Education and Training Bill

I move, That the Education and Training Bill be now read a third time.

I’d like to begin by thanking all of the members of the House for a very lively and constructive committee stage for this legislation. It does represent the biggest change in decades for the education sector and an important step towards ensuring success for all of our learners. I think the debate was useful and constructive, and I thank members for that.

I want to acknowledge someone who isn’t here tonight, the Hon Nikki Kaye, the National Party spokesperson for education and a previous Minister of Education, for all of the work that she has done over this term of Parliament to ensure that we can have a constructive working relationship on education issues. I want to wish her all the best with her retirement. I suspect that we will see her at some point in a future role, thriving in whatever it is that she chooses to do. I want to acknowledge Nicola Willis and welcome her to the role. Of course, in the next nine weeks or so, I suspect, collegiality and cooperation may go out the window just a little bit, and I hope that after the election, however that lands up, we can continue to work constructively on education issues, because it is incredibly important.

This bill delivers a high-quality public education system for New Zealand. It strengthens quality, the viability, and the support for early learning services up and down the country. It improves the police vetting requirements to increase the protections for our young children. It supports the right of all children to enrol at and attend their local school full-time, and it provides an effective pathway to resolve serious disputes and keep students engaged in education. It incorporates the reforms of vocational education and the introduction of the code of pastoral care for domestic tertiary students that this Parliament has previously passed through other legislation. It also incorporates the epidemic response measures that we passed as a Parliament and makes them available for the use in future epidemics. The bill implements some of the key elements of our education work programme, including some of the first steps to implement the decisions the Government has made as a result of the review of Tomorrow’s Schools. Again, I want to thank the Tomorrow’s Schools review task force for the hard work that they have done in consulting up and down the country on those changes.

But, significantly, this bill draws together all of the relevant provisions relating to education that are currently spread across several Acts. Currently, most education sector legislation is in the Education Act of 1989. There is, however, an Education Act of 1964, where there are still some provisions there—the Beatles were touring New Zealand, I suspect, at the time that that bill came into force, which shows you how long it’s been around for. This bill consolidates that down into one easier to understand, modern piece of legislation that is less prescriptive. It also moves some elements of prescriptive legislation out of legislation and into regulation, where it can be more easily and readily amended to cope with the changing times.

So just touching very briefly on some of the key changes that the bill makes, it allows for more active management of the early childhood education network and changes to the licensing requirements to ensure that quality standards can be met. It means that the Ministry of Education will take into account the needs of children in the community, as well as the applicant’s character, licensing history, and financial position, when deciding whether to approve the application for a new early childhood education licence. Police vetting requirements for home-based early childhood education services have been clarified and strengthened.

In the schooling sector, very importantly, this bill clarifies that once a child is enrolled at school, they are entitled to attend that school for all of the hours that that school is open. It is wrong that some schools have been engaging in the practice of rationing the number of hours that children with additional learning needs are allowed to attend their school. Once they are enrolled at school, they are entitled to attend that school for all of the hours that the school is open, and this bill makes that absolutely clear in law. The bill also amends the legal framework around physical restraint, taking on board feedback that we’ve received from the teaching community and from the disability community, striving once again to get the right balance here. I suspect this is an issue that Parliament will continue to grapple with, because it is incredibly complex and there are very legitimate arguments being raised on both sides of the argument.

The bill enables the establishment of a dispute resolution scheme for the schooling sector—not, actually, for the first time. It was established when the Education Act of 1989 was first passed, and it was repealed almost immediately, but, actually, it was an original part of the model of self-governing schools, that if we are going to have self-governing schools, there does need to be a quality dispute resolution scheme in place to resolve the issues that may flow from that, and this bill puts that in place. So once established, panels will be able to resolve serious rights-based disputes between students and their schools where those disputes have not been able to be resolved at a school level. It makes changes to enrolment schemes to strengthen the enrolment schemes regime, and that’s been well canvassed during the committee stage of the bill tonight.

In the tertiary education sector, as I’ve indicated before, this bill incorporates the reforms of vocational education and training that the House has already canvassed at length when that legislation was passed. Of course, that legislation was passed after this bill was introduced, which is why the bill has now been amended to incorporate those changes. It also incorporates the changes we made to allow for the code of pastoral care for domestic students.

Then, as I mentioned, some of the changes that the Parliament has made around allowing for the Secretary for Education to have greater directive powers in the case of an epidemic—those changes were passed by this House in light of COVID-19, and we have ensured that they are enshrined in the legislation going forward so that if there is a future epidemic, those powers will still be available to the Secretary for Education, so that whoever the Government of the day is is able to respond to that. The export education levy payment obligations for international students are suspended for the next two years, recognising that that part of our community will be suffering as a result of fewer international students coming into the country, and this will ease some of the financial pressure on those education providers.

I think this is an excellent piece of legislation. It’s one that has been several years in the making. Successive Ministers of Education have taken steps towards tidying up the Education Act. This completes that work, and I suspect in the next Parliament the process will start all over again and it will only be a matter of time before we have an Education and Training Amendment Bill before the House. But I hope for now at least we’ve got the education legislation into a point where those who are required to abide by it can at least follow it.

I rise to speak on the Education and Training Bill. I want to first acknowledge Nikki Kaye, because she was the education spokesperson for National who worked on this bill most closely with the Minister of Education, and who has led our education policy development. In doing that role, Nikki Kaye has been a fierce advocate for the interests of parents and communities. That has particular relevance in this bill because without her, this bill would have been a lot worse than it is today. It’s still, unfortunately, a bill which National will oppose, but I am absolutely certain that without the advocacy of Nikki Kaye, it would be a far more radical piece of legislation. That’s because the context for this bill was the Government’s Tomorrow’s Schools Review Independent Taskforce.

