Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill

We come first to Part 1. This is the debate on clauses 4 to 6, “Teaching Council fees and costs”. The question is that Part 1 stand part.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and if I could begin by introducing the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that you just mentioned that the Business Committee agreed to allow the Government to introduce, as it sits slightly outside of the original scope of this bill, but it does respond to many of the issues that were raised during the select committee process, and so I thank members across the House for allowing the Government to progress with this particular change.

By way of history, this all stems from the establishment of what was then the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, back in about 2015. It replaced what was then called the Teachers Council. It had an extended remit, so a wider range of powers than the previous Teachers Council, and it also introduced some new and more stringent disciplinary procedures for the council to follow in dealing with members of the profession whom there were complaints against.

Ultimately, the council was renamed to the Teaching Council by the current Government in response to some concerns when the Education Council was established by the profession, though they wanted the word “teacher” or “teaching” in the title, and we restored elected representation to that council. Other than that, the council has remained pretty much as it was established by that 2015 series of legislative changes.

The council was provided top-up funding by the then Government in 2015 to transition to new arrangements and to establish itself and to deal with some of the longstanding issues that the council had faced, including the fact that it had never been in surplus, I think, for its entire existence; it had always run at a deficit. The transitional funding, as announced by the previous Government through the Budget process, was to allow for that transition to the point where the council would become self-sufficient; it would pay for its functions out of its fees—the fees that it would charge the teaching profession for the purposes of registration.

Our Government extended the transitional support that was provided, and that transitional support would have run out—except we extended it again. Then, the council went through a process of determining what fee they wanted to affix. They determined that they would move from a three-year fee to a one-year fee. The fee would go up, recognising that the council had additional costs that it needed to meet. There’d been inflationary pressures. The council had never been particularly living within its means even before the purposes of the council were changed. The profession took a judicial review against the fees and that courts found that the council had made mistakes in the way that it set the fees; it set the fees under the 2015 law, but the courts found that those fees had been inappropriately set, and so the court set those fees aside. What that means is the council then reverts back to the fees that existed prior to the 2020 fee setting. The challenge there is that those fees were also set under the law that the courts had found was problematic, in the sense that the council was charging for all of its functions, when the courts found that the legislation only allowed it to charge for some of its functions. So the council was left in a position which was untenable, because potentially all of the fees that it’d collected since 2015 could have been drawn into question, and, at that point, the council was in some serious difficulty.

So the legislation, as introduced, did two main things. First of all, it validated the previous fees collected under the 2015 law change—not the fees that were overturned by the courts; they remain overturned by the courts. The second thing that it does is it allowed the council to credit fees that were paid towards the one-year registration fee against the reverted-to three-year registration fee, and that’s to avoid, effectively, a circular arrangement, where people who paid their one-year fee get that money back, and they then have to pay the higher three-year registration fee pretty much straight away. It means they will just have to pay the top-up in order to get that three-year registration fee.

The council will now have to go back and start re-consulting on its fees, and they will have to do that in accordance with the law. Of course, if they mess that up again, they’re also subject to judicial review again. But this law change absolutely clarifies what they can and can’t charge fees for.

The SOP that I introduced makes it clear that the leadership functions that the council has, and these are leadership functions that were inserted by the 2015 law change, cannot be paid for through teacher registration fees or levies. If the Government asks the Teaching Council to take on additional leadership roles, then the Government of the day—whomever that is—should pay for that separately, and teachers should not pay for that through their fees. So I think that responds to a lot of the criticism.

In terms of the quantum of the fee increase, I do intend to bring forward further legislation to the House that deals with the increased costs arising from those changed disciplinary functions and disciplinary processes that were introduced in 2015. It is clear, now, that the inability of the council to effectively triage complaints, the fact that they have to send a much-greater number of the complaints to a formal disciplinary tribunal hearing, has resulted in a significant escalation in cost; it has resulted in the need for the council to employ significantly more staff to deal with those complaints, and that is not necessarily going to increase the robustness of those processes—in fact, there is a real concern that we’re putting people through an unnecessary trauma, when they shouldn’t have to necessarily go through that process. So further legislation is coming on that, and that will further address the levy and fee concerns that the profession have been raising.

Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s great to be back here in the land of the free, after such a long time in Auckland. This is my first opportunity to speak in the House since returning, and I’m very conscious of the many hundreds of thousands of people in the queen city who have been locked up for a very long period of time, missing out on the opportunity to live their normal lives and for their children to be educated properly at school. So these are very sort of concerning times for many Aucklanders, but it’s good to be here back in the debating chamber, talking about issues that matter. And this piece of legislation’s quite a narrow one, trying to deal with a particular set of circumstances that have occurred with the Teaching Council.

Our fundamental point is—and the Minister has outlined the background to this—the new role of the Teaching Council from 2015, the setting up of the higher fees, the challenge by the unions, and the court ruling that has left them in a bit of a pickle. And, ultimately, the Government, really, had a couple of choices: they could ram through legislation to deal with the situation to keep the money flowing—which is what they’ve done under urgency, with a very truncated select committee process—or they could have continued the additional funding that has been carried on for a number of years now to the council, and given themselves more time to have a more fuller and proper process to work out how we can get this situation sorted out more effectively. So our opposition to this legislation is based on the fact that we don’t automatically just give a tick to urgent legislation rammed through the House under a short process.

It’s been quite interesting, because we’ve been left very much on the side of the PPTA, which is not necessarily our usual position. And we’ve heard many, many submissions of members coming in. The most notable being one teacher who said, “Well, as far as I can see, this bill has all come about because the Teaching Council is short of money—well, I’m short of money, and I’m a bit worried about how I’m paying my bills, and I’m irritated by the fact that we’re fixing their shortage of money, but I’m short of money. And the bills are piling up, the energy’s more expensive, my gas is taking more to get into the tank, my broccoli is more expensive than it ever was before, and lo and behold, next thing, these geezers want to put up the price of my teacher’s registration and I’m annoyed about it. Why should this Government be ramming through, under urgent legislation, a fix to enable them to get away with their big spending ways?”

Of course, there seems to have been an enormous amount of confusion about just what the Teaching Council is funding and what they’re paying for. And so, quite naturally, a lot of teachers have seen the enormous amount of energy, effort, and expense being led by the Teaching Council on unteaching racism and on leadership, and they’ve naturally wondered, “Well, are my fees going to this?” And the Minister is quite correct in pointing out that it’s important to separate those two, but when we looked at the legislation that was introduced, it didn’t really separate it very carefully, and the powers of the council were very broad, and what they were looking at was very broad around leadership and in the sector as a whole. And so, notwithstanding all the promises made that the council would be very focused on the registration matters, which it is ultimately appropriate to be paid for by the profession, it was extending more broadly and more broadly. And so teachers would look at the fact that the wage bill of the Teaching Council had gone from about $5 million a year to $8 million—so it had gone from about $5.3 million in 2016 to $8.2 million in 2020—and they’re wondering to themselves, “Well, is this organisation, is this council, getting elephantiasis, and are we having to pay for it?” And so that’s where we’ve come from: a concern about the—[Bell rung] Sorry, I was just getting into my rhythm and it all came to an end very quickly.

So, anyway, as I was saying, the functions of the Teaching Council are to provide leadership to the education profession and to enhance the status of education leaders and to identify and disseminate the best practices of educational leadership. Now, that all sounds very good, and everybody’s pleased to see that, and if we take a step back and ask ourselves, “Well, what are we trying to achieve here with the Teaching Council?”, I think all New Zealand parents want to know—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: 10 minutes of my life I’m never going to get back.

—that the teaching profession as a whole are drawing in the best people—the Minister made some comment; I didn’t quite pick it up.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: I said this is 10 minutes of my life I’m never going to get back.

Ah, well, and I’m sure the Minister could have put it to so much better use!

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: Yes, I really could have.

