Education and Training Amendment Bill

I move, That the Education and Training Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.

The Education and Training Act came into force on 1 August last year. It was quite possibly the largest rewrite of our education legislation that we’ve ever undertaken. Even the very, very large rewrite of education rules in 1989 still left some legislation in the old 1964 Act untouched. It was about time, I think, that we brought our education and training framework all together as one. So this Act replaced what was the Industry Training Act, what was the Education Act 1989, what was the Education Act 1964. It was an incredibly big undertaking. In addition to streamlining the legislation, in a policy-neutral sense, it almost made quite a number of policy changes as well.

This particular bill primarily deals with issues that weren’t policy changes but there were the inevitable tidying-up things that emerge when you do such a big piece of legislative change. I do intend to bring forward another amendment bill later on in the year that deals with other policy issues, where either we want to make further policy change or where we want to do other things. However, I’ve tried to keep this bill relatively technical, so it tidies up things that were unintentionally changed, in the way the various pieces of legislation were drawn together, and it also tidies up some areas of ambiguity.

I will just talk through one of the biggest things that this bill does. With the amalgamation of the education legislation, one of the things that became apparent to me was that there was a lot of very prescriptive legislation around the way schools and early childhood services and tertiary providers have to operate that was more appropriately transferred to regulation. To give an example, the Act itself specified how school board meetings needed to take place. If you wanted to do a teleconference or a Zoom meeting, for example, you couldn’t do it because the primary legislation was that specific around how school board meetings had to be conducted; with similarly prescriptive requirements around a school board election, as to when things had to be posted. Of course, we don’t tend to use postal quite so much these days, and it didn’t allow for the potential of online voting, which is regularly used in a whole lot of other forums. It didn’t allow for a variety of other things.

So we tried to move parts of the legislation that needed to be amended more frequently, and to be a bit more flexible, into schedules that could then ultimately be incorporated in regulation. As we’ve gone through that process of starting to develop and prepare those new regulations—and the Education and Training Act has those schedules eventually being repealed automatically, once the new regulations were put in place—it’s become apparent that there are still some things in there that are actually better positioned in primary legislation that Government shouldn’t have the ability to amend, through regulation, without coming back to the House to talk about. For example, Schedule 20 includes some provisions that impact on the general right of students to enrol in any State school. Those provisions should more appropriately be in primary legislation, rather than in secondary regulation. So this bill makes those changes.

Schedule 23 includes provisions about the ineligibility and disqualification of people from being school board of trustee members. Also, I think there is a need to have some more flexibility around how we do school board elections and so on, and that more appropriately sits in a regulatory setting. Something as fundamental as who’s allowed to be on the board should still sit in the primary legislation. So this bill deals with that.

Schedule 24 sets out key provisions regarding national student numbers, like their purpose and use. National student numbers provisions were due to be repealed on 1 January 2022, and we want to make sure that they are still incorporated there. So that’s why we’re trying to push this bill through the House this year, to make sure that we don’t end up repealing things that we’ve subsequently looked at and decided need to still be in the primary legislation.

There are some further changes around aligning the Children’s Act 2014, passed by the last National Government, with the Education and Training Act, when it comes to issues around police vetting of those working in an early childhood setting. What’s become clear is that there is some inconsistency and ambiguity there around what vetting requirements are needed for those wider early childhood workforces. So there are some further changes here just to make sure that that is all very, very clear. It’s in keeping with the principle, I think, of the reforms of the Children’s Act 2014, passed by the last Government. We should have a very low-risk tolerance when it comes to people who are working in those settings with children. So the changes in this bill more closely align with that.

The bill makes a number of minor and technical changes. It amends section 171 of the Act, which relates to the thresholds for interventions in State schools so that it replicates the provisions of the 1989 Act. There were some changes there that inadvertently changed those thresholds. That was not intended. This fixes that up. It extends the transitional provisions around tertiary education providers that prevent them from charging a compulsory student services fee to those who are doing on-job training for a further year, as we continue to work through a more integrated funding system, as we’re bringing together on-the-job and off-the-job training.