That task force was commissioned by the Minister with an extraordinarily broad mandate. It came back and it made radical proposals, the shadows of which are still apparent in this bill. I will, in this contribution, take you through where that shadow still lies. When that task force reported back, it proposed centralised bureaucratic hubs that would control schools, instead of parent boards. It proposed absolutely marginalising parental involvement in the governance of schools. It proposed that all school property management would be taken over by the Ministry of Education, that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Education Review Office would be discarded, that intermediate schools would be abolished, and that an education service agency would take over all servicing of schools. This idea was abhorrent to National, and that is why Nikki Kaye embarked on 30 public meetings throughout the country. In those public meetings, she engaged with parents, she engaged with teachers, and she engaged with education experts, and their feedback was resounding. The feedback was that that sort of radical change would take New Zealand’s education system backwards, would reduce the achievement of children, would loosen the engagement between parents and their schools, and would, all in all, be bad for our education system. So that was rejected.

I thank Nikki Kaye for working constructively with the Minister to help him see the light and to help him see that these were very bad ideas and were going to get him into a lot of trouble and, frankly, his colleagues into a lot of trouble in their communities up and down the country. She did a good job. But Nikki Kaye was only the Opposition spokesperson, and so she wasn’t able to save things completely.

I want to step you through now the aspects of this bill which National remains very concerned about. The first is the significant change which takes away from school boards of trustees, from locally elected parents, the ability to develop, consult on, and review their enrolment schemes. Now, it is bad enough that at the moment, the ministry can come along and say to a school, “Too bad, you’re having an enrolment scheme; here it goes.” But the saving grace that we have at the moment is that at least when that happens, boards of trustees are the ones that drive the development of that zone, who are the ones who drive the consultation, who are the ones responsible for engaging effectively with the community to discuss where the boundaries for that zone should lie, and they are the ones engaged in reviewing it.

What this bill does is it takes that ability from local boards and it gives it completely over to the Ministry of Education to drive that process entirely. What we heard tonight in the committee of the whole House stage of this bill is that such is the magnitude of that task for the Ministry of Education that they need a few more months to gear up. They need more resources, we are told, in order to take over this function. We on this side of the House are alarmed by that prospect, because we anticipate a future in which local communities are less able to influence which neighbourhoods of children schools take on. We anticipate a future in which ministries will impose enrolment zones that school boards disagree with.

I want to take you through a specific example. The example I want to talk to you about, of how the ministry can get these things wrong, is one that’s very current in my colleague Hon Dr Nick Smith’s electorate in Nelson, which is Nayland College. Now, Nayland College is a coeducational secondary school, and for many years parents from surrounding communities, including in Nelson, have wanted to send their children there because their local school was a single-sex school. Some parents prefer single-sex schools and some parents prefer co-ed schools, and so they’ve made the choice to send their children a little bit further away to go to the co-ed school. But in recent years, the Ministry of Education has been particularly slow in replacing classrooms that needed to be fixed, has not done a good job of getting them built, and the result is that that school is now reaching capacity constraints, and the ministry have said they’re going to impose a zone. Now, this, I think, is a portent of the future we will see under this bill, because what we can expect is that the Ministry of Education will have far less incentive to manage its development of property well, because, actually, it’s going to be the one in charge of setting the zone, engaging on the zone, consulting on the zone, and the power of the local board to influence that will be lessened considerably. So we will see more Nayland College - type situations, where a school community wants it to be able to take additional students but it is unable to. We will see more situations where schools are unable to create the community of interest that they wish for their school. This will diminish parental choice, and it will diminish community involvement.

We also remain concerned about other aspects of this bill, because as the Minister says, what it does is it brings together the operation of early childhood, primary, secondary, and tertiary legislation into one piece of law. In doing so, it involves all of the changes we’ve seen as part of the Reform of Vocational Education review, which centralised control of our tertiary education system so that the innovation and excellence that we’ve seen at institutions like Southern Institute of Technology (SIT)—like the wonderful SIT in Southland. Instead, that is swallowed into an amorphous bureaucratic body, and we say that’s wrong. Why would you get rid of a wonderful independent institution like SIT?

It then, also, introduces a two-step licensing system for early childhood education that we remain concerned about. In the committee of the whole House stage of this bill, the Minister said that this was about quality. Well, then why is the bill so specific in providing that the Minister can use this for a network management approach? The former Minister sitting in the Chair—the Speaker Hon Anne Tolley—will be aware of what network reviews have meant in the past when Labour have used them. What network reviews have meant is Ministers making arbitrary decisions about what should be closed and what should be opened. We are concerned that giving a Minister considerable discretion in this way will mean that we will see delays in the opening of new early childhood services, and we will see uncertainty and cost added to that process. If an early childhood centre wants to open, we think it’s very important there is a clear process that they can go through, and the two-step licensing process proposed here remains vague.

The fourth area of concern I want to highlight is around the changes relating to physical force and restraint. In one sense, actually, on this side of the House, we agree with the need for some change. We have, like all members of Parliament, heard concerns about the way the rules currently work in schools. The previous National Government made a very well-motivated attempt to make changes in this area that would meet the concerns of parents and of teachers. There have been some challenges with those. We then saw a model proposed in the bill that went through a select committee, and National discussed that in some detail. Again, concerns remain, particularly from members of the disability community, who felt that it gave too much discretion to teachers.

