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

on behalf of the Minister of Education: I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

To ensure the safety of our children and young people and the quality of the teaching they receive, it’s essential that we have effective regulation of the teaching profession. The Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand is the professional body for teachers. The core functions of the council include the registration, certification, and discipline of teachers. The council also sets minimum standards for ensuring high-quality teaching and provides professional leadership activities.

A significant proportion of the council’s income comes from fees paid by teachers to be registered and hold a practising certificate. This bill rectifies a legislative anomaly relating to the council’s fee-setting powers and makes changes essential for the council’s financial sustainability.

Authority for the council to charge fees for the recovery of costs is provided under the Education and Training Act 2020. However, in a case taken earlier this year by the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), the High Court found that the Act only allows for the council to fix fees in relation to some of its functions. There is a significant gap between what the council is required to do and what the Act allows it to charge for. The gap is unintentional and needs to be addressed. The policy is that the council should be able to recover the costs of its mandatory functions from teachers. The bill amends the Act to give effect to that policy.

Fees are the only cost recovery mechanism provided for in the Act. However, the costs related to some of the council’s functions are more appropriately recovered through levies because they relate to activities undertaken for the benefit of the profession, rather than as specific services for individual teachers. The bill addresses this issue by enabling the council to set fees and impose levies, as appropriate. This will improve the transparency of the council’s cost recovery process.

Two of the bill’s measures are aimed specifically at addressing concerns from many teachers who submitted on the bill about the potential for the council to set unreasonable or unaffordable fees. The first of these is a requirement for the council to ensure that fees and levies only cover the actual and reasonable costs of performing the council’s functions and exercising its powers. The second is a requirement for the council to consult with the teaching profession and to receive views presented to it with an open mind and to give due consideration to those views when making decisions about fees. While the requirement to consult is already a well-established principle of administrative law, making it explicit in the Act provides the profession with greater assurance that consultation on fees and levies will be genuine.

I want now to briefly touch on the retrospective validation provisions, which I outlined in greater detail during the bill’s second reading. I want to reiterate how important it is that the council be able to operate from a position of legal certainty. To that end, the bill retrospectively validates fees previously set and received by the council and its predecessor organisations, with one exception: it does not validate the annual fees made under the May 2020 order that also promulgated the change from three-yearly to annual certification.

The council’s decisions to change from three-yearly to annual certification and fees were overturned by the court in the PPTA case, and the previous arrangements were, effectively, reinstated. The bill does not change this position. It does, however, allow the council to retain the annual fees that have already been paid, credit these in part payment of the reinstated three-yearly fee that now applies, and require payment of the balance. This is more efficient than refunding the annual fees and invoicing those teachers, who have since had their annual certificate replaced by a three-year certificate, for the reinstated fee.

At the time of the bill’s second reading, I advised members that we were in conversations with the council about their professional leadership function and who should bear the cost of carrying out that function. These conversations were informed by submissions on the bill from teachers and their representatives. Many teachers support the Teaching Council carrying out its core regulatory functions and using registration and practice fees to fund these activities, but they strongly object to their fees being used to fund activities related to the council’s professional leadership functions.

During the committee of the whole House stage, the committee amended the bill to address this concern. There are three aspects to these amendments. First, the council’s functions are separated into mandatory and optional functions. The professional leadership functions are optional, and all other functions are mandatory. Second, the optional professional leadership functions can only be performed with the approval of the Minister of Education. Third, the council can only charge fees and levies to recover the costs of the mandatory functions.

It is important that the council’s mandatory functions focus on teachers. The optional functions approved by the Minister should continue to be funded by the Government because they are focused on the profession more broadly. This change will help to clearly distinguish support for growing and improving the capability of principals, which the Government has committed to, from the council’s role in ensuring safe and high-quality teaching.

I want to close by thanking all of those teachers and their representatives who made submissions on the bill during the level 4 lockdown. That input has resulted in amendments that should give teachers confidence that future fees and levies will only be used to recover costs that should be borne by teachers, and will be set in place through a process that is transparent and inclusive.

This legislation will support the financial sustainability of the council so that children, their whānau, and the broader public can have confidence that the professional regulator charged with ensuring safe, high-quality teaching will be able to operate effectively. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Look, we in the National Party won’t be supporting this legislation, as we haven’t throughout. The memorable moment for me in the select committee process, the very highly truncated select committee process that didn’t give the teaching profession much of a chance to have a say about this legislation, was one teacher who had—remember, what happened is this bill was introduced, went off to select committee for a very short period of time when we were all in lockdown. So we had a whole lot of very angry teachers who had been trying to teach through Zoom or some other temporary way during the lockdown, were harassed and slightly irritated, then having to find the time to make a submission, again by Zoom, on this legislation.

The memorable one was from one teacher who said, “Well, it appears that this bill is because the Teaching Council is short of money. Well, I’ve got a message for you and the committee: I’m short of money too and I don’t see why we should be rushing through this legislation to save them a few bob while I’m struggling here in lockdown and having a bad time.” I have to say, we had a fair bit of sympathy for him, because notwithstanding the real concerns that we have about the mathematical skills in the education system across the board, I think everybody could work out that paying $220 once every three years was not improved very much if you went to $157 every year—$157 × 3 is a little bit more than $220! So these teachers were, quite rightly, not very happy with the proposed hefty increase in fees, which was the stimulus for the court case, which is the stimulus for this legislation.

