Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2)

I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2).

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

I move that the Education and Training Amendment Bill be now read a second time. I’d like to begin by thanking the Education and Workforce Committee for their careful consideration—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Order! Order! Can the Minister just start again with the correct name of the bill, please.

Did I not read that correctly? I move, That the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Thank you. You just missed the “(No 2)”.

Oh right—OK. Very good.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Thank you.

Thank you. Well, I’ll start again. [Interruption]

💬 Hon David Bennett: I don’t know if he did, actually—I think he might have spoken once.

Well, the second one’s even better than the first. I know that—I moved the first one as well. Can I start again by thanking the members of the Education and Workforce Committee for the careful consideration that they gave to the bill and to Supplementary Order Paper 118, which relates to early learning network management, which I’ll speak more about in a moment.

To briefly recap what the bill does, it covers a range of different issues and it’s part of an ongoing programme of work to tidy up, effectively, education laws and regulations in New Zealand. It started with the Education and Training Act, which drew together the existing legislation into one place and put it into a more streamlined version. Now this, along with other bills that are progressing, is tidying up the various policy issues that were identified during that process.

So not much of this will set the world on fire, but they are, in fact, important provisions. They cover almost every aspect of our education system: early learning through to tertiary. They’ll help to strengthen the network management provisions for early learning. They’ll make the Teaching Council complaints process more efficient. They’ll enhance learner wellbeing and safety for international and tertiary students. They will provide more flexibility in the way that we regulate compulsory student services fees that are charged by tertiary education providers. The changes will authorise the use of national student numbers to support work-based training—something that we’re expecting to see a lot more of. They’ll also authorise the use of those numbers to support the teaching and assessment of NCEA in other jurisdictions, and the changes will give the Education Review Office the ability to review professional learning and development.

A range of submissions were received by the committee, so I’m told. They covered a range of views and suggestions. I understand that they were quite constructive and broadly supportive of the changes in the bill.

So to run through a few of the key changes that are being endorsed at this second reading, for police vetting, an amendment closes a minor loophole in the bill by requiring registered but non-certificated persons employed in non-teaching roles to be police-vetted before they start working.

For the Teaching Council disciplinary process—and this is quite important—we got a lot of feedback over the last couple of years that the disciplinary process that is used by the Teaching Council has become too cumbersome and, in fact, is adding significant cost to teacher registration fees unnecessarily with no real increase in professional standards and no real justification, so we’re making changes there. The bill is aiming to make the handling of complaints more efficient and more streamlined, but we also need to balance the rights of teachers and are ensuring that teachers continue to have a say in the sanctions that may be imposed by the Complaints Assessment Committee, so the select committee has proposed retaining the existing requirement in the Act for the Complaints Assessment Committee to reach an agreement about a sanction with a teacher who is the subject of a complaint.

The bill’s been updated to make sure that if minor or technical amendments are made to the code of pastoral care by the Minister, the code administrator needs to make reasonable efforts to notify representatives of affected persons or the staff of affected providers. That makes sense to the Government: people need to understand what the code is and what it means for them. The notification requirement will mean that affected parties will be able to scrutinise any of those changes as well. Concerns were raised about information-sharing provisions in the student contracts dispute resolution scheme, so the bill now clarifies what those provisions are to better ensure that they’re aligned with the information privacy principles in the Privacy Act of 2020. So I want to thank the committee for those technical amendments.

I know the committee spent quite a lot of time discussing early learning network management. It’s an issue that I’ve grappled with quite a lot in the period of time that I’ve been the Minister of Education, and I’ve heard from providers, who invest a lot of time and energy and, in many cases, their capital, in building up early learning services to find that, suddenly, the area where they’ve built up that service is subject to significant oversupply. Then, likewise, in other areas, we get complaints from communities that they have undersupply in other areas. So we want to take a more strategic approach to the way we manage early learning services and the granting of new early learning service licences.

Having said that, we’ve also got to recognise that there are some constraints there as well. So we’ve got to make sure that the licensing regime allows a practical window of opportunity for people to build a service. There are certainly challenges at the moment—and I’ve had some good conversations with the Opposition spokesperson about this—where services are finding that the building and construction sector is particularly heated, as many are, and, therefore, they were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to build services within the time frames allowed. So we have done some work to push out the deadlines for when these provisions apply. Now, the Government is intending to propose some additional changes at the committee of the whole House stage around the length of time someone can take from being given a provisional approval to when they actually build their service, because we recognise that that will be particularly difficult at the moment. So, again, I want to acknowledge the discussion that has happened there and thank the committee for their consideration of that.

The bill touches on the Crown’s obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi in relation to partnership and active protection, and, as such, we have had further conversations about that and made the decision to exclude kōhanga reo from early learning network management at this point. In fact, we need to see an expansion of Māori-medium early childhood education and provision on quite a significant scale. Growing the number of early learning services that are teaching children in te reo Māori is a priority for the Government, so, hence, we want to exclude them from these provisions at this point, and I want to signal that there’ll be some further changes that we’ll considering there in the committee of the whole House stage as well.

