Street Maryan: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Street Maryan: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:662;Page:10294] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 There are a couple of points I would like to make. I think it is really important that although Labour is supporting this bill at the Committee stage we register on the record one of our disappointments about the bill—though we are happy that a number of other amendments we sought in the course of the Education and Science Committee’s deliberation on this bill were adopted. We are disappointed about the dropping of Labour’s proposed amendment to make it explicit for principals to ensure that schools provide guidance and counselling on career choices and career pathways. I will take a moment of the Committee’s time to talk about this matter as it relates to this bill. 
Right now we are hearing a lot about tertiary education opportunities and about completion rates and failure rates at tertiary institutions. We are hearing a lot about the need to peg some part of tertiary institutions’ funding to the success rates and completion rates of their students. One of the things that happens repeatedly when one discusses this with chief executive officers of polytechs and vice-chancellors of universities—and to some extent with chief executive officers of private training establishments—is that a lament goes out about the degree to which students exiting secondary schools are prepared to make appropriate career choices and appropriate further education choices. 
One of the things that has taken on a new dimension of concern for us in the Labour Party—and this is why we lament the dropping of our proposed amendment that career counselling be mandatory in schools—is that there is now some sort of disjunction between where this bill is going the things that it could say but will not say and the kinds of requirements that are emerging at the end of the compulsory sector of education and the movement into tertiary education opportunities. 
Frequently vice-chancellors say that students have made inappropriate choices. How are they meant to avoid making inappropriate choices if they are not supported by career counselling and career guidance at the end of their compulsory schooling? Let us take Mr Joyce’s example. At the end of secondary schooling if a student wants to go into veterinary science and is accepted and if at the end of year 1 that student does not make it into year 2 then clearly an inappropriate study choice has been made. That lends new weight given the kinds of policy directions that the Government is proceeding with under the tertiary education portfolio to the idea that the dots are not being joined in respect of this legislation. If it were possible for this even through a Supplementary Order Paper in the Minister’s name to be reinstated as a part of this legislation I would urge the Minister to do that. 
It is a matter of joining the dots. Here is legislation that could have something in it to equip students to make sensible and appropriate choices not simply to go into medicine because their mother was a doctor or their father was a scientist but to choose a course where they can stay the distance succeed and not be one of those figures that the Government is keen on avoiding—that is those who do not complete courses or who fail more than half of their papers. That is something that we on this side of the House continue to lament. It should have been something that could have provided a more seamless framework for education between the compulsory and the post-compulsory sector. However that is now on the record as one of our objections although we have decided to support this bill because of some of the further changes that were made in the course of the select committee’s deliberation. 
The second area I will talk about is that relating to the new section 128A which is inserted by clause 36 of the bill. It is about the matching of register information and information about the payment of teacher salaries at payrolled schools. On the face of it this appears to be simply a matter of sharing information between one Government agency and another and so it should be. One of the things that is particularly important—and this is stated as the purpose of the bill—is to introduce information matching between the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education to identify individuals teaching in schools without registration. This is something that the Labour Party absolutely supports. As I understand it this has been worked through to the satisfaction of the Privacy Commissioner. This kind of exchange of information is beneficial to teachers because to all intents and purposes the ultimate purpose of this is to ensure that they receive every payroll entitlement that they should. However the more important consideration is that it is useful for principals and those who are appointing teachers to have the confidence to know who is still registered and who is not. 
I know that my own experience in this area is somewhat out of date now and I readily concede that. In the time when I was a secondary school teacher there was a huge shortage of teachers. The human resources policy that was adopted at the time—we did not even have human resources in those days as there was no such thing; it tended to come later as an academic discipline and as a practice—could best be characterised as the “warm body” recruitment strategy. It did not matter who was in front of the class as long as it was a warm body. There was a shortage of teachers and being able to put any poor unprepared person in front of a class of children was better than having nobody at all. This measure goes further than that and it becomes useful when teachers are deregistered and move away from that town or that city. They may have been deregistered for nefarious reasons. They may have been deregistered for all sorts of serious misconduct. Those people should not be allowed to move around the country from school to school or city to city and pick out another teaching job. They should not be allowed to be in front of children in classrooms. 
This measure allows that to be policed. The sharing of the information even for payroll purposes ensures that principals in employing teachers know for sure that the people they are employing are registered and therefore have met all the requirements of registration and are fit to teach children. With this kind of matching of information the possibility of deregistered teachers moving about the country and under the cloak of anonymity being able to take up another teaching job somewhere else far away—particularly in a situation where a teacher shortage might compel a principal to employ anybody—is hopefully avoided.