So what we were left with, given the pickle that the Teaching Council had got themselves into, was this Government’s rush to bring in this legislation to try and tidy up the mess that had been created by the Teaching Council. We have some sympathy for the need for them to collect their levies, and we absolutely support the mandated role that the council needs to perform. It’s about ensuring that teachers are properly registered, that they’re certified, and that the disciplinary side of things is dealt with. You know, there’s an argument that the National Party stood in the last election saying that there shouldn’t be fees, this should be something that’s covered by Government, and we campaigned on that. This Government hasn’t picked that up and that’s up to them, and there’s a perfectly plausible argument that the profession should pay for this independently in order to have a sense that this is something that they as a profession pay for, like many other professions do. So, OK, we’ll make that decision; that carries on and people support that. But where it got very messy was the extension of the Teaching Council into a whole raft of other things, and we’re all familiar with Unteach Racism and the professional development side of things.

Now, the Minister quite often pointed out that, well, yes, but a lot of that is funded separately and it’s not necessarily being paid for by the teachers. But what we saw was a huge gulf in understanding between the profession who were paying these levies and the soothing words coming from officialdom, which pointed towards the overarching lack of trust that seems to have developed. And so the issue that we face, of course, is, well, it’s not going to help that relationship of trust if when a problem arises, because of decisions made by the Teaching Council, there’s a court case, the Government rushes through legislation and doesn’t go through a proper process in order to sort it out and reassure the sector and the teachers themselves that what is being done is appropriate. Instead, during a lockdown, when everybody’s under pressure, they rush it through and tidy it up as quickly as they can without resolving the broader issues.

The broader issue that needs to be resolved and discussed properly is exactly how do we ensure that the Teaching Council doesn’t have a bad case of elephantiasis and is sort of getting into all sorts of other stuff? Because what we’ve seen—

💬 Hon Member: You leave elephantiasis alone.

Well, that’s right. What we’ve seen is a steady and significant increase in the costs of the Teaching Council. Its estimates for its operating costs in 2021 were $18.3 million. How they broke that down—the problem is that their fees are only $4.9 million and therein lies the problem. They’ve increased their spending and staff very considerably. So it’s all a bit sort of murky. What’s all this about? Is it about the basic registration and certification and disciplinary side of things? Or are they getting into all sorts of other nice-to-haves, which, if the Government wants to, the Government can pay for if they think it’s a priority?

By the way, I don’t think their priorities in education spending are very good. They’re all over the place. If I was to say that there’s a priority, the priority should be making sure that the kids actually go to school. That’s a very good place to start. And you know, having only three out of five attending regularly is not a good place to start and it’s where we are. So that would be my priority. But this Government has all sorts of other priorities—telling people what they should think on various topics and getting side-tracked by strange curriculum reviews. That is why there is a little bit of disquiet, I suppose, across the board.

So here we get to the situation that we’re at, the third reading. Every other party in the House doesn’t agree with this piece of legislation, but this Government is ramming it through under urgency—well, under a truncated process. The problem with that, and where they sadly haven’t sort of learnt their lesson, is that we’re here because we’re trying to fix up a legislative kink and a mistake made by a bureaucracy. Isn’t there a very high chance, now that this Government has come and brought in legislation very quickly to fix it under a short select committee process—the Minister halfway through has come up with what’s called an SOP, a Supplementary Order Paper, and changes, has fiddled around with it because the bill that they introduced didn’t do the job. So they fiddled around and they’ve made a few other changes to try and tighten things up. And they’ve sort of put something in here and a little bit there, and they’ve tweaked it a bit.

I can almost guarantee—almost guarantee—that some time next year we’ll be back again, fixing up the mistake that the Government has made this time, because, once again, they’re rushing it through and not taking the time to get it right, all because of the problems created by the Teaching Council. So, look, we’re not all out to make life difficult for the Teaching Council—good people doing good work—but there is a sort of a sense that they’re being let off the hook rather easily with rushed legislation, poor consultation, and an atmosphere of distrust with the profession itself.

It created a slightly unusual dynamic, I’m bound to say. We found ourselves very much on the side of the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), and I think that’s important in terms of a sense of bipartisanship across the board. Quite often people assume that there is not a meeting of minds between the National Party and the PPTA, but you’ll find quite often that indeed there are many things that we agree on. We certainly agree on the importance of getting children to school, for example, and that’s a topic that we’ve had many fruitful discussions on and there’s much work to be done.

And on this issue, we understood their overarching concerns about the sense that the profession is not being valued as much as it should be by this Government. They had high hopes when they came in. They had high hopes that that education and teaching would be a real focus. As it’s turned out, not much has happened, really. There’s been a lot of reviews—a lot of reviews—a lot of working groups, a lot of proposals, a lot of change started rolling, but not much in the way of completion. This piece of legislation, unfortunately, is all they’ve come up with and all they’re going to soon deliver on, and I’m not sure that it’s going to help a great deal. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, delighted to take a call on this piece of legislation. The previous member mentioned bipartisanship, and I have to say that I generally work quite collegiately with Mr Paul Goldsmith. We have, I think, a very collaborative relationship and we get some things done, but we do have different memories, it seems, on how this particular piece of legislation went through the select committee.

We had more than a thousand written submissions—in fact, 1,030, if my memory serves me well—and about 112 came before the committee and gave us all evidence, so every single submitter that wanted to had that opportunity. What I do remember is yes, there was quite a lot of concern and there were questions about this legislation, but also what I do remember is the passion and the love that shone through from all of those submitters on the work that they do as teachers. Whether they were brand new teachers or long-serving ones—we had three teachers with 40-plus years under their belt, people like Denis Wright, Anna Heinz, and Moyeen McCoy, all really impressive submitters telling us their concerns.