Yeah, yeah. And yet there is this messy, irritating process called democracy, whereby the Opposition of the day does get the opportunity to have a look at what the Government is proposing, and asking ourselves, “Have they got it right and have the proper processes been followed?”

And what I think a lot of New Zealanders mightn’t appreciate is the process that we generally have is that when Government wants to change the law, it introduces a bill and then it sends it off to a select committee, whereby the Parliament and members of the public can have their say about it—so just to remind people who are tuning into this debate and this conversation: what happened was that the Government rammed it through at very high speed and gave the profession and everybody involved very little time to actually sift through the issues properly. And the key issue at debate in this whole thing is: what should be paid for by teachers personally and what should be paid for by the State?

Actually, in the last campaign, the National Party campaigned on the Government picking up the bill for the full registration, which was a very generous policy. I think there is a reasonable argument that the profession, the teachers, should actually pay for the professional certification and qualification of teachers, as many other professional bodies do. So, ultimately, we have no argument with that. Where the real argument is is how far that extends. And if it’s coming to complicated public relations campaigns about unteaching racism, or leadership, and all those sorts of things, then far fewer people agree with that.

Now, the issue is that the Government may fund these through the Teaching Council, but the overheads and the apparatus continues to grow and gets bigger and more expensive. And so teachers are quite fairly and rightly concerned that the spending and the focus of the Teaching Council is properly narrow and focused on them and their requirements. What we saw through the whole select committee process and the submissions that we heard was a real absence of trust by many, many teachers—and not just one or two; many, many teachers—about how this has been carried out by the Government. And, as I say, referring to the young teacher, out of frustration, saying that this is all about dealing with the Teaching Council’s shortage of money, “Well, I’m short of money, and I don’t want to have to pay higher fees than I need to. And I want to be reassured by this Minister and this Government that there will be proper arrangements in place.”

Now, the Minister has admitted that it needs to be looked at more thoroughly and more legislation is going to be coming down the track, so he had a simple choice: he could have done the job properly and extended transitional funding for a little bit longer so that the job could be done properly, but instead he’s just rammed through urgent legislation to deal with it in the short term, without giving the profession the proper opportunity to have their say. And on that basis, we’re worried about that and we want to delve into the details over the next little while. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m hoping the Minister won’t regret my minutes, and he won’t be asking for them back. I’ve got many questions. But, first of all, I would like to acknowledge the teachers—particularly the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), who did take the court case, through frustration, in terms of the, I would say, breakdown of the relationship between them and the teachers affiliated with the PPTA and the Teaching Council as well—and also the concerns that came up through the select committee process from the rank and file early childhood education teachers, and questions around what that might mean for relief teachers as well and whether the 10 years’ worth of fees might all of a sudden get dumped on them.

What I heard from the select committee process was that everybody understands that it’s really important to have an independent teaching council, and that it’s best that it is paid for by the profession itself; it was just a matter of how and when we could get to that place where that relationship actually develops in a way that actually embraces all of that. I don’t think we’ve got there just yet.

I’m happy about the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP). It shows that the Minister has been listening and there is nudging movement towards getting some of that clarity, I think, which is essential in terms of the relationship. But, as I said in my second reading speech on this bill, a good relationship is a boil-up, not a fry-up—you’ve got to take a bit of time, you’ve got to give it the right ingredients, you’ve got to check in with it.

💬 Hon Member: You’ve done that one before.

I know, that’s why I said it was the second reading speech; I’m glad the member over there was listening. But the basis of a good relationship is, of course, trust as well.

So I have a bunch of questions around trying to find the clarity in terms of what the SOP means, and maybe that is within the bill itself, from the Minister’s perspective. The first set of questions I have is around this leadership provision, because that was one of the things that really came out of the select committee process, as well—teachers didn’t want to pay for it, there were concerns about the way that the Teaching Council itself was operating. So I wonder if the Minister could give me some clarity around what those leadership functions are. So, for example, I have three examples here: is it to provide leadership to teachers and directions for the education profession; (2) to enhance the status of teachers and education leaders; and (3) to identify and disseminate best practice in teaching and leadership and foster the education profession’s continued development in light of research and evidence of changes in society and technology? So it’s about: are they all there; are they yeah; are they nah; are they yeah, nah, bro? So I would like to begin by sort of getting some clarity on those leadership provisions at this particular point in time.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a question for the Minister around the speed of this bill, but I just want to start by saying that the Minister jokes about wanting his 10 minutes back, but there were a number of submitters who would have given anything for their five or 10 minutes in front of the select committee, but they didn’t get it because this bill was raced through at breakneck speed.

