Delahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5179. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Kia ora tātou katoa. It is great to take a call on education because I do not believe that there is anyone in the Education and Science Committee who is not interested and concerned about aspects of education. Often members of the public say to us: why do you not all put aside your differences and just work together? But I think listening to the debate tonight there are some underlying themes that make it clear why we do not always agree. One of those is the pedagogical vision of what education is for and I think we have heard very strongly from the Government that it is aspirational in its terms for education and that the purpose of education is to serve the economy.That is not the view of the Green Party. The Green Party believes that education is a whole lot more than serving the economy and that in fact the economy should serve its people. Education is about lifelong learning for all people and it is not about—with due respect to the chair of the Education and Science Committee Dr Jian Yang—getting them into education earlier for longer. It is actually about acknowledging that education needs to be of quality and that the goal of education is equity. That is a very different pedagogical goal and that is why we have problems with the Government’s obsession with targets and assessment which is an educational model that is reductionist and unsuccessful in other countries.The current education estimates and the Minister at the select committee were all about targets targets targets. Why is that a problem? It is a problem because the early childhood education sector may be about to reach 96 percent to 98 percent participation but when I asked the chief executive of the ministry about quality he said: “That will come later. We are going to get participation first and then we will find a way to figure out how to improve quality.” So what in fact we have got is a huge push including through the Work and Income system to make parents place their children under the age of 5 into early childhood education but quality has not yet been sorted out people. So how comfortable do we feel about making sure that our little children are all getting this brilliant start in life when there is no commitment to quality?Therefore we have got the whole spectrum in early childhood education from the absolutely inspiring and wonderful—often smaller in number high-ratio trained teacher centres plus the kōhanga and playcentre where they have succeeded in holding on to fantastic whānau engagement which is increasingly hard in this economy—and then we have got the opposite which are basically baby barns where people who do not have a choice because they have no public transport and no resources are forced to use the baby barn down the road the large franchise the commercial model. So the education sector is torn between a genuine commitment to learning because it enhances our humanity as well as our society as well as our economy and making sure we meet targets.This Government has pushed this right through to national standards and through to the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). So national standards—again another one of those measurables that actually does not deal with the unmeasurable which is children because children all learn at different rates. We have this system with NCEA as well where we are claiming we are going to get to the target of 80 percent achieving level 2 but again questions are being asked by academics about whether we have lowered standards in order to meet the target; what the real quality is of what is happening in our secondary schools.So if we are concerned about public quality education it is not enough to spout the numbers and talk the rhetoric. It is absolutely not enough. We actually have to know whether early childhood education is of quality because the most important years that we pay lip service to are our small children. We have to know that kids are getting lunch as well as breakfast which is where the Green Party has stood strong on feeding children properly and not saying that if charities and the Government want to have a bit of a partnership and have breakfast that is OK; they do not need lunch. Well of course if we lifted wages and had a decent economy then the parents could afford it but right now as was shown in the House today in our question on inequality we have a long way to go on that so we still need to feed our children in schools. That is why we need a decent school lunch programme.Honestly there are some inspiring programmes that schools are leading but they are paying for it themselves in many instances. Sometimes teachers are paying for it sometimes communities have stepped up but there is no consistency and there is a real need for a decent State-supported lunch programme that is flexible and school and community-led.