But the most important thing is—and I want to, in my very short contribution, touch on that—that the main concerns that we heard through the submissions were, in fact, addressed. The way that we reported this bill back to the House made a couple of changes through the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that the Minister spoke about in the last debate. So that was the concern on the council potentially being able to set unreasonable fee increases and teachers’ fees being used to fund the council’s leadership functions. People didn’t agree with it, we heard it, the Minister agreed, the Minister made changes. While those changes sat slightly outside the scope of this original bill, the concerns were addressed by way of the SOP debated last week, and so the SOP made it very clear that the leadership functions cannot be paid for by teachers’ fees or levies.

While I mention the word “levies”, it would be remiss of me to not say thank you to the Regulations Review Committee for their input here. I remember Rachel Brooking in the committee of the whole House speaking about a delightful exercise they had in giving this committee their advice. So it was a truncated process that had to happen because, of course, otherwise there was a risk that the Teaching Council could potentially become insolvent, and that had to be avoided at all risk. I just want to finish here with a quote from my learned colleague, Duncan Webb—“Chopper”—“This is an important piece of legislation [here which basically is] to correct an error inherent in the National Party’s previous work.” So I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m happy to take a call on the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill. Can I just start by saying that, boy, we certainly do have different memories about what went on at the Education and Workforce Committee, because while those teachers may have passion and love for what they do, passion and love was not what they brought to the select committee. More anger and frustration, in a process that was less than ideal, that was truncated, that gave them hardly any time to submit—during lockdown, where they were trying to manage students online, students in class, and only had a very short time to get their thoughts together. They were very angry at the way that they had been treated by the Teaching Council. They were very angry at the way that they’d been treated by this Minister of Education through this process.

And there was really no need, and I’ll touch on that in my speech, but I just want to make the point back to the chair of our committee that there didn’t need to be a truncated process. We put this to the Minister at the committee of the whole House stage, where we said, “What was holding you back? What date was there that something awful was going to happen, that we needed to get this through so quickly? What was it that meant that you couldn’t keep the transitional funding in place for just an extra two weeks, to give these poor teachers, who were bearing the brunt of COVID-19, having to teach online”—and I feel sorry for them, because I hear them every day trying to teach my kid at the kitchen table; half of them with their microphones on, half the kids singing away with the fairies. These poor teachers had a week and a half, around about, to get their thoughts together, and there was no reason for that. The Minister could have, if he had wanted to, put that transitional funding in place for at least a couple more weeks, to give them time. So what the chair of the committee is saying just doesn’t stack up.

This bill will pass into law today, not because it’s a well-thought-out and carefully considered piece of legislation; not because the Minister is on top of his portfolio, with his finger on the pulse, and knows what’s going on with the Teaching Council and is in tune with the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA); and certainly not because we took, you know, a great deal of time to consider this bill—certainly not; not because we gave stakeholders all the time in the world to gather their thoughts in order to write down their written submissions and prepare oral submissions. Labour will use their majority tonight to pass this piece of legislation into law to fix up what is a very embarrassing problem for them, which happened under their watch. It did not happen under our watch. It did not happen under a National Government; it happened under this Minister’s watch, because he does not have his finger on the pulse. Under this—

💬 Hon Member: 2015.

Yeah, here we go. Here’s the interjection—and this is the whole reason that the Minister has tried to back out of how this is not his problem. Oh, it was something that the National Party did back in 2015; they didn’t quite get the law right! Let me make it clear: this happened under his watch. Any good Minister with his finger on the pulse would have known what the Teaching Council were up to: building their empire; hiring more staff, increasing their staff costs from, what was it, $5 million in 2016 to over $8 million in 2020; not consulting properly with the sector; taking what was a triannual registration to a yearly registration, increasing teachers’ costs. Any Minister with his finger on the pulse, if he knew what was going on, would have headed this off at the pass. And I say to whoever that member was that said, “Oh, it was a 2015 problem.”: this happened under this Minister’s watch because he didn’t have his finger on the pulse.

This did not need to go to court. The PPTA did not have to take this to court, because you can’t tell me that the Minister hadn’t been told by the PPTA early on, “Hey, the Teaching Council are out of control. They’re empire-building, their costs are increasing, they’re going beyond their mandate, they’re doing things that teachers don’t want, they’re not properly consulting with the sector.” They can’t tell me that the Minister didn’t know that. And he did nothing. It clearly indicates that there is a Minister quite busy with another portfolio that he has, and ignoring what is going on right under his nose. These things happened under his watch. Those staff costs increased $3 million under his watch.

Let’s just talk about consultation for a moment, because in the court’s decision, they came down quite hard on the Teaching Council about their lack of consultation with the sector. They talked in detail about this unlawful tax and the fact that the teaching profession and the sector were not adequately consulted. And then, to add insult to injury, or rub salt in the wound, this Minister thinks it’s OK to acknowledge their concerns about the lack of consultation by having a truncated process in which there’s no proper consultation. I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous.

The poor teachers, no wonder they feel the way they did in the select committee, where they were angry and upset and furious at the Minister and this Government, something that’s unheard of, usually, with the PPTA and the teaching profession. They were furious. They were not filled with love and passion at select committee; they were furious. They’d just been through a process where they felt like they weren’t listened to. They weren’t adequately consulted with. The PPTA said the same, the judge said the same, and here’s the Minister, rubbing salt into that fresh wound, saying, “Hey, by the way, teachers, you’ve got to have two weeks to get your thoughts together, during term time, during lockdown.”