I also intend to—well, actually, I think I’ve covered all of the changes that I intend to move through the committee of the whole House stage. So it really just remains for me to thank the committee, once again, for their work and say that I’m looking forward to the debate when the bill reaches the committee of the whole House stage. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I have to wholeheartedly agree with the Minister when he says that most of the changes in this bill won’t set the world on fire. But what is worthy of debate—and he won’t be surprised to hear this—is Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 118 around network planning. Nothing in this Supplementary Order Paper can’t, I would argue, be done under the existing tools available to the Minister, and what it will, in fact, do is reduce choice, it will reduce quality, and it will reduce the affordability in early childhood education (ECE). That has been our position all the way along and it doesn’t change.

There were some changes made to the bill at the select committee stage, and we worked really constructively, I’d have to say, as a committee to get some of those changes through, and I’ll mention some of them in a moment. The Minister has already alluded to some of them. We worked really hard to make this SOP a better SOP. I would argue that network planning still does more harm than good, but I would say that we did work really constructively and got some wins to change that SOP to make what is a bad idea a slightly less bad but none the less still a very bad idea.

I just want to go through some of the changes that we made at select committee on SOP 188 around network management. Firstly, the commencement date, and I have to say that having the Minister come into the committee, this new way of operating where we get the Minister in before we start talking to submitters and start thinking about the bill—having the Minister come to the committee and explain what he’s trying to do actually worked really well in this case because we got to give him some feedback that was, I think, really important around the commencement date of network planning.

It was 1 August this year, and builders had been given a two-year window to get their buildings completed before they had to apply for an application for licensing. The problem was that two years, firstly, is never long enough to build an ECE centre or even renovate one—that’s the first problem, and we’ll talk about that more in a bit—and, secondly, COVID had come along in the meantime and made things really difficult. We had lockdowns, we had lack of supply of materials, we had people off with COVID and buildings delayed, and we had council services that weren’t able to come in and do inspections, and that pushed out the building of so many centres that were not going to make it in time for the 1 August date.

Now, we made this very clear to the Minister right at the very start. It should have been, frankly, obvious to him. The feedback from the sector should have been obvious to the officials and to the Minister, but it was the work of the Opposition in pointing out that there were going to be dozens and dozens of centres caught out and, potentially, put in very, very difficult situations where banks were going to stop lending to them halfway through a build because they were concerned about the fact that they might not get their first licence. Now, to the Minister’s credit, he listened and changed the date out to 1 February. We did try and move that out six weeks, given that six weeks is lost over the Christmas period, where councils and health authorities can’t come in and do any checks over that period, but, unfortunately, that was voted down—I tried my best.

The second area that was really important—and many submitters came in and talked about this—was not the commencement date as such, but the two-year period to build an ECE centre. The only part in this bill that would guarantee you a little bit of extra time was some sort of unforeseen event like a natural disaster, but a lack of building products or consent times pushing out weren’t included, and so we made that really clear to officials that there wasn’t a developer that we spoke to that said that they could get a centre built in two years under normal circumstances, let alone the circumstances that we exist in right now with a lack of building products and a lack of workers. It was really hard for us to get this through to officials, and I have to commend the Minister. He entertained me in his office and listened to me, and went away and has said that he’s going to put an SOP through extending this. We don’t know what the details of that SOP are, but if it’s sensible and it makes the bill better, we will support it. But we have yet to see the details of that.

The other change that was made, which kind of went maybe 10 percent of the way to making this clause better, was—I call it—the clause that will stop banks lending to ECE. What this clause says is that the Minister may, at any time, impose new conditions on the approval, or may amend or revoke any conditions. So for those out there who are listening, the Minister could give approval for a pre-licence and, then, halfway through the build, could change his mind about the conditions of that build—how many licences, for example. When we put this to officials, they said, “No, no, no. It’ll only be if the developer’s circumstances change that the Minister will make these changes.” We tried to get that made clear in the bill, but we were unsuccessful. The only change that was made was around the fact that now there is an explicit requirement to notify the applicant of any changes and seek their response, but, in the end, the Minister still retains the right to make any changes that he likes halfway through a build.

The other thing that was changed was excluding kōhanga reo from network planning. The question arises from this—and it’s not clear in the bill and it’s not clear in any of the commentary—how the Government will analyse statistics to come up with their regional plans for network planning. Do they exclude Māori from that statistical analysis if kōhanga reo aren’t included in network planning? When people are putting forward their plans to try and get a pre-licence, are they to include Māori in that area or not include Māori in that area because kōhanga reo aren’t included, or are they to exclude a percentage of Māori in that data analysis? So I think, potentially, there is a problem that the data will be skewed around where a centre is required and who requires that centre if we’re not including kōhanga reo in network planning. I’m not saying that we should include it, but I’m just saying that we haven’t heard from the Minister how the data will now be analysed if kōhanga reo are not included.