My question to the Minister is this. He explained in his first reading speech—which I went back and read—about how he extended the Government subsidy to the Teaching Council shortly after they took office to recognise some of the changes that were made, including reinstating elections to the council. My question is: why did the Minister not do that again, reinstate transitional funding—and my colleague Paul Goldsmith talked about this—to cover the council for a period that would have allowed a more full and proper select committee process in order to allow for some of those unhappy stakeholders—and they were very unhappy—to have their say?. I mean, even given the short time frame, we heard from a lot of submitters. But we know there were hundreds more who didn’t get to have their say, and the one comment from all of those submitters, or a great proportion of those submitters that came to the select committee or appeared on Zoom, who were visibly angry and upset at the way that this bill was being rammed through—the one thing that they all said was “Why is this being rammed through so quickly? Why is this not a full process?”

I asked the Minister why it was that he couldn’t have extended that funding, given the level of mistrust that the teaching profession have with the Teaching Council, and now the level of anger and angst against the Government for seemingly covering everything up and pushing it through quickly without allowing people to have their say. So my specific question to the Minister is: why didn’t he reinstate and extend that transitional cover to allow even for an extra week or two for people to come to grips with the bill and have their say at select committee, just to create maybe a little bit of goodwill between the teachers and the Government again, which has been severely dented and, I would say, in some cases, lost, from some of the speeches that we heard?

If I could just quickly respond to those two points. In terms of why we didn’t just continue with the transitional funding: in fact, the Government did continue to provide transitional funding to the Teaching Council because they have had to revert back to the fee that existed previously. The issue was that without this bill, and without this bill being progressed quickly, all of the fees that the council have collected since they came into existence in 2015 could potentially have to be refunded. So we wouldn’t just be providing transitional funding but, in fact, we’d be leaving the council in a position where even with transitional funding they would be insolvent. So that is the reason why the bill is being progressed very quickly.

In terms of the question from the Greens around leadership, I think there is an important need—and the Supplementary Order Paper I think, that I’ve put forward, 68, does clarify this more. There’s an important need to differentiate between the leadership functions that the council needs to undertake in order to fulfil its core functions and those leadership functions that may be additional. So if I give an example that one of the core functions of the council is teacher registration. So they set the standards for teacher registration and then they have a process in place for registering teachers. In the process of doing that, they need to demonstrate to teachers how they can actually meet the registered teacher criteria, and, in doing so, that is a leadership function. So they’re disseminating best practice. They’re saying that in order to become a registered teacher or in order to maintain your teacher registration, these are the sorts of things that you need to do. That is, in itself, a leadership function. I think most people in the profession would believe that that is a legitimate role for the Teaching Council, including secondary school teachers.

On the other hand, there’s the wider leadership functions, which we are now talking with them about. That includes things like professional development or leadership development for aspiring professional leaders within the education system. The profession’s view, and I think it’s one that’s been well articulated, is that they shouldn’t have to pay for that through their teacher registration fees. The Government’s never been of the view that they should; in fact, we’ve always been clear that if we ask them to undertake those functions, that the Government should pay for those separately, and that’s always been our intention. So Supplementary Order Paper 68 absolutely clarifies that and makes that clear.

Thank you very much for that answer, Minister. I’ve got a couple of other questions as well. I guess I’m one of those people that the last time I really got into maths was seventh form—I did calculus, then I did first year at university, and then I went to law school and threw away my maths books. But I know that some of the teachers will get lost, and I have gotten lost around, like, the movement between the fees, between this, that, and the other as well. So trying to get that clarity around that is really, really important, and, as I’ve been saying for a while, when you have that clarity, that helps us to build that relationship, which has broken down, I feel, between the profession and the Teaching Council.