How is that building any trust and confidence in a sector that already feels let down by the Teaching Council under this Minister’s watch? I challenge anyone on the other side of the House in our select committee to tell me why it is, how this ever even got to court. Why did the Minister not have his finger on the pulse? Why did he not know what was going on? Any Minister would have said to that Teaching Council, “Pull up your socks, tighten your belt, stop hiring more staff, get back to your core duties, and remember”—sorry, Madam Speaker—“remember that teachers don’t have deep pockets.” They are facing the same quite rapidly rising cost of living that everyone else is. Their petrol, their groceries, their electricity—everything’s going up. They do not have deep pockets to pay for whatever the Teaching Council decides is OK for them to charge.

And what has the Teaching Council learnt from all of this? Have they learnt that they need to consult properly? Oh, certainly not after the Minister’s behaviour and truncating the process. Have they learnt that they need to tighten their belts? Let’s see, if you look at the legislation that he brought to the House, we had to amend it to put in there that they had to consult properly, because the Minister didn’t even put that in the legislation. We had to do that. Furthermore, he had to bring a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) to the House, when he should have well known that that’s what the sector was so upset about. They didn’t want the leadership functions in that. OK, he fixed it up at SOP stage, but that’s something that he should have brought forward in primary legislation, further showing that he doesn’t have his finger on the pulse.

I suppose the one thing that was the most disappointing, which has been pointed out by speakers in previous stages of this bill, and the one thing that was missing from this Minister was a mea culpa, was an “I’m really sorry” to the sector: “I’m really sorry that the Teaching Council have done this to you. I’m really sorry that you weren’t consulted with properly. I’m really sorry that there was an unlawful tax that was put upon you. I’m really sorry in the manner that you feel like you aren’t properly represented by the Teaching Council.” None of that.

In fact, what we get is a Minister that’s trying to sweep this under the rug like this dirty little problem didn’t happen under his watch, via this bill, in a truncated process during lockdown, and hoping that people wouldn’t notice. Well, the fact that so many submitters submitted to our select committee was despite the fact that there was a truncated process; we can only imagine how many more we would have had, how many more angry, frustrated teachers we would have had, had we had a proper process. This bill is fixing up a dirty little problem that happened under this Minister’s watch because he’s not on top of his job, and this Government is here tonight passing this into law despite all those things that I’ve said, and we will not be supporting this bill. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. So I think it’s important, really, not to go through a lot of the history of this bill, which has been covered ad nauseam at some stages in all the previous readings. So what I will do is just go back to basics in addressing some of the concerns that the previous speaker, Erica Stanford, addressed in her speech.

So, first of all, this bill was introduced to address an urgent issue which clearly needed to be resolved and was directly linked to the Teaching Council’s ability to pay for their work. Now, their work is to register teachers in New Zealand. This is important work. It’s work that we need as a country, and it’s work that teachers need in order to have faith in their profession and in order to carry on with their important work. So it was absolutely important that they had the ability to raised funds, and this what this bill is about. It allows them to continue with their work to raise funds to regulate the teaching profession within New Zealand.

I also just wanted to make a few comments on the Minister of Education. He’s an incredibly hard-working Minister who is on top of his portfolio and knows every corner of the education sector. He’s been working in education for over 20 years. He’s incredibly passionate about the subject and is absolutely on top of every element of his portfolio, despite the huge workload that he has. So I absolutely refute any suggestions that he is not on top of his portfolio. In fact, what occurred in this particular instance was a decision made by an independent body, the Teaching Council, to raise fees on 1 February 2021. This legislation was introduced—introduced into the House—on 12 August. So we, obviously, know that there was a judicial review that happened in the meantime, but that doesn’t suggest a Minister who is ignoring the profession. It doesn’t suggest a Minister who is not on top of the issues. It suggests a Minister that cares about the fact that teachers are regulated within New Zealand, recognises that the Teaching Council has an important job to do in providing that work, and provides legislation to immediately be able to do that.

We had a very, very thorough process—although it was a truncated process, I don’t think that that necessarily means that it’s not a thorough or proper process—at select committee. As you’ve heard, we had over 1,000 submitters. They had a very high quality of submissions that they put forward to us.

So I think the important message, really, from this is that what we have in this situation is an issue that arose, the issue arose because of the fact that people are allowed to take judicial reviews, which is something that we should all celebrate in this country. Because it threw up an issue, the Minister then introduced legislation to the House in order to fix it, to allow a very important public body to continue their functions. So I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s great to take a call on behalf of the Green Party on this really important piece of legislation. It was really great to hear that the National Party is supporting the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), and I hope what that means is that when they come asking for better pay and conditions, that support will continue, and what I would also say to them is, when the New Zealand Education Institute come asking for support as well around pay parity and supporting early childhood education teachers, that that will also happen as well. So I look forward to their continued support of what our teachers and the teachers’ unions are calling for in terms of all their pay and conditions—good luck to that.

I’ve taken quite a bit of interest in this bill, and at the heart of it, it is about trust. It’s about trust between the teaching profession and the Teaching Council as well, but also the massive strain that that trust has come under. And so, not wanting to re-talk out the history of stuff like that, there was the judicial review, there was this legislation that—for me, at least—came rushed into the House as well. But I think it’s really important to remember that the context of all those particular events have happened within the pandemic; it’s happened within a pandemic. So we already have teachers that are already doing all that they can do to support our students, to support our children and what they’re doing, whether they’re zooming into their classrooms to support our teachers to do a very, very difficult job as well, and then we’ve also got this happening as well.