Probably the most important things are the changes that weren’t made. One of the things that I argued really strongly for was statutory time frames for decisions to be made. I argued really strongly for this because developers clearly said to us in select committee that if a developer is putting up land for tender or they’ve got an option on some land, they put in their network plan application and then have to wait. How long? We don’t know. We argued for a reasonable amount of time so that developers wouldn’t lose out on land. The problem comes if a developer has an option on some land, puts in an application for approval for their licence, and then it takes three months for the Minister to make his decision. Meanwhile, they’ve lost the land, and what does that mean? Does that mean they have to go back to square one and apply again? So there’s all these questions that are thrown up through network planning that haven’t been answered.

In the short amount of time I’ve got left, I want to talk about the Minister’s strategic priorities—which have come out this week for consultation—and the problems around that, and nothing in this bill explains to us how he’s going to weight his strategic priorities.

So, for example, if you have a big centre that puts in on day one a very comprehensive plan, here’s a new development that requires a centre, and a big centre has come in and put their plan in. They’ve spent thousands of dollars on it, they’ve surveyed parents, they know exactly where to put it, and they know exactly what parents want, where they want it, and on what route, and then what does the Minister do? He’s got now a set of priorities that prioritise bilingual services, hapū- and iwi-owned services, services with a distinct Māori identity, Pacific bilingual—and the list goes on—Pacific language and culture. What does he do? Which one does he give weighting to?

If he gets a very comprehensive set of data from one centre and then one of his strategic-priority centres comes along with not such great data, and only for a small centre but the requirement is for more, what does he do? Which centre does he give the approval to? There’s nothing in this bill to say what the weighting is. If you take, for example, a new development area in rural New Zealand that requires, say, a centre for a hundred kids and a big centre comes along and says, “We can provide a centre for a hundred kids.”, and, say, a bilingual centre comes along and says, “Well, there’s only demand for 30. We can do 30.”, what does the Minister do?

We don’t know what the weighting is, and we would argue—I argued this in the first reading and I’ll argue it again at the third reading—that all this does is entrench those existing providers. It doesn’t give them any impetus or any incentive to keep their fees low or invest in capital to make their centre any better, because they will enjoy the licence without any competition, and so that’s why we’ve been opposing the bill. There are so many questions that we will put to the Minister at the committee stage around this, because they haven’t been answered at the select committee stage. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a real pleasure, as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, which dealt with the bill, to take a short call.

The Minister of Education ran us through the extensive work that was done during the last parliamentary term when, of course, we had a complete rewrite of the education legislation and a revamp—a well-overdue revamp—of the whole education legislative framework. We had a new Education and Training Act created at the time, which came in force on 1 August 2020, and it was actually the most significant education legislation that we had seen for several decades at that time.

So the Minister has already spoken about the next steps being continuous improvement in that process that we have started. The Minister gave us quite a good recap of those improvements that this bill contains, so I won’t go too deep into the detail, except to say that we had 36 written submissions in total come to this committee and we had 14 oral submissions that we heard, and 14 of the 15 submissions that dealt solely with this particular bill supported the bill.

Also, we heard the previous speaker Erica Stanford talk about the timing of the network management changes. It is probably fair to say that as a result of the feedback and the Minister’s taking that feedback into account, we had the timing pushed back significantly from 1 August 2022 to what is now the date of 1 February 2023. That is a balanced approach because, I guess, we also have to acknowledge that the provisions in the Act have been in there now for a couple of years and the sector has been aware of them. I also want to add to this that a good early childhood education centre doesn’t mean it has to necessarily just be a new build, so that is something to keep in mind, as well.

So this bill is, then, one of a number of bills that the Government will be bringing to the House this parliamentary term. Together, they will progress our education work programme and contribute to what I’ve already mentioned is a continuous improvement of the education sector. I do commend the Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Hipkins, for introducing this bill, and I commend it to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). The purpose of the bill, obviously, at the start was to make a number of amendments across a range of relatively minor and technical changes, but then, of course, that changed with Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 118, when it brought in the networking planning for the early childhood sector—a particularly significant addition to the bill.

Some of the technical changes are relatively minor, but I think they’re worth mentioning because some will have real nuisance value. The police-vetting provisions will certainly be a nuisance to the police in that a number of applicants—non-teaching and unregistered-position applicants—will be preparing their application and getting vetted in preparation for it, so that means that the police are going to be doing a lot more work than is necessary in that area. The other area is that of the compulsory student services fees being charged. The notes say, and I listened carefully to the Minister of Education saying, “greater flexibility for the Government”—please read that as “much less flexibility for the tertiary education providers”. Once more, the Government is exercising more control and, therefore, making it more difficult, with less control for those on the ground.