But what’s happened today is we’ve had Supplementary Order Paper 544 land on the Table of the House. That proposes a totally different set of rules in this area from those that were considered in depth by the select committee. My concern is simply that we on this side of the House have not had the adequate opportunity to assess what those changes mean, nor to engage with the experts in this area or the members of the community who would have a view on those changes. That is what the select committee process is meant to provide for, but in this instance, these changes haven’t gone through that process. So our concern is not whether these are right or wrong but simply that they have been rushed. We are concerned that there could be problems in the implementation because of that.

Finally, what we see in this bill is actually missed opportunity, because in this country, we have an education system that, by and large, does a great job, but we still have one in five children leaving our schools without the literacy and numeracy skills they need to achieve. If the Minister thinks that this bill contains a single thing in it which will really address that challenge, then he is dreaming. We need to do a much better job in education. This bill is not the bill that will deliver that.

It’s a wonderful opportunity to be here and stand to talk on the fantastic bill here, the Education and Training Bill. This bill, of course, is a key part of the broader work plan that this Government has had and has going forward in education. This bill is the key legislation, the key framework, that shapes our system. It brings together many different forms of legislation that have been built up over the years—legislation that, I have to say, has been difficult for the people that work within the sector to actually navigate. So bringing it together, pulling it together, and modernising it into this particular bill is very much overdue and has long been desired by the sector and is a bill that is very much welcomed.

I’m not going to take much time here this evening, because I think that it’s been said in previous speeches and also the Minister of Education’s first speech, but there are a couple of areas that I would like to just take some time to comment on. Firstly: enrolment zones. We’ve heard some opposition around the provisions in this particular bill around enrolment zones and the fact that there is opposition over that side of the House around the Secretary for Education taking over the development and consultation of the enrolment schemes. For those numbers of schools that those people are hearing from that are opposed to this, there are an equal if not more greater amount of schools who are actually welcoming these changes. These changes will make these schemes more equitable for those schools. There are a number of schools that have struggled with the enrolment zones. It is a burdensome process for boards of trustees, and many have stated over a number of years that they wish that there was a more equitable, fairer scheme in place that could actually take that burden away from them, and they could actually then focus on their key governance roles.

Unfortunately, we heard from the other side during the committee of the whole House that there was concern around the role of the principal. I share those concerns. It is a very, very hectic role that puts a lot of pressure on the individual. In many schools, the board of trustees is actually guided a lot by the principal in that enrolment scheme development, and it’s the principal who actually takes on more workloads and takes them away from their key role of leading teaching and learning within their school. So I see this as being something really positive for our education system and really positive for those schools who really struggle—actually, for all schools—because, in effect, it will lead towards a much fairer system and a fairer enrolment scheme within our education system.

I do want to very briefly, in my final couple of minutes, just talk about the changes that have been made in the physical restraint. We’ve heard that this is one end of the spectrum, which will be the teaching workforce. We’ve got the disability sector over here, and we’re trying to find this place in the middle. I absolutely welcome these changes. It is a really hard space to actually navigate, but I think there are some key pieces in this legislation that will point towards a way in the future. The key changes are around the requirements around training for our teaching workforce. We must see that happen. I like the discussions of some ideas about those ways forward. We’ve got some fantastic training programmes in that space here in this country at the moment. I am myself trained in non-violent crisis intervention, NVCI. I think it is a fantastic training programme. If our teaching workforce were trained to that level—not necessarily that particular programme, but to that level—then we will go some way to addressing our concerns of our disability sector.

This is a fantastic bill, and I have absolutely no hesitation in commending this to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We have been quite clear, since this bill has been reported back from the Education and Workforce Committee, that we will be opposing this legislation, but then we again took the opportunity during the committee of the whole House—which was just before the third reading now—to ask questions. Those questions were based on concerns that we have in this legislation. I have to acknowledge that the Minister did take calls, but he just addressed those questions; he didn’t actually answer them. In a way, he just defended the position that he has towards this legislation. So if the Minister had actually, genuinely looked into resolving those issues that we had raised, maybe we would have thought about changing our position.

So I’m saying that we are not fully opposed to this legislation. There are a few things that we like in this legislation. Like Jan Tinetti was saying, this is about putting all those provisions to do with the education sector—this is the early childhood education sector, compulsory, and tertiary education—together into this legislation, making it easier for people to navigate. We support that, but there are provisions in this legislation that are to do with various education sectors that, as early childhood education, compulsory, and tertiary education, we don’t agree with.

First, as I have started talking about things that we actually support in this legislation, I would like to give another example of a provision that we support. This is about renewing transitional plans. In my view, this is actually a good change in this legislation, because this is about taking care of people, young children, where their wellbeing is in question. So there is a requirement of attendance—usual attendance—and there is an exception allowed which is fixed in the current legislation for up to six months. Through this legislation, that is going to be flexible.

But what is good about this change is that it has to be initiated by a parent or a guardian of the child. So we don’t want to see any child or the family of that child being forced to keep the child away from school. So it is initiated by a parent, and then, of course, the school principal has to be involved, the Secretary for Education has to be involved, and there has to be a medical practitioner involved in this whole process to make sure that this process is not just to keep that child away. When children start school at that very young age of five years, we want to make sure that their experience of attending school is really positive. We don’t want to give them a fright. We don’t want to, in a way, punish them by making them sit there when their physical or their mental wellbeing doesn’t allow them to be in school for that many hours. So that flexibility is something, as I said, we support.