Not to mention that the vaccine mandates, I know, talking to some of my friends in the teaching profession—the sorts of pressures that that has put on them as well, the sorts of uncertainly. I mean, and I do know that it’s only a very small number of teachers that haven’t taken up that mandate as well. But if you’re organising from a practical level your new teachers, what you will do with the relieving pool—so, for example, maybe some of the people that you might need to rely on in that relieving pool, they’re actually at the retiring end of the spectrum, so they might not be able to step in and support those particular schools as well. So it is in that context that we have rushed this legislation through the House. It has been rushed through the House.

During the committee of the whole House, I thought we had a really good discussion with the Minister, and we were supportive of the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that came to the House as well. So it was good that after what—I felt—came through the Zoom hui was a lot of frustration, particularly from the PPTA, particularly from those teachers affiliated with the PPTA, but also with the rank and file of other unions and also independent teachers as well, there was some acknowledgment that things weren’t well, that this legislation wasn’t drafted in the most timely and most constructive way possible, hence the arrival of the SOP. And so we were supportive of the SOP. However, as the great philosopher from South Auckland Ardijah says:

Time makes the wine

Like love it grows stronger

I think we needed to be a lot more timely with this particular bill because of that pressure, because of that pressure that we are placing upon teachers, on the teaching profession, within this context as well. And rushing things through makes it very, very difficult for them.

Because at the heart of it is that trust. We all want that trust in the institutions. We want trust in the Teaching Council—I hope we want trust in the Teaching Council, because it’s the same thing when we have trust in all of our institutions. The success of our response to the pandemic has been because of our trust in the health institutions, our trust within health experts, and our trust within our community leaders that are fronting the pandemic response as well. Well, it’s the same thing in education. It’s exactly the same thing in education; we build up trust in our institutions, within our schools, our school communities, our professional bodies, our teachers’ unions, and, of course, the Teaching Council as well. When you build that trust in, everything else flows a lot more easily.

I wanted this piece of legislation to build on that trust. I wanted this legislation to help to carve out a pathway so that the teachers—particularly those ones affiliated with the PPTA—could say, well, actually, this is a pathway which encourages trust. This is a pathway that encourages trust. But it’s hard to do that when they have those pressures.

I like the direction of the SOP, but there were a couple of things in there which were still uncertain for me. I understand that the leadership provisions will focus on the registration and the licensing of teachers. That’s really important. I think everybody around the House, even over there, here as well, really sort of emphasised the role of the Teaching Council in terms of the registration and the licensing and that sort of thing. So having exemplars about what that might mean makes sense for me from a leadership perspective as well.

And then there was also that talk about, well, if it’s other stuff which is not related to that, the Government will not support and fund those kinds of things as well. But there was a grey area for me, and so when I asked the Minister around those leadership provisions, out of three examples, and one of them was to provide leadership to teachers and directions for the education profession. So you could probably fit that within the registration bit, maybe, to enhance the status of teachers and education leaders. I don’t think that part fits in with the registration and licensing part, it probably falls into the second part, so I’m not sure how that might actually eventuate practically. And the third part is about—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Order! In the third reading speech, the member will reflect on the bill as it sits on the Order Paper and as it is presented to the House.

OK. Thank you, Madam Speaker. And so, for me, those points weren’t clear. But I think if we took the time to walk with those teachers, given the pressures that they’re under, we would have got that clarity. And I did hear, at the second reading, over there, that people were saying, well, maybe it’s one week or two weeks or three weeks—it could be a lot longer than that. From our perspective, if it’s for a public good, if it supports accessible, free education, it is something that should be supported, and at the heart of that is that trust, in all of our institutions but in this case within the Teaching Council. I don’t think, with this piece of legislation, that we’re there yet. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill, a bill which seeks to allow the Teaching Council to set fees to fund its operations. The bill is required due to a series of unfortunate decisions and circumstances. Teachers need a Teaching Council. It’s an important body required for regulating the teaching profession and the certification of its teachers, but they have moved outside the scope that the teachers had given them into professional development that the teachers really hadn’t asked for and, subsequently, that requires the increased fees.

After consulting with the teaching profession, the Teaching Council decided that annual registration was the way to go, and this is when things really started to go wrong. They didn’t listen to the consultation that they received from teachers who overwhelmingly didn’t want a change from the three-year registration to the annual registration. The registration process is a stressful time for everyone—teachers, administrators, and principals—and it just adds that extra layer of stress. As it turned out, as we know, it took the Post Primary Teachers’ Association case to the High Court to have it reversed. So it just wasn’t done properly. It’s this sort of behaviour that has led the teaching profession to really distrust, rightly or wrongly, the Teaching Council.

When I renewed my registration last year, it was a really hot topic at the time and at the time I and my teaching colleagues couldn’t believe that the Teaching Council believed it was quite justified in raising their fee from $220 every three years to $157 every year. Even those teachers who didn’t teach maths could work out that it was a pretty big increase from $220 to $471 every three years, and now they’re up with a wage freeze. I was in the Education and Workforce Committee and heard many of the submitters, and lots of issues were brought up, like the extra powers, the rushed process—was questions being mentioned a few times tonight—the concern that the Teaching Council weren’t the right people to provide the professional development, that the requirements keep changing and requiring teachers to receive professional development for these changes, and whether the Teaching Council, the body for discipline of the teachers, was the appropriate body to provide the professional development and leadership. Many mentioned the salaries of the Teaching Council staff—they weren’t happy with that. There’s a certain amount of annoyance that the Teaching Council had a budget, so they should work within it, like everyone else, and almost every submitter was concerned about the lack of consultation.

