Annual Review Debate — Education

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just changing the mode a little bit here. As chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, I’m delighted to kick off the annual review debate on the education portfolio. I’m sure there will be many interesting contributions, and I’m looking forward to hearing from the Minister of Education. But first, I’m going to give a brief overview and an outline of the process that our select committee went through for this particular review. The education sector annual review was comprised of seven in-depth annual reviews for different Government entities. They were the Ministry of Education, the Education Review Office, the Tertiary Education Commission, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, Education Payroll Ltd, Network for Learning Ltd, and Education New Zealand. We conducted a briefing with the Office of the Auditor-General; a hearing with the Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Hipkins; with the chief executive of the education sector entity; and we also asked many written questions of them all. There were some key themes that came out of that deliberation, and that was shown in our annual review report.

One of the main outcomes of our review was the varied level of preparedness for lockdown conditions amongst schools and kura. The Education Review Office report provided a useful outline of the experiences of different schools in responding to the lockdown and how they continue to provide learning resources to their students. The Education Review Office led the work to set up the Home Learning TV / Papa Kāinga TV to support learning at home for those with poor access to online learning. It was actually quite interesting: we heard that, apparently, at the launch they had more viewers than a Super Rugby game, so I would say that’s probably quite a big success.

We heard from the sector about the lessons learnt from lockdown—what worked well and how certain schools responded—and the report also spoke to the benefit we could see if these practices would have been more widely adopted. The Minister noted his concern regarding school attendance rates during last year’s lockdown. A priority for the Government was to set up a means to measure the speed at which attendance rates improved post-lockdown. The Minister took us through how the process is managed, and we had a discussion about what could be done to actually improve the attendance rate at our schools and kura.

In our report, we also asked about the ministry’s measuring of students’ progress, and the Minister spoke to the curriculum-wide approach that the ministry is taking, as opposed to an approach that very narrowly focuses on the content of students’ tests. The Minister also spoke to how teaching professionals will take part in the curriculum changes that occur with a programme that enables teaching professionals to take temporary leave to work on the design of the curriculum changes. The Minister also talked to us about how teachers and school leaders will be supported through the transition and changes to the wider education system to reduce strain on teachers and the capacity of our schools and kura.

The committee also asked the Minister about what is being done to address disparities for Māori and Pacific learners. Work on cultural competency in the education system, and on Māori and Pacific attendance rates as well, is under way, and the Minister explained to us that the Fruit in Schools programme has had a noted improvement in learning outcomes for the students, and it has also gotten students more involved in their learning.

I would like to finish by saying a big thankyou to those working in the education sector for responding to the unprecedented challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic brought and all the challenges that the sector had to work through under very challenging circumstances—running everything, continuing, and responding to the challenges as well. This has been a very robust review, and I’m satisfied that we’ve covered many of the overarching themes that our report brought up.

Talking to the new-style debate and a new-style format as well, I think it’s a real tribute to this new format that we can have a more robust debate on the holistic future of education and the education sector in New Zealand, and, at the same time, that will provide for a stronger level of scrutiny in Parliament. So thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We all, of course, across this Parliament have a deep concern about our educational outcomes in New Zealand. We acknowledge that the most powerful route out of poverty is through education. We also have a Government that talks a lot about the knowledge economy, our bright future in technology and high-paying jobs, the green economy. And so, you know, the question that’s on a lot of people’s minds—to the Minister—is: how does he think New Zealand is going to prosper in this knowledge economy, in this technology-rich economy of the 21st century, this globally competitive, technology-based economy? How are we going to prosper in that when our maths performance, in particular, is falling off the pace—and it’s one that’s been the case for a while? You know, we started off around fourth in the Programme for International Student Assessment rankings for maths; now we’re 22nd, and it is falling. I acknowledge the work that is proposed and I’m sure the Minister will mention the changes to the NCEA requirements around literacy and numeracy. But I do make the point that the real challenge is also at the primary and intermediate school, so no matter what you do when someone is 15 or 16 is always going to be a struggle.