But on that, a couple more questions: given that the Teaching Council does not intend to fulfil its legislative functions without a substantial fees increase, how will the Government mitigate the financial burden to teachers? I’m thinking of probably the early childhood education teacher that zoomed in and says, “Look, I’ve got to budget down to the last dollar.”, and if all of a sudden the fees bump up, you know, tenfold or fivefold or whatever, that’s going to seriously impact that teacher, particularly new teachers, particularly a relief teacher who has to pay for the registration fee as well. So that’s a question around what kind of support there could be for teachers in those circumstances.

My second question is: instead of allowing the Teaching Council to charge levies, as well as fees, why does the Government not fund those aspects that are for the public good, such as the disciplinary functions, instead of making more teachers pay for a process the vast majority will never need?

Third question is: why does this legislation seek to expand the Teaching Council’s fee-setting powers to cover all of its expanded functions, when the submissions to the Education and Workforce Committee were very clear that teachers want to remove these expanded functions and not pay for them? I think you talked a little bit about that in terms of the leadership functions as well, but if you could give us a bit more clarity on that, I would appreciate that.

And, fourthly, there is that breakdown of trust between the profession and Teaching Council, so it would be good to get some clarity and some answers about what the Minister intends to actually rebuild that trust, because I think we need that. We need to have that trust between all the different bodies that make our school system work as well. If it’s because there is a lack of faith within the council’s leadership layer, what will the Minister do at that particular point? Are you looking at reforming it, asking for resignations, or doing something else as well? So there’s a number of questions there that I have asked. Thank you.

I would just encourage members to be careful when they talk about the breakdown in the relationship between the teaching profession and the Teaching Council because of the inherent assumption in that, that all of the teaching profession think the same when it comes to the Teaching Council, because they don’t. As a result of this legislation, one of the things that we did do was actually talk to the profession about where some of the leadership functions that the council have at the moment should set, including considering whether, in fact, we should remove them completely. We received representations from the NZEI opposing that, from principal groups clearly opposing that, from advocates for Māori teachers opposing that, and about the only organisation in favour of that was the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA). Now, I acknowledge the PPTA have opposed the council’s existence in its current form from when it was introduced and when it was established in 2015, and that’s a long-held in principle position by the PPTA, and I respect that position. I don’t happen to agree with it, and all of those other organisations that I just mentioned also don’t agree with that.

In terms of the fees that the council will now have to consult on, I make a couple of observations. The first of which is that the council has been in a position where the fees collected have not covered its core functions, even prior to when the council was established. So its predecessor organisation, the Teachers Council, was also in a position where the fees it was collecting were insufficient to meet its statutory responsibilities. So a fee increase has been coming for over a decade now and one of the challenges, of course, is that successive Governments—I’m responsible for this; my predecessors, Nikki Kaye and Hekia Parata, were also responsible for this—have continued to defer that. The challenge is that the longer you defer that, the bigger the increase becomes when it eventually happens.

So what I think we have to do is benchmark what’s a reasonable fee increase. So we can look at other comparable professions and, actually, the fees currently charged by the Teaching Council are actually significantly lower than they are for other comparable professions in terms of the fees that they pay for their regulatory bodies. What can we do to help keep those costs down? Well, I think we can do two things. The first is what we’re doing in this bill, which is to make it very clear that additional leadership functions that the council may take on should be paid for by central government and not paid for by fees or levies. The second is to look at those disciplinary functions again and say, “Are all of these processes as good as they could be?”, because there’s no question in all of the advice that I’ve had from both the Ministry of Education and the council directly that those changes to the disciplinary processes have accounted for a significant increase in the Teaching Council’s structural costs, and so we can have another look at those. I think we all agree that robust disciplinary processes within the teaching profession are vital. If we have people in the profession who are not upholding the standards of the profession when they are dealing with young, vulnerable children, then absolutely there should be robust disciplinary processes to deal with that.