The bill clarifies the early childhood education regulation-making power in the Act and it ensures that the regulations can be made to cover applications for approval to apply for an early childhood education service licence. It’s a new process provided by the Act, but it’s not yet come into force. Regulations will be required to operationalise the process and the bill clarifies some of those.

So I don’t think this bill is going to set the world on fire. It is a relatively technical and, I would hope, a reasonably non-controversial bill, compared to some of the other education legislation we deal with. I can assure members of the House that there’ll be plenty of opportunity to debate some more exciting education issues later in the year when we do bring forward some further policy changes. Now, this particular bill really isn’t designed to make any further policy changes. It’s largely a tidying-up bill.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Speaker.

Madam Speaker, apologies. National will be supporting this bill through the first reading to the select committee, in the spirit of bipartisanship that we often seek to extend across the House. The Minister says that the bill has a number of small and non-controversial changes. On the surface of it, that seems to be the case. What it shows is that they brought through significant legislation last year and mucked up several elements of it, and now, within a year they are coming back to fix those where areas where inconsistency and ambiguity exit, and tidy up mistakes made last year. We, of course, note that this does happen from time to time, and we will work through them through the select committee and would be very interested to hear advice from professionals working in the sector about the proposals. And, you know, we see here things being moved into regulations as opposed to the original Act.

There is some particular focus on ensuring that former teachers are not automatically enabled to use physical restraint in schools. I’m conscious of the fact that it is quite a technical and difficult area for many schools, so we will certainly be looking very closely at views on that proposal from people working at the actual school front and having to deal with very difficult circumstances, so as to ensure that that is workable and practicable. We also note, in relation to early childhood education around regulation powers, again, that can be a very fraught area.

So I don’t see the point of extending the speech on this bill to any great degree, beyond the fact that what we have here is the Government tidying up a piece of legislation that they’ve only just passed, dealing with mistakes made in that original piece of legislation. It is an area of inconsistency and ambiguity. As appropriate, this will go off to the select committee, and at that point there will be the opportunity for people working in the sector, dealing with these issues day in, day out, to have their say, and we will listen closely to them and form a judgment as to what we support and don’t support. But, in the meantime, we’ll work constructively with the Government to ensure that we have the best legislation that we can, given what is proposed.

In the meantime, we continue to have a truancy crisis in this country. These are the sorts of things that we hope that the Minister will be bending his mind towards. While all this is well and good, if we only have 60 percent of students attending regularly, as we do at the moment, these are massive, massive issues for the sector to deal with. I do hope that when he, in his first reading speech, referred to the fact that there will be more substantial legislation coming through the House, he turns his mind to some of those issues, because if we are going to deal with falling off the international pace in terms of educational achievement that we are seeing in this country, there are a couple of things that need to happen—the first of which is that kids need to be at school, and the second of which is that we need to have some way of measuring progress, particularly in the primary and intermediate school sector. So I’m hopeful that the next time he comes with some legislation in the education area, he’ll be addressing some of those issues. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak. Isn’t it lovely that peace and harmony has broken out across the House on a Thursday afternoon, with the National Party and the Labour Party, obviously, in support, and we look forward to the contributions from the other parties to hear where they might sit on this bill.

So, as we’ve heard from the Minister of Education, who gave an excellent outline of what is contained in this bill, this bill makes a number of small and non-controversial amendments to the principal Act, but some of them are relatively urgent, which is obviously why it has come to the House. As a member of the Education and Workforce Committee, I look forward to this bill coming to our very busy and very well-chaired committee.

