Peachey Allan: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Peachey Allan: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:646;Page:15022] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 It was H G Wells who said many years ago that civilisation is a race between catastrophe and education. For too many of our children in this country today the race is leading to catastrophe. How can it be that a country of the wealth and background of New Zealand is still reporting to its Parliament that something like a quarter to a third of our children are not learning to read write and do mathematics to a level sufficiently high enough to let them function as reasonable sensible thoughtful adults and to take their place as contributing members in a market-driven modern world economy? That is what is happening in the New Zealand education system now. What we get from the Minister is a whole pile of platitudes excuses and reliance on ideologies that we know do not work. That is the point of this financial review. The ideologies of the Government mean that it has demonstrated that it is not capable of getting to grips with the issue of why so many of our children are not learning. 
One of the things the ministry said to us in the select committee as part of the review was that yes there is a shortage of teachers in South Auckland where some of our poorest children and the children who are in most urgent need of top-quality teaching are but we should not worry because there are spare teachers in the South Island. The bit that is missing of course is that those teachers are in the South Island; they are not where the demand is. 
I have to ask the question of how many of our children in New Zealand schools are currently being taught by teachers who are not in command of the language of instruction. Language is the great skill that a good schoolteacher has to communicate with children of all backgrounds abilities and interests. Time and time again school principals are telling us that they are not able to hire teachers with that ability. 
When we look at the secondary sector we see that secondary teaching is no longer getting its share of the top graduates: those men and women who will bring intellectual rigour to the curriculum and to assessment. They are no longer being attracted in sufficient numbers into secondary school teaching. What we have instead—and this is the failure of the Minister his predecessors and that Government—is an uncontrolled growth in bureaucracy: the Ministry of Education the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the Teachers Council and the Education Review Office. More and more taxpayers’ money is being spent on pointless bureaucracy because that Government does not get it that children learn in classrooms and in positive relationships with their teachers. No child whom I know ever learnt to read write or count in the office of a bureaucracy. No child has ever learnt in the office of a bureaucracy. Yet this Government’s only answer to the critical problems facing our education system is to hire more bureaucrats and get bigger offices then try to regulate the initiative the sense of responsibility and the ambition out of schoolteachers school principals and boards of trustees. The desperate call of the children and their parents in this country must be to get that money out of the bureaucracy into schools and to teachers to give them a fair chance at developing the programmes and teaching that are required to ensure that not just some of our children but every single child has the opportunity to learn. At the moment because of the policies of that Government and because of its obsession with bureaucracy centralised control and strangling initiative too many of our children are not getting the opportunity they need.