Unfortunately, the change in wording in section 479(2) that says “with the written approval of the Minister” doesn’t give any cause for reassurance. Teachers look at this whole fiasco with a huge degree of suspicion. There are big problems with our education system already, with truancy a major concern, literacy and numeracy standards spiralling downwards, teacher training and retention issues, dubious curriculum decisions being made with very little thought as to what happens next—how are they taught? Who’s going to teach them? And millions of dollars being poured into a restructure. When they hear the Ministry of Education say, “There’s a risk that those who paid the $157 dollars for an annual certificate could refuse to pay the remaining $63 owing for the 2023 year certificate with which they have now been issued. This does not meet the criterion of fairness.”, they’re quite rightly wondering where the Government’s priorities are.

So, in summary: consultation was asked for, albeit in a truncated process, and it was received loud and clear. Teachers want to know what the point of consultation is if it’s going to be ignored. The Teaching Council has an important role to play in the registration and discipline of teachers—40 percent of the Teaching Council’s budget is spent on disciplinary processes. Maybe it should be more. Do it well, be more efficient. It’s affecting people’s lives and reputations. Leave the professional development required by specialist subject areas, like science or music, to the experts who understand already what is required. One of the professional leadership aspects of the Teaching Council’s work is “to encompass matters such as promoting inclusion, discouraging racism, and affirming the need to have high aspirations for all students.” I would argue that all of these should be addressed in the recruitment process. If not, maybe that’s what the Teaching Council should be concentrating on.

The other responsibilities that have developed over the years need to be reassessed. The Teaching Council have a lot of work to do to gain back the confidence of the people it represents. They must have the trust and respect of teachers. ACT accepts this bill will pass and sincerely hopes that the Teaching Council works very hard to remedy the disconnect it has with teachers that is so evident. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand and take a call on this piece of legislation. Before I begin my contribution this evening I would, though, like to acknowledge all the teachers and students around Aotearoa New Zealand, right from early childhood education to primary to secondary to tertiary, who have had one heck of a year. It’s been tough, and so I think it’s important to acknowledge them, the hard work and the challenging ways that they’ve had to teach and learn during this year.

We have heard that this piece of legislation has come about due to some issues that came about to make changes to the Education Act, to right some wrongs that we determined by a judiciary review. So what we had heard earlier from the previous speaker, Chris Baillie, was that the Teaching Council changed their fees from a triannual fee structure to an annual fee structure, with an increased amount per annum. As a person who’s come from the education sector I did find this quite an interesting piece of legislation to go through. We have heard we had over 1,000 submissions and a large number of people that wanted to submit to the select committee, and I acknowledge those teachers who did that through those trying times. Our teachers across New Zealand, they are passionate about education, they are passionate about the children, and they are passionate when they present to a select committee. So we heard a lot of passion from them.

What we have with this piece of legislation is that it retrospectively validates the receipt of fee payments that were made from 1 February 2021. Even though those fees have since been quashed, teachers that paid those fees at that time with this piece of legislation are still able to have those fees that they paid credited against the new fees that have been set. So the council doesn’t have to go through the process of reimbursing everyone and then people paying back the correct amount. So it’s just fixes up that as well.

One of the things that we did hear loud and clearly from the teachers was that they did feel that they hadn’t had much consultation at all from the Teaching Council. And so whilst that wasn’t quite part of the initial legislation as introduced, the select committee heard their concerns, the Minister heard those concerns, and therefore introduced a Supplementary Order Paper which addressed those concerns, which will ensure that the Teaching Council must consult in a fair way with the teaching sector before they look to make any adjustments to fees further.

So without any further ado, I commend this bill to the House.

The next call is a split call. I call Nicola Grigg.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a short call to add further to my colleagues’ opposition to the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill. Much has been made of the lack of consultation, and I think it’s symptomatic of this Government and its increasing propensity to rush legislation through this House, in spite of public discomfort, in spite of the public feeling it’s being ignored. To take, for example, just recently the introduction of three waters, there’s been the Māori wards, and now this is the latest and greatest from this Government, who is making a name for itself in its inability to listen to the users on the street. This is yet another piece of legislation that directly contradicts what the people that it will directly impact—that is, the teachers—actually want.

💬 Jo Luxton: It doesn’t. It’s what they’ve asked for.

I note the MP for Rangitata’s got a lot to say. I can assure her in this House that her constituents would like to hear from her every now and then too, so I suggest you get chatty back home instead of in here, Ms Luxton.

At the heart of the matter in this bill is that the High Court ruled that the Teaching Council acted unlawfully when it increased its fees for a practising certificate from this triennial system to an annual system—that is the heart of it. It was an unlawful tax. This bill will set fees and impose levies, but what a way to thank the teachers of New Zealand after all the work they have done in this past three months and, indeed, this past year. It’s not a huge amount of money, but that’s not what is at issue here. It is the principle: the principle of the majority of those 1,000 submitters who went before the select committee and opposed this piece of legislation.

We in this House are being asked to provide retrospective validation of a receipt of payments taken by the Teaching Council, despite that High Court ruling, but we do acknowledge the work of the Teaching Council that it does in regulating the profession, and that it does require revenue. But there should be a very, very high threshold and a very good reason to push through retrospective legislation, and the National Party does not believe this bar has been met here. The precedent it sets is terrible. It is no wonder that every party in this House except the Labour Party has opposed it.

The Minister mentioned the submissions and the submitter concerns in her opening address, but my read on it is they’re still not listening. These submissions were largely against it. Now, I didn’t even sit on the select committee, but I’ve taken it upon myself to reach out to teachers in my electorate and ask them exactly what they make of it. I know it is a foreign concept to this Government to engage with its stakeholders, but here is what a teacher at a high school in Christchurch wrote to me: “I received this unbelievable email from the New Zealand Teaching Council who have convinced Chris Hipkins to change the law, allowing them to change the fees that they want and potentially go to yearly registration. This was after the council lost in court, so now the Government seeks to change the legislation. The fees after the law change will also be backdated and additional money sought from teachers.”