I’ll just touch on a couple of points. I’ll just keep my contribution fairly brief. I know, as I said, the Minister outlined the full extent of the bill, but the bill introduces a new structure that’s intended to follow the journey of students through education, starting with early learning and moving to schooling, and then tertiary and vocational training. The reason this is important is because when students move from one area of schooling into another, those transition points are incredibly important. So whether it’s early childhood into primary, or whether it’s primary into intermediate or some sort of middle school, and then into high school and then tertiary, those points there can make or break a person’s education. If they have good, positive transitions, then things will go well, but if those transitions don’t go well, then it can have quite a long-lasting negative impact on their education. So I’m particularly pleased to see the new structure that this bill introduces.

Just one final point is that it moves some prescriptive detail directly into regulation—so rather than into legislation, it moves it to regulation—and that gives flexibility for the officials and the policy makers to make changes in real time in terms of being able to respond to what’s happening in our education system. We have a dynamic education system, and it’s important to be able to do that. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, as my colleague Paul Goldsmith has said, we support to select committee this Education and Training Amendment Bill and the general tidying up of the technical components of the amendments. But we do have some concerns around clause 12, extending the prohibition on providers of charging a compulsory student services fee to trainees that transfer over to Te Pūkenga, the new mega-merger Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics of New Zealand entity. That inability to charge those compulsory student services fees is a risk to our tertiary education organisations because they are being asked to cover more and more services for our students.

Now, nobody is denying that our students need to have these services and, in fact, the legislation would allow tertiary institutions to charge for them individually, but it would be absolutely impractical to be doing that on an individual trainee by trainee basis. This really does continue a trend of the Minister exerting influence over the fees that institutions can charge while expecting those institutions to do more and more and not giving any extra support from the Government.

I just want to outline some of those extra things, those extra student services that are being asked of our tertiary institutions. We’re looking at a new code of wellbeing and safety that will be issued in 2021 to take effect in the beginning of next year. It builds on an existing interim code. The sorts of things that it expects institutions to be able to do are: to be more responsive with more student services, and teaching and learning approaches to meet diverse needs of the learner population; to provide more training and support for staff, and that’s now including accommodation, staff, security, and cleaning staff; peer support training; better protection for learners who want to make complaints and resolve disputes; and better consistency within and across providers for dealing with emergencies. Now, nobody is saying we don’t want these better services for students, but how are the providers going to provide them if they can’t charge fees for new trainees, if they can’t increase existing student services fees, and if they don’t get additional revenue from the Government?

They’re saying that in the new wellbeing and safety code we’ll have many more dimensions to this support—so community and stakeholder consultation. That’s involving not only students but staff, whānau, local community, and iwi in identifying and defining wellbeing and safety, and issues with provider learning environments—a whole-of-provider approach, going beyond just student services, but looking at promoting an environment and a culture that enhances learning wellbeing across all levels of institutions. It’s looking at the learning environment, both physical and digital, providing positive teaching, learning and living experiences. So that’s not just in the formal education environment, but as learners develop personally and socially—that’s going to be a challenge as students are particularly social at that tertiary education stage—and individuals’ wellbeing and safety needs across a whole range of contexts, effectively looking at their social, physical, spiritual, and cultural needs throughout their learning journey.

Now, these are not insignificant requirements of student services on institutions, but they can’t charge any student services fees for new trainees to do this, and they can’t increase their compulsory student fees for existing students, and they aren’t getting any further money from the Government, except that they did have some money promised to them. So we can look at it in the context of the $25 million that was promised to the tertiary institutions for student mental health and addiction services. It was announced in July 2020, but not one dollar of that has been able to be spent yet. The $25 million was allocated in the midst of COVID-19, and it was explicitly sold as helping students through the pandemic. The education and health Minister at that time, Chris Hipkins, said, and I quote, “The lockdown has been hugely disruptive for students. Many of them have had to relocate and move to online learning, isolating them from … peers and tutors. Mental health is a priority for this Government, and it’s never been more important to ensure that our young people have access to the help they need when they need it.” Except they haven’t. So getting money out for student services such as this should have been able to happen quickly.