The related question I have for the Minister is: how do we know if young girls and boys are progressing at school and doing well at primary school and intermediate school in the absence of consistent assessment? Now, the Government decided to throw out national standards. They decided not to try and improve them or perfect them or work with them—discarded them—and so how does the Minister reassure himself and the rest of the country that children are progressing effectively year in, year out and so that will lead to better maths outcomes in the years ahead?

Well, thank you very much, Madam Chair. I’d just like to ask the Minister in the chair about school attendance. The Education and Workforce Committee reports on page 6 of its annual review that the Minister told the committee that he would be working with the ministry to improve attendance rates. I just wonder if the Minister could elaborate a bit—or perhaps he did at the committee; our member is away today—for the benefit of people here on two questions: why he thinks there is a decline in attendance.

He said in the House—or he has, at least, alluded in the House to the fact that people go on holidays. I don’t know if there has been an increase in holidays or if there could be some other explanation for increasing levels of attendance. If he can diagnose the reasons why students aren’t attending, then I think it would be easier to have confidence that the work he is doing with the ministry might reduce it.

Well, we’ve given another round of questions. So there has been a lot of discussion today in the House around the Māori Health Authority, and we’ve heard from the Prime Minister that a separate agency is required by the Treaty—or words to that effect. So the broad question I have for the Minister is: what does he believe the Treaty requires in terms of decision making in education? Is there a plan to have a separate Māori education authority or some such establishment?

So it was a very interesting discussion that was launched today, and I hope that, as a country, we will talk about this properly. We heard from the Prime Minister in the House today around the concept of partnership and decision making. Her statement was that consultation with Māori is not good enough and that it has failed in the health area and that the basic principle of partnership is that you have an equal say—those are the words of the Prime Minister in the House today.

I personally struggle with that concept in the sense that through the normal democratic process, under the one person, one vote principle, all New Zealanders, including Māori, elect a Government and on the basis of their manifesto to govern, until they are kicked out, and now we have another suggestion which is to say that the two Treaty partners, that elected Government gets 50 percent of the say, in one way of interpreting, and Māori, whoever speaks for Māori—whether they are elected or appointed or how that is arranged—have an equal say in decision making, which is, if I’m not over interpreting that, a colossal change in our constitutional arrangements.

Most New Zealanders would assume that we are all treated equally under the law and it is one of the things which makes this democracy the great place that it is. And now we’re told that the Treaty requires decision making on an equal basis, 50:50. So there are real implications and questions around democracy in the process, and it is hard to argue that it doesn’t create different types of citizens—well, that is a risk of how that is interpreted.

So the question I have is: in the education framework, what does the Minister see as what the Treaty requires in how decision making is made? We’ve seen a couple of examples recently in the development of curriculum. So in the history curriculum, I noticed the advisory board was 50:50—Māori and everybody else. Is that a deliberate decision and is that a basis of how he intends to make decisions? And, likewise, in the development of the commerce area, I was interested—so I’m interested in decision making around curriculum, but also the broader structures of how the ministry and decision making is organised and what he believes the Treaty requires in terms of how those decisions are made.

If I just work backwards through the questions that the members have raised so far to date, the member Paul Goldsmith asked some questions around Te Tiriti—what it means in an educational context. One of the things it does mean in an educational context is recognising the way we’ve done things in the past has been wrong: that Māori learners have not just been underserved by our education system; they have been actively discriminated against. It was not that long ago in New Zealand’s history when Māori students were subject to corporal punishment in schools for speaking te reo Māori, and that is the legacy that we all inherit and that we should all be ashamed of and we all have a responsibility to do something about. I have absolutely no qualms in standing up here and acknowledging those things that have happened and saying that they were wrong, saying that they have left a shameful legacy for New Zealand that has resulted in generations of Māori not having access to the same educational opportunities as other students and we should do something about that.