Paul Goldsmith spoke earlier and made the point that there is a real sense from the profession that it is undervalued. And another constituent of mine has said, “I spoke on this subject at our teacher-only day to a staff who feel deeply unappreciated by our Government. Of course, this is similar to how farmers, doctors, nurses, midwives, police, and ACC staff already feel. I’m seeing growing discontentment from people, even amongst lifelong Labour supporters. Hopefully, people will remember this treatment at the next election.” This teacher raises a very valid point. This Government should be focused on lifting student achievement. Our kids are being left behind the rest of the world through no fault of their own. It should not be focused on ramming through legislation that goes against the grain of what their stakeholders want, in retrospect. It should be listening to their stakeholders, it should be focusing on its core duty of lifting kids’ achievement and giving them a decent future.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Thank you for allowing me to take a call on the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill. I speak not as a teacher, I speak not as a—well, I’m a student of life, but not a student of education; always learning, always growing. I actually stand as a spouse of a primary school teacher, and, in fact, this coming Friday evening, when many of you may be at home doing whatever you’re doing, I will be actually at his graduation event—he gets his registration; for two years, he retrained, as an adult, as a primary school teacher. So on Friday night, we get to celebrate his achievements of two years as an educator, of two years doing the mahi; the three years and more, beforehand, of his studies, but he will be registered.

What I find exciting about that, in the journey over the last few years with him working as a teacher in a school, is seeing the support that is needed, seeing the support that is desperately needed, for our teachers to ensure that they do the mahi, and, like what was just said from our previous speaker, Nicola Grigg, that our tamariki, our rangatahi, are educated well. So ensuring that the council is set up, ensuring that we change this piece of legislation, will make sure that my husband and the teachers around the country will have the supports in place that they need.

I just want to close by referring back to the Minister, Chris Hipkins, and thank him for this. He says this legislation really is around supporting our children, the whānau, and the broader public so they can have confidence in the professional regulator charged with ensuring safe, high-quality teaching, which they’ll be able to operate effectively. I thank Marja Lubeck from the Education and Workforce Committee, and all of those who heard the submissions, and I look forward to going to my husband’s graduation when he gets his registration on Friday night, and I commend this bill to the House.

Congratulations to your husband, Glen Bennett.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I too also want to add my congratulations to Jon and my friend Glen.

I rise in support of this Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill. This bill is all about provisions in the Education and Training Act 2020, amending provisions in Education and Training Act 2020 to enable the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand to set fees that cover the costs of all of its functions and powers under the Act. It also clarifies that the council can charge fees in instalments and recover unpaid fees. These changes are consistent with the legislative framework for other professional regulatory bodies.

Now, we heard a lot about angry teachers. What we have seen is not anger. What we have seen is teachers speaking with passion. But, obviously, the different views that they hold are with the Teaching Council. They did that with the mutual respect. We heard what their concerns were. We listened to them, and because of that the Education and Workforce Committee reports it back, the bill, with three changes as a result of concerns that they raised. No one has—not the Minister and not the committee—actually ignored their concerns.

I want to mention one of those recommendations, that the Education and Workforce Committee required the council to consult with the teaching profession with an open mind and give due regard to the views expressed during the consultation when making decisions about fees. This is one of the things that consistently the teachers raised, and it was reflected back in the report that we sent back to the House. The Minister also has made amendments in his Supplementary Order Paper 68. I want to mention one of his recommendations that the council may only recover costs of its mandatory functions. So this is not the work of a Minister that doesn’t care. The Minister cares, and he’s taken his job seriously, and, hence, we have this legislation tonight in this House.

If all this passion and energy from our colleagues on the other side of the House was spent in bettering our education system, we wouldn’t even be here tonight discussing all these issues because we would be OK.

This bill is all about addressing matters that need an urgent response. It does not, in any way, attempt to resolve every possible legislative issue relating to the Teaching Council. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees, Levies, and Costs) Amendment Bill. I first heard about this during the election campaign last year, and my colleague across the way Dr Liz Craig and I were at a teachers’ forum and this was brought up, and that was the first I had heard about it, but I’ve certainly heard plenty since then. I’m interested that the member who has just sat down, Ibrahim Omer, feels that the 1,033 submitters to this amendment have had everything they said heard and responded to, because that’s exactly not what I consider happened in this process.

So look, I’ve worked with teachers for the last two decades and more, and I want to acknowledge the tremendous passion that teachers have for what they do, and they have to have this passion because it’s a really challenging job that teachers do. I admire enormously, even in a normal situation, the work that teachers have to get through, and over the last two years, my goodness, they have had to change and adapt. I’m not going to use that dreadful “pivot” word, but they really have had to change the way that they engage with their students, and they have worked incredibly, incredibly hard.

That passion that our teachers have, the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) took to the High Court. Now, you don’t take a High Court matter without being really aggrieved with what has gone on. They took this to the High Court and they won on so many different levels. It must be incredibly disheartening for the PPTA now to find that having gone through that process, having done all that work, having made all these submissions in that very truncated time that they had, which was during school time, it was during the period where most teachers were teaching in lockdown conditions, that, essentially, they have been ignored. They came out in strength and they have, essentially, been ignored.