I also want to acknowledge Supplementary Order Paper 544, which was introduced during the committee of the whole House. In that, offering NCEA to offshore students was addressed. That was a concern we had from the start. In the context of COVID-19, we know that we have learnt that there are a lot of things that can be done while being away. You don’t have to be learning face to face. Distance learning is very much—that is possible. Now, we know that a lot of students are not able to come to New Zealand. Export education is a very important sector for New Zealand, and we need to see all possible ways to support our economy. Export education is one sector where we definitely need to build on. So this was a concern we had from the start, but that has been addressed through the Supplementary Order Paper.

Then, again, the physical force and physical restraint issue that we talked about before. So now we know that the Minister has said that is being addressed, but, again, there is a question of training of teachers. We don’t know exactly what kind of resources are going to be available or what kind of training is going to be available for teachers to understand what it actually means and what it will mean for children that have special needs.

Now, talking about concerns that we have in this legislation, during the committee of the whole House, I wanted the Minister to address the issue of the early childhood education centre licence approval system that is going to be put through this legislation. One issue that didn’t get answered was where there is a criteria of checking that entity’s history of providing for the early childhood education sector. So there could be a lot of people that are new players in the sector, they want to get into this field, and they may not have a history. So I feel that those people will find it really difficult to get into the sector.

Our population is growing now—the first time we have 5 million. There are a lot of young families that do need childcare centres in their vicinity or close to their workplace. During this recent recess, I, with my colleague Barbara Kuriger, visited an early childhood education centre. Actually, it was the opening of their brand new centre. That was a beautiful centre. This was in the middle of a big workplace, a lot of workplaces around it. So that was providing that convenience that parents need when they have children of that age. They can bring those children close to their work, drop them in their day-care centre, and then while going home, pick them up and go home.

So these people, the providers in the sector, they understand what the need is, and they understand where that need is. So we should give that freedom. We should give that kind of decision-making ability to our community, rather than the Minister having full control, deciding where and when somebody can apply for a licence to start an early childhood education centre. So I’m not in favour of that, and we on this side, as we have said, we have concerns about that.

The other issue is about the process. During the select committee process, three months out of six months of this legislation were when we were in lockdown. Now we are considering this legislation in urgency—the committee of the whole House and third reading. So I fully understand that the Government wants to look like they have done a lot of work in this sector, but this is not the way to push through this legislation, which the Government themselves have acknowledged is very important legislation in the education sector. So we have concerns about the process as well. Maybe if there was more time—as we have seen through a Supplementary Order Paper, the Minister has actually fixed a couple of issues that were raised by us. I believe that if we had more time, maybe there was a possibility to work on this legislation where we could have supported this legislation. But at this stage, it’s not possible for us to support this legislation in its current form.

Enrolment zones have been talked about. Yes, that remains a concern in this legislation. After the committee of the whole House, we are concerned. Again, to me, it looks like it’s the control being taken away from local schools. The control is going to sit with the Secretary for Education, which we don’t support.

Overall, this legislation, as I said, we fully understand that it is consolidating various legislation which have anything to do with various education stages—that is, early childhood education, compulsory, and tertiary. But putting this together, we have expressed our concerns about vocational education reform and political reforms that are now part of this legislation. So that was separate legislation, and now that is consolidated into this legislation as well. So that is another area of concern. We didn’t support that reform, and we cannot support those provisions and this legislation just because they have become part of this bigger legislation.

So I have expressed our concerns about this legislation. This is a very important area. Education and training is important, and it becomes even more important now we know so many people will be losing their jobs. They might be looking at upskilling themselves to find a new kind of job. With the advancement of technology, there is a need for people to upskill, so education and training should be given more seriousness than the way the Government has dealt with this issue. So I oppose this bill. Thank you.

Kia ora. Thank you, Madam Speaker. So I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of the Education and Training Bill. If I can just go back to the start of this Government, one of the requirements of the coalition Government was actually to hold a conversation with New Zealand to set in place a 30-year vision for education. It was to establish what New Zealanders thought success looked like for their children. It criss-crossed New Zealand; it had hundreds, thousands of participants. It was a conversation that was required by New Zealand First of their coalition partner, because we had made a commitment to repeal national standards, to repeal charter schools, and to repeal COOLs, or communities of online learning, all of which were unnecessary but were put in place by the previous Government.

They were unnecessary because the Education Act 1989 already had the flexibility inside of it for those things to exist. Strangely enough, we have seen that very fact. So since the disestablishment of charter schools, what we have seen is those that were charter schools have become “schools of special character”. It was always the argument that New Zealand First put forward that the special character provisions in the Education Act 1989 could be widened so that more than one special character could remain. I would argue that Hohepa in the Hawke’s Bay should be able to take advantage of that broadening of special character recognition so that they too can become a State-integrated school.

We also believed that national standards were not good for children. I remember having conversations with the Rt Hon Bill English during negotiations where he acknowledged that and recognised that, and recognised that, actually, a success was bigger than just a line in the sand. New Zealand resonated with that when we had that 30-year nationwide conversation. COVID has proven that communities of online learning can exist under the current Education Act.