In terms of what the Treaty means in an educational context, I’d encourage the member to read the document that his Government signed New Zealand up to, because it talks about the concepts of partnership. It talks about recognising the right for indigenous people to be involved in making the decisions that affect them. That’s the document that his Government signed New Zealand up to that our Government is now working through a process of figuring out how to give effect to. Perhaps, if he doesn’t know the answers to those, he should think about why his Government signed up to a document that it clearly didn’t seem to understand or value in any way. On this side of the House, we believe that the Treaty is an important document when it comes to education; that partnership with Māori is important when it comes to education; that the days when we had to ask Māori students to pretend to be something else, some other culture, in order to succeed in our education system should well and truly be left behind; and that we do need an education system that responds to their needs.

David Seymour asked some questions about school attendance. One of the things that has been challenging around school attendance is that the measure we rely on predominantly is a very blunt one, and that is the number of students who are attending school in any given term for 90 percent of the half-days. So the way a school term is structured is the number of half-days that a—

💬 David Seymour: There’s other percentage breakdowns.

So the measure is a very blunt measure: the number of half-days—90 percent—that a student is attending school. I’ve been working through trying to understand the trends, because I think it is important that we do understand the trends, and I will certainly prepare a greater breakdown and make sure that that is released.

Looking at what the justification for those is—the ministry will classify in their statistics the different types of absence. There’s a justified and an unjustified absence, and there are justified absences. So we saw an increase in term four last year, for example, in the number of students who were staying home because they were sick; that was probably a good thing. The message got out there: if you’re sick, stay home. That’s what we were telling people to do, and we saw an increase in the number of people doing that. We know that about 1 percent of our students are away during term time because of family holidays; they are classified as an unjustified absence in the classification framework, but some families will have a justification for what they are doing and they would argue that, actually, the kids are getting quite an education out of whatever the experiences are that they are involved in. So I think we need to unpack that data a bit more before we can reach any firm conclusions about that. We have put extra funding into schools through the Urgent Response Fund in order to deal with attendance issues, to make sure they’re re-engaging those kids where truancy is a persistent problem, because those are the students that I’m most concerned about. So there is more work happening in that space.

Just quickly, on maths illiteracy and numeracy—as Paul Goldsmith has mentioned, some of the stats that New Zealand faces at the moment are not good. Typically, the studies that he will be referring to are the likes that Programme for International Student Assessment tend to be surveying and sampling secondary school students. I point out to him that all of those secondary students being sampled are the national standards generation. They went through the vast majority of their schooling at a time when national standards were there. Without national standards, what are our alternatives? More robust statistical sampling is a way of getting good information. We do have those very robust studies available that actually provided genuine national snapshots. National standards didn’t; they weren’t national and they weren’t standard. Different schools were interpreting them differently and the results were not comparable. So the sampling studies that we have are actually more reliable. We have got a big focus on professional development on strategies for how we can improve our literacy and numeracy teaching. Those sorts of things are going to do far more to turn those statistics around than something like national standards, which actually did the opposite.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d just like to respond to a few of the things the Minister said. First of all, is his rather intemperate response to Paul Goldsmith’s comments. The question that Paul Goldsmith asked seemed to be, you know, should representation and representative bodies that make decisions in New Zealand—this Parliament, councils, school decision-making bodies—be proportional to one person, one vote, or should there be some other proportionality as per the concept of a partnership under the Treaty? I think that’s a legitimate debate that a lot of people would like to have. The way that the Minister tried to somehow make an equivalency with students being hit for speaking Māori many, many, many decades ago, I don’t think really is helpful to the debate, to be quite honest. For context, students were getting corporal punishment for just about everything in that era, and, actually, in that period it was a different time. Many Māori parents actually wanted their kids to learn English instead of Māori. I don’t think it helps to have these kinds of intemperate debates. We need honest conversations that unite New Zealanders behind better ideas, but so much for that.

I am really interested to hear the Minister elaborate further on what he has planned to work on attendance, because his answer was quite helpful. He said “Look, we really have quite a coarse range of analysis, either the student was there or they weren’t. And if they weren’t there, it was either a justified or unjustified absence.” And, as he rightly noted, people might have quite a range of ideas about what are justified absences. So if he could elaborate further on whether he might have a new suite of descriptions for why students are away I think this would be really helpful to know. As someone who grew up in Northland I’m very worried about the attendance rates there. I’m afraid I don’t think they’re as benign as he’d like to hope.