Having said that, it does seem to be that those processes have now become so stringent that they’re capturing relatively minor transgressions that shouldn’t be going to a disciplinary tribunal proceeding where other means may well be able to deal with those complaints. So I think we will look at that and we’ll bring forward further legislation to the House, and that will have an impact on the fees.

Just because we have been talking about the submissions, I want to make it clear that there were 1,033 submissions, and that was in a very short space of time that those submissions came in. Teachers had to do it during term time and most were in lockdown during that time, so it was a significant effort from those teachers. I think my Green Party colleague and I, listening to them, were shocked with just how disappointed and angry the teachers were.

And so my question to the Minister in the chair, the Hon Chris Hipkins, is around his Supplementary Order Paper 68 and his comments around clause 4(2), “(2) The functions that the Teaching Council may perform with the written approval of the Minister … as follows:”, and the three comments there around the leadership training. Can the Minister just clarify whether that addresses the submissions of many of the teachers—that they explicitly stated they did not want the Teaching Council to be involved in professional development provision for them? And so is the Minister saying that this leadership training will not be any subject-specific professional development? And also, the functions that the council may perform with the written approval of the Minister seem to be quite an operational matter that the Minister is prepared to put his finger in the pie of, and does he think that getting down into that operational level is a sensible thing for him to be doing and likely to fill the teachers with confidence in the council, if they have to be going to him for approval? Would it not be much better that he ruled that provision out, specifically when the submissions asked for that provision of professional development training to be left out?

Very briefly, in terms of answers to those last contributions in terms of professional development, I think the member Penny Simmonds just asked the question about whether or not it was the Government’s intention to transfer professional development functions to the council and, therefore, require teachers to pay for those. No, is the absolute, categorical answer to that.

In fact, one of the first things I did when I became the Minister of Education was to stop the programme of work that had been put in place under the last Government to transfer the administration of teacher professional development from the Ministry of Education to the Teaching Council. That was in train when I became the Minister, and I stopped that. It is not this Government’s intention to do that. I do note that it was the last Government’s intention to do that—the previous National Government—and that was something that this Government has stopped.

In terms of the changes around leadership function and the question of “Will they satisfy all of the submitters?”, the answer is that is a little bit yes and a little bit no. In terms of a little bit yes, it says to them that if the council is taking on additional leadership functions, then they won’t have to pay for it through their fees and levies—I think they’ll be happy with that. In terms of whether the council should have any additional leadership functions at all, the profession is divided on that. So the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) submitters, or the largely PPTA submitters, who made contributions to the select committee would prefer that the council didn’t undertake any leadership functions at all, and the very strong feedback from other representatives of the profession—and I’ve just mentioned them; the NZEI, a variety of principal groups, and a variety of groups representing Māori teachers—have been very clear that they think that they should.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I was just wondering if the Minister could drill down a bit more around his comments around helping teachers to mitigate that financial burden. And I was wondering around comments around what that might mean for new teachers, relief teachers, and early childhood education teachers, and whether you are going to do something different there or whether it’s just going to be broad-brush. I’d like some clarification in those spaces.

I think one of the most regrettable things about this is that the Government did provide funding to allow the Teaching Council to move to more regular instalments, because more regular instalments are easier for people to pay than a big lump sum every three years. One of the challenges around this particular court case is that the funding in order to transition to that yearly fee—recognising that if the council moves to a yearly fee, for the first two years they have less revenue because of the period of time it takes for them to build up the annual fee collection to the point where it would be at if they were collecting the three-year fee all at once. So we provided them some bridging funding to overcome that gap that moving to an annual registration would create. Unfortunately, some of that funding will have been used to bridge the gap that’s now been created by the fact that they’ve had to revert back to the lower fee. So we’ll continue to talk to them about that. But I think the provision allowing for them to charge a yearly fee, rather than a three-yearly fee, is the main thing that I think will help teachers, because they won’t have that big outlay in the same way.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 1 set out on Supplementary Order Paper 68 be agreed to.