So this piece of legislation builds upon what was that coalition requirement and starts to set into place and connect from early childhood, compulsory sector, tertiary, and moving on through into lifelong learning. One of the things that is the reality of New Zealand’s future in a COVID environment—because we’re not post-COVID yet—is that many New Zealanders are going to need to take up fresh learning, whether it be micro-credentialing, whether it be using the vocational pathways to recognise their current skill set and how that skill set can be transferred into another opportunity to gain income.

So this piece of legislation starts to cement in some of those changes. There are three particular areas. First of all, after years on boards of trustees, and knowing also, as the Associate Minister of Education with responsibility around bullying, anti-bullying with discrimination, racism, and so on and so forth inside our schools, and for learning support, I can do nothing more but welcome the dispute resolution panels that have been set into place here.

Again, I want to acknowledge Catherine Delahunty, as it comes out of the dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autism spectrum—an inquiry that was initiated by Catherine Delahunty and supported by Chris Hipkins and myself and the current Leader of the Opposition. At that time, it was the disability community that came and said, “We need another mechanism by which to take our concerns when our children are stood down or excluded or expelled from school—we need another body earlier than the Ombudsman, because the Ombudsman takes too long.” And the Ombudsman himself came in front of the select committee and said, “My workload is such and my office is such that they are right. They need something else, closer to the ground, closer to community, and that is more a mediating body that is able to rebuild a relationship between the school, the student, and their family.”

But one of the things we are seeing is more and more behavioural issues among our children, and they are younger and younger and younger, from three-year-olds and four-year-olds who are being put out of early childhood education, to six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds that are so aggressive and so violent and so unable to moderate their own behaviour that they are being excluded at that age from schools. So not only is it that there is a disputes panel being put into place through this piece of legislation, but other work that this Government is doing to try and pilot like the Managed Moves in Napier and other ways to assist families and children to be able to learn the art of self-moderation that we know will help them for the rest of their lives when they are in situations of anxiety or stress, where they can learn to take a breath and take a moment and manage what is happening with them. But the vision of the dispute resolution panels as articulated through that inquiry is that parents and schools will be able to come together and, through a mediation body rather than an adversarial situation, find the best solution for the student.

I want to go to the physical restraint clause. This was not the clause I would have preferred. I actually put forward a different wording for Supplementary Order Paper 544 that was built around non-violent crisis intervention and my belief that every teacher, as they once were, should be trained in non-violent crisis intervention. That is not just for the children who are on the autism spectrum or those that have been referred to often during the debate on this document; it is also for those children that their behaviours come not from a disability, not from a neurodiversity, but from a circumstance inside their life. We have not empowered our teaching staff with the skills they need to manage before something becomes a crisis. I remember going to Canada, for example, and how the classrooms there had lowered their lighting and put up fairy lights, and there was a tepee in the corner that was available for any student that needed it, not a student stigmatised because they may have a neurodiversity and at times during the day they needed to separate themselves and make themselves safe.

So I would have preferred a wider definition that would have required the Ministry of Education to step in immediately and train not only the teachers in the classroom but initiate, inside initial teacher training, non-violent crisis intervention as a norm for every teacher. However, we’re in a coalition Government and this is better than what it was. What was put into place by the National Government was unworkable in the real world.

One of the things that became unworkable was—and I’m going to draw on another parallel. In the context of family violence, we recognised that children are victims of family violence if they are inside a home where there are things being smashed, things are being thrown, and things are being screamed. But apparently, under the previous legislation before this change, that wasn’t the situation. No other child was being traumatised if they were in a classroom where another child was throwing things, smashing things, and screaming things. Those two things cannot be true at the same time. So the previous legislation was unworkable for real life. It didn’t help students, it didn’t deliver for the disability community, and it certainly didn’t deliver for the teaching profession, who are attempting to educate every single one of their students at the level and with the resources that allow them to be their best. So it is with great joy that we’re able to finally change—perhaps not as much as I would have liked to—and make a practical change to what has been an unworkable situation inside our schools around physical restraint. I hope that the teaching profession will get the support that they need from the Ministry of Education. I know the Minister himself is adamant that they will. So that’s something that we will need to keep our eye on.

Finally, however, the last thing I would want to say is around the workforce development councils. The workforce development councils are based on the Ōtorohanga model. It’s part of the conversation that New Zealand First brought to the table. It’s about knowing what local communities need: where are the opportunities for employment? Are there the appropriate education opportunities for the young people or those in their 30s, 40s, and 50s to be able to gain that education, gain that training, and be able to find employment in their area, regardless of where they are in New Zealand? We commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to rise to take a call tonight on the Education and Training Bill.

It’s always a pleasure to follow Tracey Martin. It always allows me to insert a bit of vim and vigour into my speech, because she always says things that make us on this side of the House raise our eyebrows.

The first thing that I would say is that, obviously, she referred to the Tomorrow’s Schools Review Independent Taskforce report that was put out. We all know this Government spent millions and millions of dollars with this review, travelling around the country, spending a great deal of money on fancy lunches and croissants and coming up with a range of new ideas that were going to have a—[Interruption] Yeah, they did. They had croissants.

💬 Hon Member: What’s wrong with croissants?

Nothing wrong with croissants, but they are relatively expensive in the grand scheme of things when we’re spending taxpayers’ money. But, that’s right, we always remember that the other side of the House forget that it’s not their money; it’s taxpayers’ money.

Anyway, the point is that they went around the country and they had what the Hon Tracey Martin said was a conversation that was needed to be had. I don’t know what the conversation that was had was, because, as Nicola Willis pointed out in her speech earlier on tonight, we ended up with recommendations that were going back to what we had in the past of education hubs that were this massive centralisation, which no one was happy with.