Second of all, he seemed to say that he could only get statistics for how many students attend 90 percent of the time. Well, I’m fairly certain in my various travels, I’ve seen more fine-grained breakdowns than that. And, actually, if the Ministry of Education has the raw data and the committee report it, they now have that digitally reported for 85 percent of schools, then you would think that, actually, the Minister would be able to give many more fine-grained breakdowns. So, I guess, the question is: when will we see a wider range of descriptors for absences, and when will he present more fine-grained breakdowns, you know, 90 percent, how many students attend 80 percent of the time, and how many students attend 70 percent? And you get the picture. So those would be helpful questions.

To return to teaching New Zealand history in schools, I think there is a little bit of disquiet around the three big ideas that the ministry has developed and is currently consulting with. They’re in the committee’s report to the annual review. They say the three big ideas are: “Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand; Colonisation and its consequences have been central to our history for the past 200 years and continues to influence all aspects of Aotearoa New Zealand society; and, Aotearoa New Zealand’s history has been shaped by the exercise and effects of power.” Well, that’s an interesting take on history. It seems exceedingly backwards and exceedingly zero-sum, I would describe it. Whereas, for example, technology, if it wasn’t for technological development none of us could have got here, none of us would have anything to export, we wouldn’t be able to get it to market, and wouldn’t be able to communicate with people. Not only is our past inextricably linked with technological development so is the future of our kids.

So this is a history curriculum which has nothing to say about the role that technology, which made our country possible and will continue to make it possible, has played in our history. No doubt there are quite a number of other concepts that might be more useful than the exercise of power and colonisation; interesting concept, but hardly the whole story. And as for the idea that Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand, well, actually, if you read Michael King or James Belich, they start long before any people arrived at New Zealand. I think it’s said that a land without people was seeking a people without land. So I’d just like the Minister to explain what he thinks the thinking is behind these three big ideas. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just in relation to the Minister’s answer to my first question, I’ll ask my question again because he didn’t answer it. He just talked a little bit about history and then about the National Party’s history. I want to know what does he believe the Treaty requires in terms of decision making in the educational context, because we’ve heard today what the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health believe it means in decision making in the health context, where there are poor Māori outcomes. There are also poor Māori outcomes in education, and I want a clear answer from him, not an attack on the National Party or on history, just a clear understanding of what his policy is today.

Secondly, on the question of attendance, which we’ve been talking about quite some time, I went to a school a couple of weeks ago, Whitiora School in Hamilton, a school with a roll of over 200-250 students, where the regular attendance was 15 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. Fifteen, not 50—1-5; 15 percent. Only 15 percent of students were meeting the threshold of regular attendance, and it turns out there are nearly 20 schools across the country—17 schools—where fewer than 20 percent of students attend regularly.

In fact, there are even four schools where fewer than 10 percent of students attend regularly. If you look at deciles 1 and 2 schools, fewer than 50 percent—right across the whole deciles 1 and 2—attend regularly. So our attendance rates are a national scandal. My criticism of this Government, because it’s not a new problem, but it has been getting worse—my criticism of the Minister, and I want to hear his response, is that, notwithstanding that, there’s about 18 reviews under way in education and there’s a whole lot of things going on in education, but I don’t see a clear focus on turning that around. The Minister has said in the Chamber many times that the primary responsibility rests with parents—and I agree with him—but is that signal being sent very clearly to parents that their fundamental responsibility is to make sure that their kids are at school, with lunches and properly fed?

Then, secondly, for the schools, what consequences, if any, are there for schools if year in, year out, month in, month out, only 50 percent, or 15 percent, are turning up regularly, and what consequences are there, if any?

Thirdly, when it comes to the attendance services, or the old truancy regime, what’s happening there? We have a very small amount allocated, about $10 million a year, and it is manifestly inadequate to the task, and, yet, this Government decides that, rather than putting more resource into that area and acknowledging there has been a little bit that’s gone in during the COVID crisis, but still relatively little, instead, money is poured into things such as ensuring that my children and children from wealthy families don’t have to pay their NCEA fees, which hardly strikes me as a critical issue. Or they get their first year at university free—a whole lot of universal spending, very poorly targeted, and, yet, the kids aren’t at school. They’re not making any progress because they’re not in school.