But what did they do with the $1.62 million per annum that was to go to the institutes of technology and polytechnics? Well, once it would have gone out to them and they would have straightaway got it into student services. But this time, and for anyone who’s worried about what happens when there is centralisation, that money went to the mega-merger polytechnic institute Te Pūkenga. That slow, cumbersome, bureaucratic morass has sat with the money and they are still in discussions with the Ministry of Health about how to use it. Remember, this was money for student services that was announced in July of last year and is still sitting, waiting to be allocated.

So this Education and Training Amendment Bill prohibiting institutions from charging a compulsory student services fee for trainees that transfer into this mega-merger institute Te Pūkenga are going to be sitting there getting access to services but not being charged for them. This is another example of the Government making announcements and putting impositions on to institutions but not getting the money to them to be able to do it.

These institutions only have three ways of getting money, essentially: student fees, Government income, or international student income. They don’t have the international student income, because this Government will not allocate managed isolation and quarantine places to the universities who have guaranteed that they would pay for them to let international students in. They’re not allowing the trainees to be charged for compulsory student fees, and any money that they are making announcements about getting out for student services is not getting to the institutions and is not getting to the students. It is a continuation of the Minister exerting his influence over our institutions, which should be autonomous entities that should be able to make decisions for themselves and should be able to get services out to those students quickly. But they certainly can’t do it if they don’t get the funding to be able to provide those services.

While we support this legislation to the select committee stage, there are certainly issues that I’m sure we will be debating in this bill but also in the additional bills that come through for education over the coming months. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you for the opportunity on a Thursday afternoon to take a call on the Education and Training Amendment Bill. We’ve heard quite a bit of detailed outline of what this bill pertains to, so I probably won’t go into that particular detail. In fact, I think I recall the Minister of Education starting his speech by saying this bill won’t set the House on fire—but if it did, I’m sure one of those many fire stations that we are building all through the country could probably deal with it.

💬 Kieran McAnulty: Whereabouts?

Anyway—all over the place, yeah.

But when it comes to this very small but relatively urgent bill that will come to our select committee, I think it’s probably helpful to look at the context of the wider education sector and what it means for that. So, as the Minister already outlined, we had the Education and Training Act enacted in August last year, which amended the 1964 and 1989 Education Acts, and it made for some simplified, less prescriptive, and more modern language. What this bill does is, basically, it continues on that same trend with some more small amendments, and that basically goes to ensuring that we are working further towards our work ensuring success for our future learners.

I really look forward to this bill. It is a very busy Education and Workforce Committee, but we’re doing some really good mahi there. It’s a collaborative team, and with this bill impacting primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational learners and teachers, I’m hopeful that we will hear from a wide range of people and organisations on how we can progress this bill and continue to improve the educational outcomes for all New Zealanders. So, with that, I’m delighted to commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora Madam Speaker. The Greens will be joining the peace that has broken out across the House today to support this non-controversial technical bill. I did note the comments from the Minister that this bill won’t set the House on fire, which is good, especially on a Thursday afternoon when we’re all just about to head home.

There is a well-known Māori whakataukī that goes: ko te manu e kai ana te miro nōna te ngahere. Ko te manu e kai ana te mātauranga nōna te ao. The bird that partakes of the berry, their domain is the forest. But the bird that partakes of knowledge, their domain is the world. And, of course, with a well-resourced educational pathway from early childhood through to secondary and onwards to tertiary education, that bird is more likely to have more opportunities and access to a wider diversity of berries—or pathways to other nutritious nuggets of knowledge, if berries are not your thing. I’m personally a berry person, so that analogy works for me, but what I’m saying here is that education creates opportunities, and that it is important that our education system should give everyone the best possible start on a lifelong journey that happens inside and outside the classrooms.