The simplification of qualifications and other credentials: this is an enabling part of the bill for the WDCs, or the workforce development councils, which were part of the review of vocational education. That was a completely unnecessary review, and equally unnecessary workforce development councils were put in place. Previously, this work was done by industry training organisations, which were made up of people from the industry. The workforce development councils, unlike the industry training organisation boards, are mainly made up of union representatives and special interest groups, and so I think we are quite likely to see a change in focus around the qualifications. Let’s look carefully and see how many encompass things like employee rights, health and safety, and employee welfare, rather than the actual skills needed in a trade and industry qualification.

The most significant part of the bill, though, obviously was SOP 118. The Minister talked about the granting of new early childhood education (ECE) licences. Now, all through, I kept thinking that this is a solution looking for a problem, and the solution that was already sitting there for the Minister was the targeted assistance for participation (TAP) funding that could have been used where he wanted to put in place centres—particularly special nature centres—where there aren’t centres or where it’s difficult to put a centre in for it to be viable. So he had the tool there to be able to bring about the change without taking this heavy-handed sledgehammer to the walnut.

This, though, is part of an overall trend. This is a Government trying to dictate to the private sector. So we’re seeing it in the ECE sector, we’ve seen it in the tertiary education sector, and we’ve seen it in the healthcare of elderly sector—most recently in the tertiary sector, where the Minister has reduced funding for private providers, and it will be to such an extent that a number of private providers will close. In the healthcare sector, I received a letter this week, as did a number of southern MPs, about the incredible difficulties that their private providers in the care of elderly were finding and the lack of sympathy from the Government in terms of those private providers. It is ideological. It is driven from a point of saying that the private sector should not be doing these things, the centre knows best, the Government knows best, and the Government wants control.

The two-year time frame that my colleague Erica Stanford has referred to—there was a lot of argument over this. Look, I’m not surprised that the Minister didn’t understand that you couldn’t build something in two years. We have to keep remembering that the Minister has never run any sort of tertiary, early childhood, or any education centre, so he simply wouldn’t know how long it takes to get resource consent, to get building consent, and to do the building of it. As someone who has built over $110 million worth of education facilities, I knew that two years was ridiculous, and so we had to try and point this out gently to the Minister so that he could understand it.

Going to a number of early childhood centres with this legislation and trying to get from them what the issues are—and look, there are a number of issues. Having visited a number of centres, let’s traverse some of the issues that they are looking at. Child-to-teacher ratios: major issues there. Pay parity—where the Government has caused more harm than good. Quality assurance: spot checks are not regularly occurring that we were led to believe would occur. High costs to parents—and here we see the impact, again, on those squeezed middle-income families, who have got high childcare costs. The free hours for those over three years old just simply are not free hours for many families. The administrative burden on teachers and centre managers; the restrictions on the six hours per day that can be claimed; the skill shortages and the desperate issues that they have around being able to access qualified teachers, who are simply burning out—these are all real problems. They’re real problems looking for solutions, not solutions looking for a problem, as the Minister has gone here.

The consultation around this legislation, this bill, could not have happened at a worse time. When I visited the centres and talked to the centre managers, these were people who were absolutely exhausted. They were people who had been through the most difficult time in their careers: keeping centres open for essential workers; keeping centres open when they were struggling to get enough teachers there themselves; people having to work much longer hours than they should have; trying to cope with these staff shortages; trying to cope with children with COVID; and all the time, they were expected to be in a place in their mindset to be able to think of network management—of the Government wanting to have more control over where centres should be open, how they should open, and what they should look like.

This whole notion of strategic priorities, again, talking to the centres—how do you put these applications in when you have no idea what the weighting is going to be of the criteria? This most transparent Government ever, without any indication on just how these priorities are going to influence the Minister’s decision-making!

This just looks like the whole tertiary education situation again, where, if you centralise it, you have control over it. When I look at things like the simplification of qualifications, where normally 16 invitations to participate would have been putting in submissions, all of a sudden it’s centralised, controlled by a head office. They cannot put submissions in. They cannot put their heads up and disagree with the Government, because they are entirely controlled by the centre.

So that’s what this Government is wanting to do with this legislation: more control. They’ve got control of the vocational sector. They’re going now for this greater control of the early childhood education centre. This will not improve quality; it will lower quality. It will reduce competition and it will increase prices, and the squeezed middle families will be hit again.

I was really looking forward to hearing somebody who was supposedly a champion for vocational excellence in New Zealand, and it was really disappointing to hear the speaker before me talk about things that aren’t happening. It would be really great if you’d kept up—it’s not a review of vocational education; it was a reform. Things have changed, and they’ve changed for the better.

This bill brings coherence to vocational training. We’re getting rid of things—our training programmes and training packages—and we’re getting really coherent micro-credentialling, qualifications, and national curricula, and they are determined by industry, because we do have these things called workforce development councils and they are driven by industry.

💬 Nicola Grigg: And unions.

The industry decides—do the maths. It isn’t dominated by unions; it is dominated by the sectors. It’s industry-led. It’s going to bring long-term solutions to the workforce development issues that we hear in health, in construction, and primary industries.