I have to acknowledge Nikki Kaye, as Nicola Willis did earlier on this evening, because she went around the country and she spoke to principals, communities, families, teachers, parents, and even children in the 30 meetings that she did, and the pushback on what came out of that review was extraordinary. As Nicola Willis said, a great deal of work was done between her and the Minister of Education to water down some of those changes that were so opposed by the sector and families and parents.

The Minister went on to talk about the wonderful job that this Government has done in getting rid of those unnecessary charter schools, and he said that they’re all doing fine now that they’re special character schools and that that was always good enough. I actually have to say that those charter schools have done more for increasing our educational achievement in this country than this bill will ever do. Nicola Willis pointed out that there isn’t almost a single thing in this bill that will lead to an increase in educational achievement and outcome, and I have to say that the charter schools and the model that was in place before had some incredible results, and getting rid of those is a massive step backwards. But I won’t go on too much about that, because it’s not in the bill, and I know that the Speaker will want me to get back to the bill.

What I want to talk about—and we’ve alluded to it earlier—is this idea of the taking away of the responsibility around zoning from school boards. As Nicola Willis pointed out, there’s sort of this shadow of what was left of the Tomorrow’s Schools review. Most of those things were stripped out, but we were left with this problem, and we are still very opposed to this.

There isn’t a single school in my electorate that I have spoken to that’s in favour of this. It’s really interesting when you’re working with schools as a local MP to see the pitfalls of the Ministry of Education when they get involved in things like zoning, and even new classrooms. They’ve failed miserably so many times in being able to account for growth and in understanding where growth in communities is, and that’s just when they’re looking at classrooms. That’s why we have such a lag of availability of classrooms, because they always get it wrong. It’s really interesting that in this case, the Minister, when he was in the chair earlier, said that “Well, the ministry will still be consulting with school boards before and during the consultation process.”, but we all know well that the Ministry of Education will pay lip service, at best, to the wants and needs of the community, because it’s not as simple as drawing lines on a map.

Actually, if they’re going to consult with the boards and they’re going to consult with the schools, why not just leave that process as it is with the boards and the schools, because they know their communities best? There has to be a balance in between numbers of students and where they can go, and communities where people live, work, play, and shop, and where they feel connected to. There has to be a balance, and as Nicola Willis pointed out earlier, this will bring up the possibility of an excuse by the ministry to not put in place builds of new classrooms, because they will simply jimmy round the zoning to make up for not building new classrooms. In fact, we already see it, but that will lead even more to not taking into account communities’ wants and needs in terms of their communities and where they feel connected to, and that balance will certainly be swung more in favour of numbers rather than the needs of communities.

I don’t want to go on too much more. The last thing I would say is that we’re also very concerned that this bill removes that specific accountability placed on school boards to raise educational achievement by muddying it with three other objectives and giving them all equal weighting. On this side of the House, we don’t argue that those three metrics aren’t important, but not having educational achievement as the number one top priority of that list, in our opinion, is not a good thing.

In the dying few seconds that I wanted to take up, I just wanted to say that on this side of the House, we strongly back communities, boards of trustees, families, and local areas. They know what’s best for their local schools, and it’s not the Ministry of Education coming in and making decisions for those local communities. We will always back those local boards, teachers, parents, and communities above the Ministry of Education, and we will not be supporting this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise to speak to this bill. It’s a daunting challenge and a humbling one to hold the education portfolio, and, as everyone who’s spoken tonight has acknowledged, this bill touches on some incredibly important aspects of our education system and, thereby, our society. Education is a basic human right. It, in a way, underpins many, many others of our rights—our right to democracy and to engage with it, our right to information, and our ability to thrive and participate in society. So the fact that we are tonight modernising our laws around education, from early childhood education and strengthening that up and down our nation, right to the rights of students with different needs to both attend their local school and to be treated well while they do that, and right through to vocational training, to tertiary education—it is a joy to support the passing of this bill.

But I do want to just focus on a few aspects of it, because it is mammoth and none of us have actually been able to get through every single thing that we like about it. But to me, this is a good bill because it is a human rights - based framework that it adopts, in a lot of ways, and one of those aspects of the bill is around the right to participate and to attend school. I think we were all a little bit shocked when we found that, in fact, some of our most marginalised students, those with needs that should be catered to in our schools, were not in fact being cared for in the ways that they needed but being discouraged from attendance. So this bill makes it clear in law, finally, that once a student is enrolled in a school in New Zealand, they have a right to attend for all the hours that that school is open, they are able to participate, and, if they are going to attend a lower number of hours during the week or during the school day, that programme is established for them with their own input and with the input of their whānau.

So that is a basic child rights principle, and New Zealand is a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child—that’s one of the most universal and enforceable aspects of human rights law—and we’re proud to try as a Government to uphold those rights for our children and young people. So their input in that programme and their right to attend school is really important.

The next aspect of this, which is a due process right that has been really, really long overdue for students and for parents, is the right to dispute resolution that is fair, that’s inclusive, and that will result in a mediated outcome for students and their family where they have been, for example, excluded—where their rights or their wellbeing is touched upon by a decision that’s been taken by the school and where that decision is not able to meet the child’s needs in the view of that whānau. So that has been missing, even when something as important as exclusion has applied to a child. And we know that that actually will impact on a person’s life for a long time. It will change a child’s life. It will mean that they have outcomes that we know, at the other end of our due process and rights scheme, as a Government, in the justice system, will result in people coming through the youth justice system. We know that some 90 percent of young people that come into conflict with the criminal justice system experienced what’s been diagnosed as serious learning disabilities and have often been excluded from school. So that’s how we’re impacting their lives, but there was no dispute resolution mechanism at the end where education is concerned, and this bill provides for that.

