Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you for the opportunity to debate the Education (Update) Amendment Bill. I also will try not to read my speech as much as possible. Labour wants to be supportive of a bill like this. It has been 27 to 30 years and this is a huge undertaking that the Government has taken in rewriting the Education Act. However there are so many things in this bill that we just do not agree with unfortunately. The first is the communities of online learning. When this proposal was first debated in the House what I know from the coverage both in the media and just from listening to a lot of interviews after it was first proposed by the honourable Minister is that even though this bill has been consulted on for over 18 months the communities of online learning however was not one of those proposals that was taken out to those in the sector to ask them for their opinion about whether or not it was a good idea. Right now we already allow via charter schools the privatisation of education. The Government already allows charter schools to hire teachers who are not registered. But with the communities of online learning it goes even further than that. So not only are we saying if this bill passes that schools do not even have to have a registered teacher what the communities of online learning will allow for because the change in the law will allow it is that you do not even need a teacher. That is something I am fundamentally opposed to. I am a person who went through all of her schooling having been led by a teacher. From preschool primary school intermediate and right through to university I had a teacher of some kind. Just knowing and seeing a lot of the schools in my area in South Auckland seeing how the students interact with their teachers I say that having teachers is a crucial thing. I quote the vice-chancellor of Massey University the Hon Steve Maharey who once observed: Technology is merely a delivery mechanism. On its own it changes nothing." I agree. Technology is a good thing to have and yes we are going through a revolution in technology—automation; technology is a way of life. However one of the other reasons why communities of online learning just will not work for all of our students is that we know that not all of our kids actually have access to a digital device. There are some schools a few schools—Hon Member: It's called infrastructure.JENNY SALESA: Oh infrastructure; that is right. There are some schools via Manaiakalani where parents can by paying $3 or $4 or $5 a week access a digital device. However not all of our schools have access to Manaiakalani. So my question is: does this Education (Update) Amendment Bill allow for ensuring there is equal access for all of our children? The answer to that is no—not when there is something like a community of online learning that allows a whole school to be registered. We are told by the Minister of Education that there will be a rigorous process that a private entity will have to go through a school will have to go through and even a tertiary education provider will have to go through before it can become a community of online learning. But my question is: will it be more rigorous or will it be just as rigorous as when this current Government chose Serco? We know how that panned out when we allowed a private provider like Serco to run our prison systems. The other assumption that communities of online learning have us questioning—because it is definitely privatisation of education; it is the market model—is whether it is a market model that says to us in terms of education that the competitive market is what will deliver better educational results. Has it delivered better educational results? If we just look at the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) results internally here in New Zealand the honourable Minister will probably say: "Yes it has delivered." But what do those NCEA results actually mean when we have so many of our students graduating from high school with NCEA level 2 and some of them with NCEA level 3 but they still do not have a job? There are still over 87000 who are not in education training or employment. Do those NCEA results actually mean that our students are more successful now? When we are not filling our own jobs here when we are going overseas hiring people from overseas to fill in the huge skills gap that we have in this country are we actually successful in our educational system? Not for all of our students and I say that this education bill does not actually make sure that all of our students are going to be equally successful. This current Government has taken the attitude that the only learning that seems to matter is the one that can easily be measured. However it also says that the only measurements that matter are the national standards and NCEA and I do not agree that those are the most crucial of learnings for our students. The other thing that this bill proposes is that our students can start school as early as 4 years old. Labour is open to the debate of whether or not we allow kids to start school as early as 4 years old. However we would like to see the evidence and research to back that up. The other question I would like to pose this Government is: what about those poor vulnerable students—the young students who are not currently enrolled anywhere the ones who are living in cars garages or tents? We know from Te Puea Marae that of the families with young kids that they served about 50 percent of them were not actually enrolled in any formal education whether it be preschool primary school or high school. Why? Those parents told us that they were moving so often that they did not quite see why they would actually enrol their children when they would just have to move them. So my question to this Government is: will this bill deliver for our most vulnerable and poor children? I am not so sure. In terms of State integrated schools we welcome the move to consolidate education legislation by moving the law so that it allows for integrated schools as well. There are some really good well-integrated schools in my electorate over in Manukau East. Many of them are Catholic integrated schools. They deliver really good results for our students and so we welcome the move to include State integrated schools. The provision under this bill that we agree with is the fact that Careers New Zealand is going to be disestablished and moved into tertiary education. We know just from the consultation that we have had with the Future of Work Commission—a lot of people have told us that the career services advice at the moment needs to be really looked at and needs to be addressed. We of course have our own proposal which our leader has announced. We believe that it is the best way forward to professionalise careers advice. It is not something that I have seen in this particular bill and so that is something that Labour will do. Thank you very much."