I was with farmers last week who were really pleased about the fact that they were going to have young farmers turn up on-farm and they were going to have qualifications that were developed by them—by the farmers—and they were going to be credible and they were going to be world leading. They were looking forward to that because the other system was not delivering for them.

So for those of you who can keep up, you will understand that this bill is supporting a very good, very progressive way of building a wonderful vocational framework that will meet industry needs because it is led by industry. So keep up because the world is moving on, and I really do commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. First of all, I’d like to acknowledge all of our teachers and learning support staff and school leaders and principals and our communities, who have been doing it tough over the last couple of years. They really do have our tamariki at their heart and our children at their heart as well. Whenever I meet teachers, you know it’s not about the money—they’re not going to make heaps of money, anyway—it is about the passion and commitment to our children, to our tamariki, to our whānau, and to our families, and I just wanted to start off by acknowledging them. At 9 o’clock tonight, if any of the teachers are out there watching this and listening to this debate, I would say, “Why?”—two words: work-life balance. But if you are out there listening, kia ora, tēnā koutou katoa.

The House has been moving pretty quickly tonight. It’s been kind of whizzing through, and I can only imagine it’s because the Labour Party can’t wait to release all the goodies—the education budget goodies—for teachers and those out there in the learning sector. I know I’ll be interested to take a look about what’s going to be showing up in that Budget. We know—and it’s been talked about a bit in the House tonight—about the pay parity gap in early childhood education (ECE). The solution there is that you actually need to put some more funding into those steps. It was a start, but it was a start that actually needed to have more funding, and it needs the sort of funding where you actually can get a line of sight and a long-term vision as to how we’re going to actually decrease that gap in ECE, because it is massive. With a plan, it signals to the sector, “You know what? Actually, this Government is serious about sorting that out.”, and I will be looking for that and I’m sure some of the teachers will be looking for that.

Also, I’m mindful of some of the learning support staff that I have met over the past year as well, and I’m hoping that will also feature in this Budget as well, because they do an amazing job. I will be looking at the operational grants part of the education budget as well to see if there is going to be anything there for those learning support staff but particularly our teacher aides, our resource teachers of learning and behaviour, our resource teachers, our clinicians, and everybody who supports our tamariki to do all those things.

Anyway, this bill is about none of that. The Minister of Education talked earlier today about all the different things. This bill won’t put the house on fire—people were excited over there. It is one of those bills which is designed to sort of pull together and tidy up a bunch of things: things such as having better alignment for police-vetting requirements, strengthening and streamlining the Teaching Council’s disciplinary processes, giving the Government more flexibility to regulate compulsory student services fees by tertiary education providers, enabling student numbers, enabling the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to exercise discretion, expanding the Education Review Office, simplifying qualifications and other credentials, and ensuring that learner wellbeing and safety arrangements and dispute resolution schemes for international and tertiary students are fit for purpose. A Supplementary Order Paper did show up. I had a look at it and I was just going through some of the submissions, and I think it’s a good thing, to be honest.

What the ECE sector needs is consistency. We have talked about pay parity; we do talk about pay equity. We do talk about how it’s incredibly patchy out there within the ECE sector as well, so we feel that this will actually give a bit more of that consistency across the ECE sector.

The introduction of network management for early learning is a provision for early learning services which, to be honest, has been left to the market, resulting in an oversupply of services in some areas while other areas remain underserved. It is often those communities that are disadvantaged due to location and socio-economic status who suffer from an undersupply. So good on the Government—it’s good to see this proactive approach.

I do note the submission from the New Zealand Educational Institute, who said that the “Private provision has been shown to encourage a ‘race to the bottom’ around wages and working conditions, opening a wide pay gap between teachers in early learning and their colleagues with the same qualification in the schooling sector. This has created barriers to the provision of quality early learning and has contributed to a critical shortage of teachers in the sector. This is confirmed by the experiences of teachers in private early learning over the past few decades, as well as a proliferation of research reports and reviews identifying the failures of market-based provision.”

Capitalism is what I think the general term for it is, and I do like how they sum it up here, because, yes, this is a good step, but there is more to do—and this quote here is—“However, while the new network planning provisions in the bill are an important step in moving away from market-based provision and preventing further damage, they do not offer a pathway for undoing the damage market-based provision has caused. The proposed provisions are akin to a halting of the tide, but not of a turning [of the tide].” So I’m hoping there’s going to be a bit more in this Budget which will help to not only halt the tide but turn the tide.