I do want to thank Youth Law, the Human Rights Commission, and the Children’s Commission, who I know—in my previous life working on children’s rights—fought really, really hard for this change. As the Hon Tracey Martin noted, this also came about as a result of a Green-initiated inquiry by our MP Catherine Delahunty, who I’m sure has kept a very close eye on this bill as well.

The next rights-based change that this bill makes that we welcome is the prohibition against religious instruction in schools. We would have liked the bill to have gone further and to address the issue of religious practice, which is something else which comes through in a more insidious way that parents often don’t know about, so that could mean prayers before assemblies, which isn’t a particular class that the child may be excluded from but just part of school life. I know from sitting on the committee that parents and other rights-based organisations came and raised concern about it. We know that the Human Rights Commission has taken this to court. But it is a positive step that in law we now recognise that separation of religion from State schools, and the education system is something that’s important and to be protected, and we’re upholding that.

But the last aspect of this bill that I welcome with great joy and has been introduced just tonight is the part that removes the previous wording of the bill that we know caused grave distress to parents, families, and communities of children with cognitive diversity and special needs that were not being addressed by schools and teachers were not supported in addressing. That is the use of the term “use of force” being allowed in our education system. The term was introduced to replace the previous wording that we’ve now reinstated, which was the “use of restraint”. We’ve now reinstated that, but the framework that’s been put around this, instead of use of force, is something that’s truly progressive. So we did that through really close communication with parents and with teachers. We know that nobody wanted the use of force and the escalation of what children were already experiencing as being traumatising.

So the terminology has reverted back, but we’ve also inserted a requirement that use of restraint is restrictive, that it is only used where there is imminent risk of harm, and that, before that, we will expect teachers and others dealing with children to use de-escalation methods that fall far from physical restraint or physical intervention, that are far less traumatising and will require us as a Government—and this will be our commitment—to provide for training and support of teachers and everyone that deals with children in schools to know what de-escalation looks like, to know the behaviours that may escalate to a risk, and to intervene in a non-violent, non-physical way well before that happens and support children to behave appropriately in the classroom.

So we have inserted a requirement as well, and this is truly progressive and this has never existed before in our law, that guidelines be developed in consultation with not just parents but parents of the affected children. So they’re a subgroup of parents, and they hadn’t been effectively consulted with before. That had been causing them huge stress, and now they are specifically noted as a community that will need to be consulted with, together with teachers, with principals, and with experts and policy makers. So everyone will come to the table for the first time and develop guidelines around what behavioural de-escalation looks like, and that is a commitment by our Government to provide for truly inclusive education, for compassion in our schools, and for equality.

And so I do support this bill. I am so pleased and so grateful to everyone who came together to tell us what was needed, from the ground up, and to share their expertise and their time, and that has resulted in a bill that we can all be proud of. Thank you.

It’s a pleasure to rise and take a contribution at the third and final reading of this Education and Training Bill. I just want to start out by saying that one thing I always try to apply to any legislation that I’ve been debating in this House is the application of a simple question, which is: does a law address a defined problem? And for us to answer that question, you’ve got to dive deeper and ask: what is the problem, and then is the legislation that we’re considering the appropriate solution to that problem? Now, I applied that same methodology to the Tomorrow’s Schools review, and I was actually startled by the lack of a definition of a problem, and the solutions that were provided weren’t solutions to any problem at all. And I must say that I wasn’t the only one. Most principals, most board of trustee members, most parents I spoke to and consulted with over the Tomorrow’s Schools task force review report had the same conclusion: what is the problem this report is trying to solve?

I just want to reflect on some of the feedback that I’ve had from my area of Northcote from the sector, because those are the problems that I’m getting about our education system. The first is the bureaucracy of the ministry: the sense that in any problem that schools or teachers are having, they’re coming up against a brick wall between themselves and the ministry in getting progress. The second is around the lack of adequate resources, whether it’s teachers or school classrooms. The third is around support for our most vulnerable: not only people with complex needs but also students with high needs, as well. The fourth is around preparing our kids for success in the modern world, and the fifth is really around the ability of schools to handle the political football. The biggest feedback I actually got on the Tomorrow’s Schools review was schools hated being treated like political footballs. Whether it’s a National Government pulling them in one way or a Labour Government pulling them in another way, they hated the extremes of the political spectrum, and they wanted us to actually take politics and ideology out of our schools to address some problems.

Now, what I see from the bill that we’ve been talking about is that it doesn’t address any issues that I’ve just outlined for you today. It is a bill that, quite frankly, is searching for a problem, and it only reinforces the view from our education sector and from our parents out there that this law is all about ideology. It’s all about ideology and not about good policy: the ideology of centralisation, the belief that Government knows best for you and your child rather than the school; the ideology of removing power from local communities and the sense that, actually, local communities don’t know what’s best for their kids; a sense of removing accountability. My colleague Erica Stanford mentioned the lack of accountability now under this new bill for school boards and the accountability they have for students’ academic achievement. So this bill really doesn’t provide much in the way of improving student outcomes and addressing some of the deep-seated challenges that are facing the sector.

