previous occasion that the rewrite of the education legislation is long overdue. Basically, it’s our whole legislative framework that needs a revamp. With this bill, we are creating a new Education and Training Act, once it’s gone through all the stages.

So what the bill does—I’ll just recap what we’ve heard in the House—is that it brings legislation on early learning, schooling, tertiary, and vocational education into a single statute by merging the Education Acts of 1964 and 1989 and updating the language that we find in both those Acts.

Mentioning the 1989 and 1964 Acts, this is legislation that is in some places 55 years old, and it hasn’t been amended or has haphazardly been amended, and it’s well overdue that we’re looking at some of the outdated language that, actually, in some of the provisions, could be referred to as somewhat discriminatory.

Basically, we’re introducing a new structure with this bill that is more easy to follow, and thereby creating a bill that deals with a journey of students that starts at early education, early learning, schooling, and then goes through to tertiary and vocational education.

I was going to mention some of the examples—many examples—that this bill has of updating and bringing into the current times some of these provisions, but also making the whole system more fluid. But they have actually been very well covered by my colleagues on this side of the House, and sometimes also even on the other side—I’ll give them that. I do want to make a specific mention of one particular provision that I’ve found that is mentioned in the Education Act 1989, and that goes to the fact that there is at the moment a provision where a principal can actually stop a student from attending school because the principal has reasonable grounds to believe that a student is not clean enough to continue attending school. That’s the wording at the moment in that Education Act. So, obviously, that is something that we do need to change.

Another really significant piece in this legislation is the fact that school boards’ primary objectives should be a little bit more than focusing just on achievement. So there is a very broad range, and in all of these nearly 600 pages that I was up late with last night, sitting on my desk—it is focusing on not just achievement; it is actually broadening that out to make sure that there is a safe and inclusive environment for our students that’s free from racism, and free from discrimination and bullying. Also, schools are giving effect to Te Tiriti, so the bill is making sure that the schools’ plans, policies, and also the local curriculum actually correctly reflect local tikanga Māori.

Now, the Minister already spoke at length regarding the use of what is now referred to as physical restraint, and we had a marvellous speech from my colleague Mark Patterson earlier on that I’m going to enjoy watching again and again as soon as we finish here in a few minutes’ time. But I just want to finish off by saying that this is a great piece of legislation, and it shows so clearly the contrasts with National, who basically left us an education system with increasing financial and other barriers to access. So this Government has started to tackle that, making sure our children can make the most of the opportunities of the future, building more schools and classrooms, planning for future growth, taking financial pressure off, scrapping NCEA fees, and even providing funding to many of the schools so they don’t have to ask the parents for donations.

This is a positive Government focused on tackling the challenges that are facing New Zealand, and these nine years have taken effect, but we will take our time to fix it, and we’re making good progress in the meantime. So we’re looking forward to this 600-page bill, and I commend it to the House.

And a Minister’s going to move the report-back date.

on behalf of the Minister of Education: I move, That the Education and Training Bill be reported to the House by 4 May 2020.

Motion agreed to.