Gilmore Aaron: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Gilmore Aaron: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2671] 
AARON GILMORE (National) 
: 
 I rise to support the first reading of the Education Amendment Bill. The bill deals with three key messy issues in the education sector: reducing compliance issues around police vetting of contractors in for example early childhood education centres and I want to talk about that in a minute; allowing body corporates to be limited statutory managers or commissioners; and repairing a number of issues that exist already with the Teachers Council. 
I think we all believe that quality educational outcomes are critical to the future of New Zealand. I spoke about this at length in my maiden speech. Education is one of the fundamental planks of our Government’s plan for the future and everyone would agree that education is important. This bill is another step in that direction along with national standards and the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in school infrastructure. The Government is delivering confidence and helping to create aspiration for students and their parents. 
I attended a low-decile school in eastern Christchurch an area that commonly has problems with teacher retention teacher training and poor data quality and that has poor student performance as a result. There are many preschools in my area and they are what I want to talk about. They do not have the same level of resources as preschools on the other side of town. Compliance costs have a considerable impact on the actions of the parents and the students. 
I will give a specific example of the benefits of this bill. My family and I have been involved in our local playcentre and kindy for over 30 years. I myself attended this preschool. With no large amount of resources available the compliance costs of small early childhood education centres are considerable. We recently had to employ a contractor to build a new fence at the front of our local kindergarten. That contractor was required to be vetted by the police. That was ridiculous. We were volunteers who unlike the previous speaker had not had any experience of police vetting. We did not have any templates and forms. We had to create the whole process and to ring the police. We did not know what to do because no one had ever told us. With the resources wasted on that process a group of us parents could have built the fence ourselves as in a working bee. 
Stuart Nash 
: Why didn’t you? 
AARON GILMORE 
: Well as I was saying this is one of the issues that the bill is designed to fix. The current legislation is actually unworkable and this amendment bill will put in place some good steps in the right direction. It will free up resources to be spent on children and indirectly free up police resources to be used to catch criminals—which is what the police are there for of course. My own daughter who is 3 will be a beneficiary of this bill as well as the children of other families in my community. 
The benefits can be rolled out across the entire country. The Ministry of Education estimates that in the order of $350000 or more annually will be freed up as a result of the changes to the police-vetting procedures. That sum could be used to build a whole new preschool. It could be used to run a whole new preschool for 100 kids a year. We are a Government that wants more for our kids and wants resources to be used in a way that makes sense. For an area like mine with a rapidly growing population in north-east Christchurch this legislation is a good step—removing that sort of compliance and using those resources in a better way. 
The next move is to improve data matching of teachers. This is a problem across schools and the bill’s provisions will help identify teachers who perhaps inadvertently do not hold a current teacher’s practising certificate. Many non-certificated teachers who will be picked up by data matching will not be aware that there is a gap that needs to be filled. The bill will put in place a regime to help those people re-qualify or if they do not get out of the system. The programme will be reviewed on its effectiveness after 6 months against the objective that all teaching staff be registered. This is good. It will allow for a feedback loop to check the system is actually working. 
Let us talk a little about the limited statutory manager and commissioner changes that are in this bill. As Anne Tolley spoke about earlier there currently are 42 limited statutory managers and 29 commissioners. There are three commissioners in my area. My part of Christchurch has seen more than its fair share of commissioners and limited statutory managers. In fact my former school principal has made a full-time career as a limited statutory manager since retiring 15 years ago. A number of people across the country are equally eminently qualified to do this role but do not meet the current criteria to be a limited statutory manager. The changes in this bill will allow more people to do that job and get problem schools back on track. 
The previous speaker spoke about a gentleman called Professor Hattie. Professor Hattie has some good views and many of these have been adopted in some way. He was the developer of asTTle an important tool in the use of national standards. An important plank of our party policy is implementing national standards for numeracy and literacy. I think that is an important step in the right direction. 
I want to talk about some of the other changes that have been mentioned by earlier speakers. One is the change around playgroups. As a parent of two young kids I say that playgroups are an important facet of the local community. In Parklands where I live over 100 kids attend the local playgroup. Many playgroups do not know the rules and guidelines about how to operate or run a playgroup. This bill will allow more clarity on how those playgroups should be operated and what rules and regulations should apply to them. These are positive things. 
There are a number of other changes to anomalies. There are 13 major changes. They include allowing more flexibility for special schools and for school boards. Many schools as a result of the nature of their community do not have the right resources in terms of legal skills financial skills or the like. They cannot get them from their own community but the school next door does have them. This bill allows some changes. It allows the merging of school boards and allows sharing of resources if the boards choose to do so. That would work quite well in many cases that I have run into in my area. 
Other issues that this bill deals with are allowing the combination of new establishment boards more flexibility when private schools are reviewed and changing the time period for reviews by the Education Review Office. There are tidy-up issues around retrospective payments to integrated schools where there has been a mess-up. 
Another really interesting area is the offence mechanisms for student loans. I was a protester against student loans many years ago when they were introduced and I must admit that many students put in place systems whereby they knowingly or not fill in forms to get the resources they think they are entitled to. Changes in this law will allow that to work in a better way. They will make sure that students are not taking advantage of the system and that the resources are used in a more clever way. One of the other things this bill is designed to deal with is the suspension of teachers. At the moment a teacher is suspended for normally 3 to 6 months. This bill will allow that suspension to continue and there are good reasons for that in terms of suspension of the teacher’s practising certificate. There have been some cases in recent times where suspensions have caused some problems. 
The bill clarifies a number of issues around special classes special clinics special schools and special services. They are tidy-up provisions and make a lot of sense. They will reduce a bit of administration and work for officials and for certain schools up and down the country. Another issue that has been pointed out is the definition of “institution” and issues that arise around the requirements of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. 
The bill’s changes are good and not controversial. The only thing that Opposition members seem to think is controversial is the issue of contractors working in early childhood education centres. The changes that this bill introduces are good because they will allow small early childhood centres like those I have been involved with to operate more effectively and efficiently; allow the community to spend resources on the things it wants; allow the police to focus on what they should be doing—catching criminals—rather than vetting fence builders; and improve a whole series of other little snags that exist within the current law. Fixing these snags in the system is a worthy cause and I think we should commend this bill to the House. If members opposite actually thought about some of the changes being proposed particularly the issues of compliance they would see that they are a major improvement for particularly small centres in the early childhood sector rather than the secondary school sector. Thank you.