We will be supporting this bill, because it makes a number of relatively small and minor changes to the primary Act, but I do hope that means that this will give this Government time to deal with some of the bigger issues. Just after lunchtime I managed to look outside of the ivory tower, down to the Parliament lawns, and I wandered down because I saw a whole lot of students down there with their desks out—they were having a teach-in. I do want to acknowledge the Hutt Valley High School students who were parked up on the Parliament lawn with their desks and schoolwork for a teach-in. They were here to highlight the issues and protest about the toxic mould which was discovered in a block of classrooms at their school. So let’s get these small technical things out of the way, so you can deal with the real big issues like infrastructure in schools. Having young people engaged in politics and advocacy for, and on behalf of, their communities is a great thing, and a great way to broaden one’s educational pathways, and it further acknowledges that schools are at the heart of community wellbeing. So good luck to those students, and I hope the Minister gets a bit of a move on and gets that high school sorted out.

Other issues that have been front of mind, at least for me, are the pay parity issues within the early childhood education sector and in associated workplaces, and an urgent shortage of teachers. We know that early childhood teachers do an incredibly important job, but their pay lags significantly behind kindergarten and primary teachers with the same skills, qualifications, and responsibilities—so let’s get that sorted.

But back to this bill. It will make a number of relatively small and minor changes which add clarity and may have been overlooked in the creation of the primary legislation, the Education and Training Act 2020, enacted last year, such as provisions which ensure workers who do not quite meet the definition of a children’s worker in the Children’s Act can still be safely checked under that Act and that all other early childhood centre or school employees meet police vetting requirements in the principal Act; and ensuring that interventions in State schools by the Secretary for Education mirrors the corresponding provisions in the Education Act 1989. This will ensure the types of interventions the secretary makes are only those provided for under the Act. It also includes provisions which mean teachers are not automatically enabled to use physical restraint in new schools they start teaching at, but must have the prior approval of the school that employs them. Regulation-making powers relating to early childhood service licences are clarified, and agencies to which ministerial statements of expectations might apply, are specified. The ban on tertiary education charging trainees a compulsory student service fee is extended by one year.

With greater Government and community support, everyone can reach their potential so they can fully participate in society. Together we can make the necessary changes so that all children thrive. Let’s get this down the road so we can focus on the big issues. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill today. This bill, the Education and Training Amendment Bill, seeks to make some amendments to the principal Act. I stand here not only as a parent of four children who have been through the New Zealand education system but I also know as a grown-up how hard life can be when the education system lets you down. So ACT will support this bill through its first reading so we can make sure we get this right, for all our children’s futures.

These amendments, for the most part, are straightforward, uncontroversial, and aim to clear up some areas that have resulted in uncertainty. These amendments are so straightforward and uncontroversial that it begs the question: why were these missed from the principal Act to being with? For example, take the provision that proposes to specify the five education agencies that must comply with the statement of expectations relating to the Treaty of Waitangi issues. These agencies were not named in the principal Act, so the uncertainty that followed is understandable. ACT voted against the principal legislation, with the worries about the possible consequences that could arise from the rushed way that such an extensive piece of legislation was brought about. One could argue that the need for these amendments is an expected consequence of rushing legislation.

Also, ACT disagreed with the principal Act’s provisions that shifted educational responsibility around enrolment schemes away from locally elected school boards, and centralised these powers with the Ministry of Education. We believe that local school boards understand the needs of their schools best, especially when it comes to zoning. But ACT is also the party that advocates for better-quality laws and processes. These amendments make some minor changes that provide clarity and certainty. This we support.

It is ACT’s view that the sooner we make these changes, the sooner we can direct our attention towards addressing the real issues, such as New Zealand’s education crisis. The fact that students’ performance on objective international tests has been plummeting all century, in addition to the fact that barely 60 percent of our children are attending school regularly, is the real crisis, and that is the issue that requires our urgent attention. So ACT will support this bill to the first reading.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. I stand to, I guess, accept the challenge that was put down to us by the Minister, who tried to imply that some of us wouldn’t be excited by this bill.

💬 Kieran McAnulty: She’s excited.

I’m excited. I’m easily excited. As an educator, a mother, I’ve been on a board of trustees, and I know very, very well the complexities that surround our education system. And I think it was a really ambitious and important thing to try and pull all of those Acts together in one—all of that that legislation that covers us, as my colleague referred to earlier, from early childhood through to schooling through to tertiary, so that we can build towards a seamless and coherent lifelong learning system for our nation.

