Tinetti JanJAN TINETTI (Labour): Mr Assistant Speaker I rise to take a call on the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill. [Interruption]ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Sorry members. I omitted to say The question is that the motion be agreed to."JAN TINETTI: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Firstly I'd like to congratulate the member—Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I apologise to my colleague for interrupting her speech but I think it's important that new members don't get into bad habits. The member Simeon Brown was questioning the absence of a member from the House and you should pull him up on that one.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I did not hear that but the members all know that we are not to mention the absence of any member.JAN TINETTI: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Firstly I congratulate the member Erica Stanford for having this bill drawn from the ballot. Unfortunately—well no actually I'm not going to even say "unfortunately" because I have never seen a piece of legislation that I could never ever support as much as I cannot support this piece of legislation. And out of anyone in this House anyone in this Parliament—full Parliament—there is probably no one that has the knowledge the in-depth personal knowledge that I have on decile funding. Over 28 years I have worked at a decile 10 a decile 9 deciles 5 6 and latterly a decile 1 school and I have been principal of four of those schools. So I have a pretty broad knowledge of decile funding. I also agree with the member that it is a blunt instrument. I will agree on the point that decile funding is something that we do need to do something about. We do need a level of equity funding but this is not the way to do it.This is so far wrong and I'd have to say that there is an absolute misunderstanding of decile full stop. Decile is not just about funding. Decile funding itself is only 3 percent of schools' operations grants—only 3 percent—and we're talking about legislating only 3 percent of the funding that goes into schools. Decile to me as a principal of a decile 1 school meant so much more than that. Decile 1 was also where we got to determine the eligibility for our professional learning and development contracts that we entered into with the Ministry of Education. It also gave us allowances.As a new teacher in our decile 1 school I had several staff members that were eligible for the Voluntary Bonding Scheme. So this bill talks about abolishing deciles so does that mean we say to those teachers "Oh sorry you're not eligible any more because we've got rid of those deciles." or does it mean "Oh we've got 25 children this year who come under this scheme. Next year it might be 24 so you won't be eligible because 25 was the cut-off point."? We haven't thought these things through obviously. This is not the way to do this.Decile more importantly for me meant that other services such as Family Works who provided our social worker in school provided us the social worker because we were a decile 1 school. Suddenly shall we get rid of decile so we won't have the social workers in school any more because they go to decile 1 to 3 schools? But the bill says we'll get rid of deciles. That's the name: "Abolition of Decile System". So has that been thought through? I don't think so. It is not in there.As I said I agree that deciles are a blunt measure. They are not a great measure and we do need to do something about them. But that work is currently being done and this would override all of that work absolutely completely. It would confuse what is happening.Also when I was reading the bill I was completely confused by the bill that defined the decile system because the bill had to define that decile system because it's not anywhere else in legislation. So it defined the decile system to then prohibit the use of the decile system. So to prohibit the use you had to actually define it first—I know; very funny that that would actually happen that you could do that—and then prohibit the use of the decile system to allocate public money. It just doesn't make sense that that would happen and that we would do it that way.As I've already said using the legislation is inconsistent with the approach that the Education Act 1989 takes to school funding. It is not the way that we do that. We do not use legislation.Here's an example. A few years ago when I was on the negotiation teams for the primary principals' contract the then Government worked with the ministry to introduce a literacy and numeracy payment to primary school principals. The Minister had the flexibility in the funding arrangements to put that into the schools at that particular point in time. There was funding that went alongside that to actually develop literacy and numeracy in the schools. The Minister could make that arrangement and it happened quickly. It did not need to come to the House to change legislation. Using legislation to determine school funding is just a wrong way of doing it. We need a system that can be flexible and can change with needs.Also we know that we haven't got this right. We know that we've got lots of work to do in this area. So if we put this piece of legislation in and then we find that a year down the track—and I'll talk about how quickly things can change in school funding very shortly—that needs to change we would have to go back through the whole legislation process again. That is not good enough for schools who need flexibility and need things to change when things happen to schools. We need to be responsive to what the schools are telling us.Now what I said before was that I would talk about how things can change in school funding and yes we had a Minister a couple of years ago who decided to change things up in school funding so when it came to the 2016 Budget instead of getting the inflation-adjusted Budget increase in our operations grant a four-factor social investment funding model was used. They used their model of social investment funding to identify the numbers of children in each school. What a load of rubbish. That was the biggest insult to schools that I have seen. I was the principal of a decile 1 school—a school where 75 percent of my children were identified as coming under that particular system. Why did I know that? Because it said on my funding advice notice how many children in my school were identified under that social investment model. And that Opposition tells us that that data is going to be kept private. Well it's already shown to us that you told us in that funding advice notice how many children—sorry the Opposition told us how many children we got.So here's how the narrative changed. The narrative changed from "Oh you're a decile 1 school." to "How many children were on your funding advice notice?" And then the narrative changed to people saying "Oh I wonder who those children are?" So we had all of that happening and yet we've got an Opposition who will tell us that that information will be kept private. Currently we have a system in the decile system where we can go in to review if we don't agree with the decile ratings that are given to us. This will not happen under this. It cannot happen under this because according to the member over there Erica Stanford she tells us that that data's going to be completely private. Well if the data's going to be completely private how can the school challenge the data and say that the number of children is going to be completely different to what it is? It just doesn't make sense with what schools are currently expecting.Here's my final point before I finish here and this is the point that really winds me up. We've been told that this bill will—Hon Member: I thought she was wound up before.JAN TINETTI: Yeah you thought I was wound up before. This is the part that winds me up. We get told that the reason for bringing this bill in is that "Oh decile 1 schools decile 2 schools have this whole stigma." My school's name was Merivale School in Tauranga. Tomorrow we take the decile 1 tag off it. Do you think that that's going to stop people saying "Oh do we have an issue around poverty and does poverty mean that things are harder in those classrooms?" Having the decile 1 target there is just a fallacy that the Opposition have used to deny poverty and to deny the effects of poverty on our children and in our schools. It really makes me irate that we have had to put up with this discourse and this narrative for so long and we absolutely and wholeheartedly oppose this bill."