My final reflection is on supporting our kōhanga reo. It is always important that we build those relationships and build those connections with our kōhanga reo, with our kura kaupapa, and with our wharekura, understanding that commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi but also understanding that they are servicing and committed to a different need out there. It’s not like we are building kōhanga reo on top of each other—they’re not as prolific as that. It is built around those whānau that have that commitment to te reo Māori, have that commitment to tikanga, and have those roots within the community or families that want to participate in that, so it does make sense that there is a different way that you engage in that. So I do take the Minister’s point in having a bit more of think-through about what that relationship would look like in terms of this management process. So, on that, we support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to speak to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). The purpose of the bill is to make amendments across a range of matters in the Act to give effect to new policy decisions and to make other minor and technical changes. There are some valid and reasonable changes in the bill, even if they are minor and technical, but taken as a whole, the desire to get more Government control is obvious and ACT will not be supporting the bill.

The major areas of change are police-vetting provisions that better align with the Children’s Act 2014. This makes sense, but I would be surprised if most childhood services and schools don’t already have a policy like this without the need for legislation.

Teaching Councils have been talked about quite a lot recently and it’s been noted that matters of teachers’ conduct have taken too long to reach an outcome. The aim is to strengthen the Teaching Council’s disciplinary processes. It makes sense as it is their core business, and a lot of other stuff isn’t and it shouldn’t be. I know of a matter that has just concluded after three years. It had dragged on for three years. It cost the person involved over $10,000 and it is the direct cause of a number of health conditions. After three years, a simple letter stating, “There will be no further action.” ended the anguish and a distinguished career, and this is unacceptable and it needs to be sorted.

I’ve spoken to many teachers and principals and I haven’t yet come across one who thinks the Teaching Council should be involved in teachers’ professional development. There’s a conflict of interest and the teachers actually know what they need to learn. They’re doing it now and they can sort it.

The amendment to the compulsory student services fee sounds OK, but we in the ACT Party shudder when we read “give the Government more flexibility to regulate”. I think we all know what that means. The PTE—or private training establishment—changes are to enable the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to exercise discretion about whether to council the registration of a private training establishment in relation to immigration breaches. There were five cases in 2018-19, affecting a total of about 60 students. This area needs to be looked at, but we don’t believe this sort of authoritarian attitude is warranted, and we have to ask: is it the “private” part of PTEs that’s the problem?

The bill extends the mandate of the Education Review Office (ERO) to enable it to review professional learning and development. As an ex-teacher, the mention of ERO makes me nervous, and this addition of responsibility doesn’t alleviate this nervousness at all.

Then we have new sections around student accommodation. A couple make sense—for example, the provider must ensure employees must be of good character and undergo police vets, amongst other things. But new section 634A in clause 57 says where an administrator can authorise any person to “enter and inspect any premises” to check that the provider is complying with the code. You can’t just barge into a gang pad to look for drugs without a warrant, so we think this is quite an overreach and not justified.

Then we come to Supplementary Order Paper 118, which is a concern for lots of reasons, adding another chapter to the agenda around early childhood education centres (ECEs) that I think we have every right to be suspicious about. I won’t go into the details—I think some previous speakers have done that very well—but the concern ACT has over the control the Minister seeks to have over private businesses wasn’t addressed properly in the select committee. Too many inadequately answered questions that make us suspect other agendas and ideologies are the main reasons for this addition. We also think that all ECEs should be treated equally, including kōhanga reo.

ACT opposes this bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). For far too long, the education sector was underfunded. Some areas were almost left dry and the sector was left to demoralise. There was a worrying teacher shortage and schools were in despair. It was the previous speaker’s Penny Simmonds’ party that left the sector dry and in tatters, in case she forgets, because what I heard her saying about the Minister of Education not having any experience is just funny and ironic.

This bill is the next step in the Government’s improvement in the education sector. It fits within the larger overhaul of the education legislation, bringing all early learning schooling and tertiary education into a single statute. The changes set out in this bill create a more sustainable and higher-quality and a more diverse network of early learning services.

This bill will do quite a few things. One of the things that it will be doing is that the police-vetting process will be more aligned with the Children’s Act 2014. Non-teaching staff also must have a police vet before starting. It includes registered teachers who do not have a practising certificate. This bill will also make a number of minor and technical amendments.

The Education and Workforce Committee dealt with some concerns raised along the way. For example, the commencement of this provision was quite a concern for some people, and that is pushed back now to 1 August 2022.

So this is a balanced bill that puts a lot of things into consideration, and I’d like to thank the Minister for his hard work to bring this bill into the House. I also want to commend the members of the select committee for their positive engagement. It was quite a diligent and positive vibe when we discussed this bill. So with no further delay, I’d like to commend this bill to the House.

The next call is a split call. I call on Nicola Grigg—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am just going to make a short contribution this evening in opposition to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2).

As has been previously canvassed, this bill does give effect to a number of new Government policy decisions. They might like to term them initiatives, but we would say they are retrograde and backward steps. But I would actually like to talk a lot about what Penny Simmonds, I think, very eloquently referred to as nuisance value. One has really to question the timing of something like this, and I know a member opposite tried to tell the National Party side of the House that we needed to get real and get with the programme. Well, actually, we do. We go out and speak to these providers, and they frequently talk to us about the vast and deep impact that the last two years have had on them and their operations, and a change like this is just yet another thing that they are going to have to deal with.