I think that when we talk about the challenges, about, you know, “This was rushed and there’s all these bits that were missed.”—well, first of all, it was not rushed. The reason that there were bits and pieces that need clarifying and tidying up, I think, really shows why it was necessary to pull all of these pieces of legislation together in the first place.

Schools are operating in very complex environments, and when you look at what we are trying to do with the police vetting—we’ve got police vetting that applies to different people and workplaces and it applies in different Acts. So it is incredibly difficult for schools and boards of trustees to navigate those complexities when all they want to do is keep our tamariki safe.

We have looked at the policy statement. The legislation is sorting out physical restraints, it’s sorting out thresholds for interventions, and tidying things up. It is really great to hear the Greens and ACT are really keen to get this sorted, get on with the real business, which is about continuing to lift our world-class education system so it works well for everybody. I commend the bill to the House.

Look, it is a real pleasure to arise and take a short call on this bill, which is the Education and Training Amendment Bill. I think, as we’ve been talking today, it is obvious that we’ve got a series of very straightforward, very practical, quite common-sense amendments as we try and fix up and enhance the Education and Training Act from 2020. There’s some pretty practical things in here, like keeping the schedules in the principal Act around matters like the national student numbers, the school enrolment schemes, and the school boards. There’s some very good things around police vetting requirements, just so that we make sure that our children are safe.

There’s also things around specifying the actual five education agencies, which, of course, are the Tertiary Education Commission, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, Education New Zealand, the Education Review Office, and the Ministry of Education, and just making sure that those ministerial statements of expectations are very clear as we try and hold those organisations to account for delivering better outcomes for our children in education. There’s a number of other, I guess, minor and technical drafting amendments that are there as well.

We are looking forward to supporting this bill into the select committee, and, importantly, I think my colleague Penny Simmonds highlighted the sort of core issue that we do want to discuss further in that select committee, which is really the prohibition on tertiary education providers charging trainees a compulsory student services fee. That’s around clause 12, and that is important because, as Penny quite rightly highlighted, that fee is actually used and it allows providers to be able to charge that fee so that they can use it—in addition to the fees they charge students—to support services around the students.

As we have been talking about, there’s no doubt about it that we’ve a mental health crisis in this country. When we think about youth and adolescents and their ability to access mental health services, it’s blown out from 16 to 17 days to up to 23 days. I can tell you that in Counties Manukau and where I come from, in Botany, it’s very much an extra week for parents and young people and adolescents to be able to access our mental health services. We want to make sure that, obviously, we are working together on outcomes and making sure that people who need help and support can actually get it easily, and I think that that would be an important thing for us all to pick up and debate within the select committee process.

Can I also just say that it’s going to be really important—and I think we’ve expressed it here in this House—that we are, all together, very fixated on educational outcomes. We have some big challenges to deal with around education in this country. When we have a truancy crisis like we’re experiencing, we should probably make a declaration around our truancy crisis—it might be a novel thing to do—and actually do something about it. But when you think that 60 percent of our kids are going to school only 90 percent of the time, that’s something that I thought we had solved in our generation of coming through and being students ourselves. I thought we had fixed truancy—the basics of getting someone from home to school so that they could actually attend is actually important.

The other alarming thing for me, and probably one of the most alarming statistics since I’ve come into this House, has been seeing how we have had a massive deterioration of our maths, our reading, and our science scores at year 5 and year 9, and how we have slipped tremendously when you look at other developed countries from around the world. You know, we are in the bottom three in the OECD on many of those metrics, and, at the same time, we’re seeing countries like Britain actually enhance its reading, science, and maths by making sure that the curriculum is centred around a curriculum, rather than around what we’d call student-centred learning. It’s actually instructed learning, and that’s not important just because of league tables and where we stand relative to other countries; it’s actually important because when you achieve educational attainment, that, ultimately, is what drives into the higher salaries and wages, and that’s ultimately what creates choices for families about how they choose to live their lives. So it is really important stuff that we’re able to really focus on that.

