Delahunty Catherine: Education (Charter Schools Curriculum) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education (Charter Schools Curriculum) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7226. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare Pāremata. I am delighted to support this excellent bill. If we are going to talk about freedom of choice let us talk about a genuine choice for all which is a quality locally based public education system. It is not giving double the money per student to failed experiments that are not accountable and are not required to focus on the excellent curriculum that has as a previous speaker Chris Hipkins said worldwide recognition.In only the last 2 weeks we have seen why this bill is important. This bill is important because we have just had the evaluation of the first round of charter schools by Martin Jenkins and Associates. I do not know a lot about its people. They do not seem to be educational experts. They certainly were not assisted by the Government refusing to allow them to do a comparison between charter schools and State schools. But Martin Jenkins and Associates said that in terms of curriculum which is what this bill is about one of the weakest areas in the first round of charter schools was the lack of innovation in the curriculum.The whole modus operandi the whole rationale for this failed international gambit called charter schools was innovation. If we read the rather narrow evaluation on innovation we will find that the only way in which they innovated was around putting so-called experts on their school boards instead of parents. So there is no accountability to parents. There are people who may or may not have expertise. They have been put on these boards—that is the big innovation. But there was acknowledgment by the evaluators that there was a lack of innovation around the curriculum.So that makes it pretty clear that the stated objective of offering some new wonderful choice to marginalised students in the education system is not being met in the first round. The evaluation does not even talk about achievement and it will not allow comparison between schools. So bills like this come to the House because—[Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Can I ask members on both sides to stop the cross talk and let the member get on with her speech.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Fortunately Mr Assistant Speaker I have an ear infection and I cannot hear what is being said to me on my left here but it does make it difficult—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member is not missing much but it is disruptive.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I can hear white noise and I use that term advisedly. But what I do want to talk about is the fact that the curriculum is important because of its breadth. When you get schools that are now experts in preparing for the army and marching there is a very good reason to worry about breadth and to want the full weight of the New Zealand Curriculum to be offered to these students because we are hearing stories that there is a lack of breadth.Putting aside this evaluation that focused on the lack of curriculum innovation there are also plenty of interesting stories coming out of the existing experience of charter schools. Nobody—nobody—can say that the curriculum was a success at Whangaruru School. Nobody can say that. It is a tragic story. Having spent time in the north and having talked to people who are intimately involved it is a sad story of a school because the authorisation board for this failed experiment allowed it to open when it was clearly not ready—not ready in curriculum terms and not ready in many other terms. The children were the guinea pigs for a failed experiment. That is an inexcusable use of public money for children who are already struggling.I would never be romantic enough to say that the education system is perfect for Māori students in particular. I am passionate about Māori students getting access to things like Te Kotahitanga which challenges the Pākehā view of teaching education. But I am getting the message that it is time to go—I have got 1 minute. So what I will say about this bill is that this bill is part of a number of efforts by many Opposition members to try to make sure that we uphold what is good in our system we protect what is valuable and that we do not allow failed experiments to undermine the New Zealand Curriculum.Actually our kids deserve better than what is happening. They deserve better than what we are hearing from the charter schools. If the Government’s own evaluation tells you there is no innovation and the curriculum has not been innovated what was this all about? What was the point of doubling the money per student only to find that kids are missing out on the breadth of the curriculum and learning how to do marching missing out on cultural responsiveness that should be a given in schools and missing out on the genuine education that we need to fight for which is quality and public? Kia ora tātou katoa.