I was actually quite optimistic. I was thinking the Tomorrow’s Schools review would address some of these challenges. But then I saw the recommendations—centralised hubs, removing power from boards of trustees, phasing out intermediate schools, and even things like fixing the tenure of principals in our schools—and I thought, what are the problems that they’re actually trying to solve? All we have today is a watered-down version of that Tomorrow’s Schools review in the form of the Education and Training Bill. And again, as I said, it’s the same ideology that is prevalent in this Government of centralisation, of stripping power away from local communities and schools and saying, “Governments know better for you and your child than you and the communities.” So we absolutely oppose the ideology that is prevalent in and seeping through each and every part of this legislation.

I want to also talk about the lack of due process that’s gone into this bill. Only three months at the select committee, I believe, but also—

💬 Simeon Brown: Six months, but three months in lockdown.

Sorry?

💬 Simeon Brown: You’re right.

Yeah. It’s the three-month select committee process, but also it’s the fact that we have had dumped on us at the last moment a Supplementary Order Paper of hundreds of pages that we on this side of the House haven’t had time to read and digest. And, again, all that does for the sector, for the boards of trustees, for the parents, for the teachers is reinforce this notion that it is ideologically driven, and we oppose those changes. So I’m proud to stand and oppose this legislation, as somebody who, I must say, the education sector absolutely failed. I stand here proud as a school dropout and also a Harvard graduate, and it’s no thanks to our school system that I got there. I think some of the deep-seated challenges are absolutely missing from this legislation, and I’m proud to oppose this bill in the House today.

This is a split call; I call Priyanca Radhakrishnan.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is actually with great pride that I stand to take a call on this bill, because it’s a bill that will modernise and strengthen the education system. It makes some significant changes across the system that will support the progress, the achievement, and the wellbeing of every New Zealander. So I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. At the outset, could I acknowledge the Minister of Education for the way in which he conducted his part of the committee stage debate which immediately preceded this. I think it is one of the great innovations that we’ve seen of recent times. We didn’t necessarily agree with all of his answers, but he engaged regularly, and I think that, as I say, deserves to be acknowledged. And he did make some compelling points.

Now, in this contribution, I’d like to focus on the skills and employment provisions of this Education and Training Bill. Of course, we had a significant debate over the last year or so over the Government’s Reform of Vocational Education, which became known as RoVE. It was proposed about a year ago. National strongly opposed it, even though there are aspects of it that we could see some merit in, and all of those aspects are now enshrined in this bill that is receiving its third reading tonight.

It is quite a radical centralisation of tertiary education, skills, and training, and that’s the aspect that my colleague Dr Shane Reti raised such concerns about when he held this role. In fact, he was the spokesperson, until very recently, for tertiary education, skills, and training. In our reshuffle last week, my fine colleague Mr Brown has taken over the tertiary education aspect, and I’ve been given skills and education. While you’re a very fine and capable man, Mr Brown, I’m a little concerned to see that it takes two of us to replace Dr Reti. Although I have to acknowledge that, like rust, he never sleeps, and he has done very fine work in producing policy that we are going to be proud to run on in the upcoming election.

One of the major concerns we had, and it does need to be acknowledged again, was the huge cost of this megamerger. It was in the region of $400 million. That’s a huge amount of money that has come out of other aspects of education. Just to give you one example, in last year’s Budget, industry collaboration projects, scholarships, awards, and university programmes such as the university-led innovation programme were cancelled, and at the time we were wondering why. It became clear very soon after that it was, in part, to fund RoVE. They were helped by the fact that their fees-free policy was a spectacular failure. They’d been estimating about 80,000 people would take it up, but because only 50,000 did, they had quite a few dollars left over from that to pump into it. But that was just one aspect that really did concern us.

In addition to the extraordinary cost of RoVE—and, as I say, this is all enshrined in the current bill—the second major area of our concern, which I do just want to put on record again tonight, was that so many jobs were being lost because of the megamerger that took place. We have effectively now got all 16 polytechnics coming together under one entity called the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology. It’s a pretty radical restructure. Some of our regional polytechs were very badly hurt. I’m slightly conflicted, in that I have to acknowledge, as the MP for Hamilton West, Wintec is in my electorate. So this new administrative centre is in my electorate. It had to go somewhere, and I’m very glad, considering it had to go somewhere, that it came to Hamilton. I’m very glad that that does result in some extra jobs being created in my electorate. But nevertheless, we still were opposed in principle to this megamerger.

Now, some of them, WelTec and Whitireia, were at least neighbouring polytechnics, so maybe you could say that it was going to be possible for there to be some efficiencies there. But they’ve had to come together with one chief executive and it does, of course, therefore mean that there were major job losses, and Unitec and Manukau Institute of Technology were also merging with the same consequences. But then you go to the extraordinary, bizarre merger between Tai Poutini on the West Coast of the South Island, which was merging with NorthTec in Whangārei and the Western Institute of Technology in Taranaki. Now, how on earth you could have the West Coast, Northland, and Taranaki all being able to operate effectively and in a way that didn’t cause major disruptions in those regions is almost impossible to contemplate. Yet, in February of this year, the Government pushed on with RoVE. Tonight, here they are enacting it into legislation. I think that there are very significant concerns in this area and I am sorry to see it going ahead as it inevitably will do.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand in support of this bill. This bill is going to provide the framework for modernising and strengthening the education system and will make a huge difference to learners at all levels. I commend this bill to the House.

The National Party does not support this bill.

Well, I do support this bill, and I commend it to the House.