Ultimately, for this country, its problem is that we work, all together, incredibly hard, but we don’t generate enough value from what we do because we can’t get ourselves up the value chain to generate higher-value products and services, which, in turn, drives our salaries and wages, which, in turn, drives the choices that families have as a result.

So it is a pretty perfunctory, straightforward sort of bill. It’s a thin band-aid bill to fix up a number of issues, which we’re all in support of. We do support this bill through to select committee stage. But we really do need to get cracking on making sure we fundamentally deliver a system that delivers outcomes so that our young people have the best chance to be able to compete in a world out there of 195 other countries and 7.8 billion people, and where no one owes us a living. It’s going to be important that we have the education, skills, and support in order to be able to realise those opportunities for our country and for our people. Thank you.

I rise to take a short call on the Education and Training Amendment Bill. As I do, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the 18 years of passion and commitment, to a school and the hundreds of students, of the principal of Te Mata primary school during his time. I am certainly in agreement with this quote, reflecting, when he went on to his new job. He said, that, on reflection, “He had seen ‘moving through the dark days of national standards’ and a restriction of the curriculum to be ‘basically reading, writing and mathematics’, to now [after abolishing national standards] having the autonomy to ‘bring back the richness of the curriculum’, which [Mr] Bain says is an ‘absolute winning moment.’ ” I wish Mr Bain all the very best, from Hawke’s Bay and the Tukituki electorate, in his new career pathway.

Now, as I turn to the bill, I’m speaking in support of the first reading. The purpose of the Education and Training Amendment Bill is to make a number of small and non-controversial amendments to the Education and Training Act. When I listen to speakers today, it is pleasing to see that everybody across the House is speaking in support of this bill. It is the second time that I rise, after yesterday speaking on another bill, where we’ve had across-the-House support.

This bill introduces structures—a structure right through the education journey—and puts our children on the road to a lifetime of success, from early childhood, primary and intermediate and secondary and to territory education, skills, and training.

In commending this bill to the House, I’d also like to thank the hard work that the teachers do for our children—and as parents, I’d like to thank them too. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very grateful to have an opportunity to contribute to this bill. I understand that this is one of a series of bills that the Minister is intending to introduce to this House. This bill does a lot of things. It amends a lot of provisions. I would have wanted to pick up quite a few of them. However, due to the time constraint, I’m just going to leave that for the next stages of this—

💬 Erica Stanford: You’ve got 10 minutes. There’s no time constraint.

Thank you, Erica. Next time! The impact of this bill is going to be present in primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational training. However, I know that it’s going to come through the select committee that I’m very fortunate to be part of. So I look forward to seeing the Education and Workforce Committee deliberate on this, and I look forward to engaging with the public and our wider education sector. So, on that note, I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Well, isn’t it interesting that the speaker who’s just resumed his seat, Ibrahim Omer, talked about the time constraints when he had 10 minutes on the clock and then sat down in under a minute? I would encourage that member to use his full allotted time if he has that much to say.

Can I just open by also commenting on the children who were outside on the forecourt today from Hutt Valley High School, who were here in what was quite a remarkable protest, if you could call it that. They were here to do their schoolwork on the forecourt of Parliament, out on the grass out there, in protest of the mouldy, damp, cold, and rundown buildings at Hutt Valley High School, especially that C block that they tell me about. That is one of the very undesirable places. I just want to say to Flynn, who was one of the organisers of that event, well done. It certainly garnered lots of attention from MPs and the media. I think they made their point very well.

I’ll move on to the bill, the Education and Training Amendment Bill, which, as many speakers before me have pointed out, is a fix-up bill, a technical bill. Sometimes these things happen, and when the Minister delivered his speech earlier on, he did point to the fact, and he is right, that this was one of the largest bits of legislation that’s been done in a very long time when it comes to our education system. Of course, when that happens, there are things that fall through the cracks and there are some unintended consequences.