I think someone mentioned this just before. I’ve got an email here from a provider who lives in my region and has been in this industry for 21 years. She spent 14 years managing five centres and she says, “Thankfully, I currently only operate one.”—given the vast amount of regulation and authority that is raining down on them at the moment. The key areas that she has been concerned with this particular bill have been in the ratios that have been mentioned, in the teacher training, the teacher supply, and the police vetting. She thinks that around 33,000 applications are going unqualified and unattended, but, actually, she does a bit of a deep dive into the ramifications and the impacts on these private providers. These are people trying to run a business.

She said, “Here is a cross-sector of clients that have approached us or engaged with us in the past 12 months. One spent time in a mental health facility—owned two centres, one of which was shut down. One has thrown in the towel and sold after a mere seven months. Many are working on the floor with children, do extra hours completing compliance after hours, and are not keeping up with the requirements of licensing. Four are seeking help for licensing breaches and facing closure, all of which just because they are overwhelmed. Many operators, managers, and teachers are speaking up about their recent mental health issues, including anxiety attacks, panic attacks, depression, borderline suicidal. Our sector is drained, and no doubt so is the health sector.”

The reason I raise this is, again, because of the point of the Government’s ill-timed amendments to this sector, but I would also like to focus some contribution on this Supplementary Order Paper 118, which is exercising many in the sector. For many private providers, this is the very thin end of the wedge. They are very nervous—and I think rightly so—that this is just the beginning of a move towards centralisation and carving them out of the market so that we end up with a nationwide kindergarten system.

The vast majority of opposition to this network building is that it removes choice from providers, choice from parents, and choice from families. In Selwyn, the electorate that I am very lucky to represent, there is a centre in Rolleston turning away 50 to 20 new kids a week, and I do know another that’s had 20 enrolments in the past three weeks, but just simply can’t cater to them. Selwyn is the fastest-growing territorial authority in New Zealand, and this bill does not cater for districts like that which I represent.

This network system is only going to reduce competition in fast-growing areas and will not be there to provide essential services for families and—more importantly—for kids. It disincentivises competition and, disappointingly, it encourages the expectation of the meeting of minimum requirements only, and I think that’s been summed up really well. In its submission to the select committee, the Early Childhood Council said that the changes require a “significant ‘leap of faith’ to have confidence that any new process would be workable.”

So this is yet another example of the long arm of Government reaching into private enterprise, dictating how the private sector should operate, telling the public “we know best”, and it is, therefore, going to do nothing but reduce choice and quality for the children of New Zealand. National opposes this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to rise and take this call.

Consummate—consummate—conservatives. But the fundamental conservative—with a little “c”—Nicola Grigg would say, “Not now. Let’s not do anything right now. Let’s not improve our police vetting. Let’s not improve the quality of our education.” But I can’t blame her—she hasn’t been in education for years and years. Penny Simmonds, however, should know a lot better. We all know she can read, but to spend 10 minutes reading her speech and continually harp on about Southern Institute of Technology, which isn’t even affected by this—it would be great to have some engagement from the Opposition with ideas. It would be good to have a proposition from the Opposition, rather than a do-nothing Opposition who says, “Not now. Too early. Let’s sit on our hands.”

This is a bill that’s going to improve education, and I’m very glad to be part of a Parliament and a party that is committed to improving the lives of all New Zealanders, including this. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ve said it before in relation to this bill, but I’ll say it again: it is good lawmaking to make sure that any issues that have arisen through a substantive process are addressed through subsequent legislation. This is what this bill does: it improves the education sector in New Zealand.

It goes through almost every element of our education sector, as the Minister of Education has stated, and makes tiny improvements. As we’ve also heard—and other speakers have gone on in detail about this—Supplementary Order Paper 118 does make substantive policy changes in relation to early childhood education. The speakers on the other side accused the speakers on our side, or the Government, in fact, that this particular type of bill was a trend, and I agree with them. It is a trend—a trend towards improving education for all of our learners and all of our students through continuous legislative change. These changes will lead to a more unified, diverse, sustainable, higher-quality, and consistent network of early childhood education and learning services in New Zealand.

Now just to turn to a slightly more sombre note, I lost my grandmother on the weekend. My grandmother—her name was Valerie Belich. She passed away on 14 May. As a young parent she was a supervisor at early childhood education services, and so I just wanted to honour her memory, really, by talking about what she believed in in relation to early childhood education. She believed passionately that all parents should be educated in early childhood development, and she also believed passionately in the value of early childhood education.

So although this is not a major legislative change in this area, this will improve early childhood education in New Zealand, and it will improve the experiences of children who are in that education. So I think, even though it is not a substantive bill, she would support this bill and the direction it’s going in, into making those improvements for the children in New Zealand.