The final question I have is: what is so terrible about the children of former students of a school going to the same school as their parents even if they’re out of zone? The proposal is that this is such a terrible thing that we have to finish off. What’s wrong with there being a bit of tradition and families enjoying those traditions?

Then, just the final one to throw at the Minister, we’re throwing out accounting, economics, and business studies at NCEA level 1 in favour of commerce. How are we going to make progress in dealing with financial literacy and all of these other things when we’re throwing them out and replacing them with a subject? The first of the three big ideas for commerce is not anything about double accounting or anything like that. The first big idea says that this is what we’re expecting our commerce students to learn—that society seeks hauora through kaitiakitanga, tauhokohoko, enterprise, and innovation. I’d be interested to know if the Minister can tell us what tauhokohoko is, and just explain what that means and what the context is for the commerce degree. Thank you.

I’ll rely on the member’s Ngāti Porou heritage to share with us his views on what all of those things mean.

Working backwards through those issues, just briefly: on NCEA level 1, yes, the Government is focused on making sure that level 1 is a foundation-level qualification, as the old School Certificate qualification used to be. What we’ve seen since NCEA was introduced is there has been a greater drive to specialisation earlier on, and, actually, the overwhelming feedback that we’ve had through the NCEA review is people would prefer to see level 1 returned back to broader subject bases, rather than more specialist subjects, with that greater focus. Now, it’s still a very active topic of conversation and consultation is still going on about some of those issues. People will still have their opportunity to have their say on that.

In terms of the zoning, the member wants to know why somebody whose parent went to a school should be given preference over someone whose sibling might be going to a school, because that’s what the current system allows for, and the view of this Government is that, actually, that shouldn’t be a criteria in allowing someone who’s out of zone—potentially, living across on the other side of town—to be given preference over other students to attend the school. If they want to enter the ballot for an out-of-zone place, they can do so, but they should not be bumped up the priority list on the basis that their parents might have attended there 20 or 30 years ago.

In terms of the attendance services, yes, the attendance services are a small part of the equation when it comes to dealing with the attendance challenge that we have, and there’s no question we do have an attendance challenge. The effectiveness of those attendance services has been on the decline, coincidentally, since the last National Government decided to restructure them. So we are looking at how we can improve the quality of the work that the attendance services are doing, and the member can watch this space. We’ll have a bit more to say about that shortly.

In terms of New Zealand history, I would say to David Seymour that there is consultation going on about that at the moment. We do want New Zealanders to engage on what they think the important parts of our history that should be taught are, and, actually, we want that to be a very open and inclusive conversation. The one thing I will say to him, though, is we don’t propose to stop teaching everything else.

Many of the issues that have been raised are: why aren’t we teaching more about economics, why aren’t we teaching more about technology? We’ll still teach those things. We might not necessarily teach them as part of the history curriculum, but there will still be a strong focus on them, and, actually, the last Government, that he was a part of, did some really good and exciting work, I think, around the digital technology curriculum, led by Nikki Kaye. I know the member himself supported that. It was good work, and we need to continue the progress that’s being made in that area.

Finally, he mentioned representation in governance, and whether everybody should get an equal share of representation in governance, which is ironic from the member who has been the champion of a model that takes parent and democratic representation away from school governance, which is the charter school model, because, in fact, there isn’t democratic representation in that model.

In terms of the question from Paul Goldsmith of what does decision making look like in a Treaty context, he asked it as a fairly high-level question, so I’ll give him a fairly high-level answer. It means involving Māori far more in the decision-making process where decisions affect them.

I move, That the committee report progress on this bill.

Motion agreed to.

House resumed.

The committee has considered the Appropriation (2019/20 Confirmation and Validation) Bill and reports progress.

The question is that the report be adopted. [Interruption] Order! There will be silence when taking a vote. I’ll do it again. The question is that the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.