So this bill is here today—we’re here today—to fix some of those drafting errors. I would note that and I would like to say to the Minister, “Thank you for bringing this bill at this time.”, because I see that it has to be in place by January next year to avoid some of those unintended consequences. It is nice to see from this Government a bill brought in in a timely manner so that we can, in fact, have a full process at select committee, which we haven’t always been afforded. A bill that’s just recently gone through—this evening, in fact—the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill, only had three weeks, and it could have had a much fuller process like this bill is having. So it is good to see that the Minister is giving us a bit of time.

The bill was moving things around, shifting things into primary legislation and other things into regulations as should have been done. One of the things that it does around police vetting is also a necessary change. But I would like to point out that with the police vetting at the moment for early childhood centres who are looking to employ staff—and that’s another thing I’ll touch on in a minute—when they are having their staff vetted, it is now, at this current point in time, taking 30 days for that to come back. So the real crisis that’s happening here at the moment with our lack of early childhood teachers is being exacerbated by the fact that it is very, very difficult to get police vets done in a timely manner.

So, while this bill is fixing a few things up and making it a little bit easier, the real problem out there on the ground in the centres is the fact that they can’t actually get those police reports back in a timely way. In fact, most of those early childhood centres who are looking to employ staff actually vet every single one of the applicants because they know if they wait till they have chosen one of them, it’ll take so long to get the police certificate or the police check back that they won’t have that employee on the floor in time. That’s actually something that is going to require our attention because it is having an immense impact on early childhood centres.

Just going back to that, while this bill is a relatively uncontroversial technical fix-it—although I think my colleague Penny has some other ideas—for the most part at this early stage, from what we can see, it looks like most of these things are required and necessary and shouldn’t cause too much drama, although we will have a fulsome process at select committee to ensure that is the case. We do hope that some of the more pressing issues in the education system then have our attention. As other members have mentioned, we’ve got truancy issues. We’ve got issues with our maths and literacy in schools.

But one of the issues—the very important issues—that we have in our early education centres at the moment is a massive, massive shortage of teachers, which is impacting on those early learners. A lot of the time we are seeing reliever teachers on the floor to make up numbers, and even that has been a problem, getting relieving teachers, because of the changes to early childhood teachers having to be registered in a different way now. Where the fill-in teachers used to just have to do a few hours a year to remain registered and would fill those spots, they now can’t do that. So we’re heading into winter with a massive teacher shortage, because we can’t bring in migrants, and we also have early childhood education educators who can’t teach because they aren’t able to get their teachers registration in the same way that they would—having to pay thousands of dollars a year—so they’re just not doing it, adding to that crisis.

So I do hope that while this bill is just really a formality, we will turn our minds to it at select committee, in my select committee. There are some bigger issues out there that do require our attention and I do hope that the Minister will bring some more meaty bills. He did allude to the fact that he will. We are just here on this side of the House foreshadowing some of those issues and hoping that he will, in fact, bring those issues to the House in the form of legislation later this year. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I’m delighted to stand here and speak as the final speaker on this bill. I note that all parties in this Parliament are supporting it, and I congratulate Parliament for that. It’s something that the public don’t often see. They see Parliament on the news and they see parties having a crack at each other, but it’s times like this that I think should be celebrated, because it just goes to show that politicians aren’t always having a go—although I will take the opportunity to have a minor go. The other side of the House have mentioned truancy rates quite a bit tonight. Well, I’d like to remind them that this is potentially a result of the restructuring and, essentially, privatisation of truancy services that occurred under the last Government, because—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Could the member come to the bill.

Well, now that we are past the five-minutes-to-closing mark, I would like to say that I commend the Minister of Education for introducing this and fixing this up, and I also commend the bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Education and Training Amendment Bill be considered by the Education and Workforce Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. Tuesday, 11 May. Mā te wā.

The House adjourned at 4.57 p.m.