This bill also goes through and makes a number of important changes to health, safety, and wellbeing. Now these are important changes. They are not things that should be maligned or should have it said that they are a Government overreach. They ensure that things like police vets happen for people who are working with our most vulnerable—children. These are important things, and so I have no hesitation in commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d just like to pay our respects to the past speaker Camilla Belich and her family. Anybody that serves in the teaching profession is someone that’s given their life to other people and to bettering our country, so a big thankyou for your family’s contribution in that area.

This is a bill that centres on the early childhood education (ECE) sector debate in this House tonight, and when we look at that, the early childhood sector in New Zealand was, essentially, set up by Helen Clark in the great view of the left that everything should be done through Government. They would be very disappointed that the early childhood centres actually flourished and grew, because what they created was the ultra-capitalist society where they gave a payment to people in the private sector to actually deliver a service. In the true heart of the Labour Party, when it beats slowly at night, they’ll be thinking about how they actually did this: how they actually stuffed up early childhood education, in their view, and didn’t create another form of primary or secondary or intermediate education where the State dominates, the State runs, the State owns, and the State controls.

Helen Clark got it wrong, and the Labour Party, that little heartbeat that flutters in the middle of the night sometimes and is on life support now—

💬 Hon Stuart Nash: What are you talking about?

—is struggling for a home, is flat-lining, and needs a Stuart Nash to take over the leadership to give it some leadership and some strength—the Labour Party will never admit it, but they hate having a private sector part of the education system. They will hate it, and this is a blatant attempt by the Labour Party to try and ratchet in that sector.

Now, I’m not saying that they are wrong. Our primary, secondary, and intermediate schools, which are State-bound, have served this country and generations of members of this House exceptionally well. I’m not saying that’s the wrong policy; I’m just saying Helen Clark got it wrong when she was in Government and was setting up the structure.

Now, our education system values the most its Catholic network, of course. That adds a lot of value to the system. But that had to be brought in because of all those great MPs here that came through the Catholic network—they will understand how important that is. But the Labour Party is trying to ratchet that system up. They know that they want to change the rules around ECE and they don’t know how to do it, and that’s why you’re seeing the sector being quite dormant in the last few months, because people see the writing on the wall from this kind of legislation. It’s going to make them very difficult to do what they’re doing. They’re, effectively, going to be quasi - Government-controlled, and that’s what this Government attempts to do.

This will be a staged process by the Labour Government towards ECE. This will not be a one-off—“Oh, a little tinkering”. We hear them talk about “It’s only a small bill. Don’t worry about it.”, but there will be more tinkering and more plans as they try and dominate any private sector in this country, and that has been shown to be completely ineffective in other areas where they have done that.

So it is a small bill, but National does oppose it for fundamental reasons. The system we have in New Zealand for early childhood education is, essentially, a private system. Whether the Labour Party agrees with it or not, they set it up that way, and that’s the system we have. Unless they’re going to nationalise the whole thing, which I don’t think they’re going to do at this stage, they cannot change it other than tinkering with it, and every time you tinker with something, you distort it and it becomes less effective.

If you’re going to go down the market approach that we did, do not distort that market approach. What they’re going for is sort of a middle ground, where it’s a market approach but they control it, and that is the worst kind of approach that you can have.

So this is a bill that the National Party does not support. It’s time the Labour Party was honest about its history in this area and actually fronted up to the people in New Zealand and said what they actually think, and not try to do little pieces of legislation hiding the fact that they really have some issues around having a private education system in New Zealand.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m lucky to speak after Mr David Bennett, and it’s good to see my North Shore colleagues across the way on this particular topic. I am incredibly ambitious for the North Shore—I think I used “optimistic” as the word—but particularly our education system on the North Shore.

As North Shore MPs, we have to ask ourselves: do we have the best education system that meets the needs of all of our children—that is the question—and have we put the right changes in place to meet those learners’ needs? Sure, we’ve got some gaps. We’ve got some work to do. I look over to tertiary education—man, I am proud of the reforms that we are doing under this Government. I am proud of the savings and the opportunities for young people there and the achievements that we are working on.

But I come back to this particular bill, the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2), and this is another step in continuing this good work. It’s technical and there are some very simple changes that are required. But I want to speak very closely to clause 35—which, probably, nobody over the other side has read. It is the point that expands the functions of the Chief Review Officer of the Education Review Office to include reviewing professional learning and development access by schools, kura, and early learning centres.

Under this Government, we’ve heavily invested in the development of our teachers, the development of our learning support workers in schools, and the development of people that teach our tamariki. But what we also want to know—and I think of programmes like Te Ahu o te Reo Māori, the investment into building te reo Māori capability amongst kaiako and teachers and amongst staff—that this particular investment has been well spent. As we increase the volumes, we now want to carve it up and ask: are we achieving the goals that we want to? This particular bill enables us to do that.

We have expectations. We have best practice that we are looking for so that in turn, our tamariki, our children, and our young people are receiving the best quality learning experience from early childhood education and kōhanga reo right up to tertiary and vocational learning. So thank you very much. I commend this bill to the House.