Now, the teachers had some very valid grievances. As my colleague from the ACT Party Chris Baillie said, it’s not an insubstantial amount to change from a three-yearly fee of $220 to an annual fee of $157, and to have to go through that registration process. Now, I used to sign off registrations for our early childhood education teachers at the Southern Institute of Technology, and it’s not just a five-minute job for those teachers having to go through that process. So to have to do that every year and then pay more money for the pleasure of doing that extra admin when they have not been consulted with, and then legislation is brought into this House and they are, again, not consulted with adequately, and their concerns have not been heard, is giving one almighty message from this Labour Government to our teachers, and that is: “We will do what we like to you. We will make the changes that we want to and you will suck it up and like it.”

So teachers will have taken this on board. They will have seen how this Government has reacted in this situation. They will have seen the rewards that they have been given for the extra work that they’ve put in over the last two years. They will see how this Government intends to treat them when they bring up reasonable grievances, and it is not well, the treatment they are receiving. It is very, very bad treatment of genuine grievances and they should have been treated more respectfully.

Now, look, the Teaching Council does some really important work. It regulates the profession. It deals with disciplinary matters. It deals with the certification and registration of teachers. So these things are really important. But the Teaching Council started to stray from the mandate that the teachers had given them. And we heard, through a number of the submissions, that the teachers wanted their professional development to be subject-specific, and they wanted it to be through the networks of their discipline areas across New Zealand. They did not see this as a role for the Teaching Council, and they asked that the Teaching Council take that from what they intended to do and adjust their budget accordingly, and actually live within their budget, like every other individual and business has to do. When your income is a certain amount, you make sure your expenditure meets that same amount, or else you very quickly get yourself in trouble.

But the Teaching Council weren’t prepared to take that message from the teachers. They weren’t prepared to trim their budget. They weren’t prepared to trim their activities. They instead went to the Minister who rolled over and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll just take a new amendment to the Act.” I’ve given up counting how many amendments this Education Act has had in the short time of a year that I’ve been here, but he has brought an amendment to the Act to thwart the teachers’ submissions and thwart the High Court finding.

Now, that’s an extraordinary thing for any Government to do, but it’s an extraordinary thing for a Labour Government to do to a group of teachers, professionals, who would have traditionally been seen as supporters of a Labour Government. These teachers know that they are going through a very difficult time. They know that they have got big issues to solve in the education sector at the moment. They know that truancy was a huge issue before COVID, and it is going to be a really difficult thing for them to pull back on over the next while. They know that they’ve got issues around standards of numeracy and literacy.

I’m sure our teaching profession wish that the Minister would engage in some of these really difficult things that teachers are dealing with: discipline of children in the classroom, class sizes, and resources in the classroom. I’m absolutely certain, and I see it in the schools that I visit, that they are the sort of substantial issues they want this Minister to be engaging with them over.

But as, I believe, the Green Party member Teanau Tuiono spoke about earlier, a lot of the trust between the teachers and the Teaching Council and the teachers and the Minister has been eroded through this process. So getting that trust back and enabling those big issues to be debated and ways forward found is going to be an enormous hurdle for those teachers to get over, because they will remember for a very, very long time that when they took their case to the High Court and they won hands down, the Minister stepped in with this legislation and overruled that. They are going to have to overcome that loss of trust when they really need to be looking at the very big-picture issues that our education sector and our young people are going to be suffering under as we try and recover.

We have heard nothing from this Government about what they intend to do next year to try and recover, because we cannot just have our young people out of the classroom for 10, 12, 14 weeks and there not be a consequence of it. So we would have expected that our Minister, instead of spending time on an amendment like this, would be spending time on looking at what measures will have to be taken next year to support our teachers, to support our young people to catch up on the learning that they have lost. We oppose this amendment.

I rise to speak for the last time on this legislation. We’ve heard a lot tonight about a lack of trust. Some seem surprised on the other side of the House, and they talk about a lack of trust seeming to have developed. But, actually, Mr Baillie and I agree on one thing: we’re really clear about where the trust is broken and how long it’s been like that. The Teaching Council has struggled to build a strong and highly functioning relationship with the profession since 2015, when we had something called the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand hit the profession. So we have been struggling for more than a few weeks to try and remedy some of the problems caused at that time.

The profession did stand up, even though there was COVID and even though there was short notice, and they demonstrated with their significant engagement how important this council is to them and how important it is that we trust in it. Thanks to their engagement, there have been amendments and their concerns have been addressed. I just want to reflect on a couple of them.

The council has been found wanting in their understanding of what appropriate consultation looks like. This legislation will provide them with very clear guidance about what good, effective consultation does actually look like. Clause 5 of the amendment bill makes it clear that the council cannot set fees or levies higher than they need to to cover actual and reasonable costs. So the concerns—the very real concerns—that were brought to the select committee by all of those submitters have been addressed in that the fair and reasonable, actual and reasonable is very much a part of the process now. It makes it clear that the council must consult with the profession, and the consultation must be of good quality. Now, what happens is we’ve imposed an explicit requirement for the council to receive the views presented to it with an open mind and give those views due consideration when making a decision about fees and levies.

As the last speaker, I want to look forward with a bit of hope and what will be different as a result of this legislation. What next? We cannot legislate for trust. We cannot legislate for highly productive and functioning relationships with the profession. But I am looking forward to the council following through on its intentions to conduct consultation in the future in a different way. They said they intend to invite the peak bodies and unions to co-design a new consultation process; not just consult about how much those fees should be but actually what is fair and reasonable, determining and establishing a shared understanding of what those functions do actually look like.

This legislation has established a clear framework to clearly engage effectively with the profession, respectfully and successfully. And, ideally, we end up with a Teaching Council that the profession and the country trusts. That’s something our profession deserves, that’s something our students deserve, and thus I commend this bill to the House.