Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:819. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):It is my pleasure to take a call on this legislation. I would like to begin by acknowledging the large number of submitters who came and addressed the Education and Science Committee in the final months of the 50th Parliament and offered their expertise. We had an impressive array of submitters on this bill from some of the country’s finest teachers who came and voiced their opposition to the changes that the Minister of Education was attempting to make although she claims that this is about giving teachers what they need and want. I would also like to acknowledge some of the country’s finest academics who came and made their views very clear on this bill and the impact it will have on our tertiary education sector in New Zealand. It would be fair to say that it is not something that is regarded as necessary and it is not something that is wanted by the country’s leading academics. Indeed the vice-chancellors of our universities were united in their opposition to this. Universities New Zealand the umbrella group that covers off our universities was opposed to this legislation. I will go through a number of the reasons why.This bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) continues a theme in education that we have seen from this Government. This is the lack of respect for the profession whether it be at secondary level primary level or tertiary level. It is also about eroding the democratic principles that are currently enshrined within our education system. I will go into more detail at the Committee stage when we go through this bill clause by clause. What we see is the extension of what we saw with the charter schools legislation and the extension of limited authorities to teach. We heard school after school address our committee and tell us that they simply had no need for the changes that the Minister was bringing in under this legislation. This is simply an attempt to further devalue the work of registered trained and qualified teachers within our education system.What we have also seen is the lack of democracy whether that be around the Teachers Council or the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand or EDUCANZ. I think the teachers who appeared before our committee thought it was more a case of “Edu-can’t”. It was going to be to the detriment of the teaching profession and to what our students and our children ultimately received at the end of it. Certainly consistently we heard from those in the tertiary sector that the changes that Steven Joyce is proposing tucked into a bill of Hekia Parata’s here are a solution looking for a problem. We struggled to find why it is that the Minister wanted to make what are actually very sweeping and fundamental changes to our tertiary education system. Changing university governance is fundamental to the way a university operates and has been so since the Middle Ages when university councils were put in place to protect academic freedom. This is a very very evolved and very cherished principle and we should all be concerned when it is eroded. Universities are our critic and conscience and we should never let that place in our society be in any way weakened. We will all be the poorer when that is the case.The only clues that we could find of what it is that the Minister thought here is that he talked somewhere about efficiency and the ability to make decisions. If we actually look at how this stacks up New Zealand universities typically have 15 to 20 members at the moment. The proposed legislation was to take them down to between eight and 12 governing members of their institutions. If we look around the world at some institutions I will let you be the judge as to whether they are struggling with their performance their efficiency and their ability to deliver. Cambridge University has a council of 24 members—an institution that most of us see as a little bit shabby and not being able to foot it. Oxford University has 25. Harvard has 32. Stanford University has 33. That well-known institution that has no ability to lend anything to innovation the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a whopping 72 members of its governing body! There simply is no evidence that suggests that cutting the number of people on a governing body of an institution is going to lead to the outcomes that the Minister says that we need to achieve.In fact there is evidence to the contrary. Far be it from me to ever conflate correlation and causation but if we do look at some of the changes that this Minister has brought in if we look at the changes that were brought into our ITPs to our polytech sector by this Minister in 2010 when the governing bodies of those institutions were slashed what have we seen within our polytechnic sector? Well if we use as a performance measure—one that the Minister will understand and I am sure would hold dear as a good performance measure for our ITPs—the operating surplus i.e. profitability what we see if we measure it is that on average we actually see this in decline in our ITPs since the councils were halved. Since we instituted these more skills-based nimble efficient and driven governing bodies we have seen a decline in the very measure that I am sure this Minister would hold dear about the success or otherwise of a polytechnic in this country.Not only do we have a reduction in the size of our university councils but we have a parallel system happening in our universities as to which the Minister is proposing with our Teachers Council and it is what my colleague Chris Hipkins referred to as “hand-picked democracy”. Not only are we going to radically reduce the number of people governing our academic institutions; the Minister is going to appoint some of them. The Minister is going to appoint them there and the Minister has the power to remove them as well. This is one of the things that was brought up by many many of the submitters as something that was a fundamental problem. It was a conflict between various clauses in this legislation that amounted to an absolute assault on academic freedom.It is somewhat disingenuous for the Minister the Hon Steven Joyce to stand in the House and say that it is all right; academic freedom is intact—and there is nothing to see here because he is not touching section 161 of the Education Act. Yes Minister this is the section in the Act that guarantees academic freedom and sets out the purpose of the university. The problem that I will go into at the Committee stage is the way in which the subsequent clauses interact with section 161 of the Act and the very assault they put on it. I have talked about the Minister appointing members. I am talking about the Minister having the power to remove and I am talking about who members are accountable to. Is it accountability to the institution? Is it accountability to the governing body? And these are all fundamental questions that chip away at something that we should hold very dear in our country and that is academic freedom. It is for these reasons that Labour will oppose this bill. For the Hon Steven Joyce to say that it is OK that universities can choose who they put on they can choose to put students and they can choose to put academics—that is not good enough. We need legislative protection of these very fundamental principles of what our universities should be about.What we heard from vice-chancellors and the universities of New Zealand is that actually it is not enough to have one student representative on their councils. This is something that they have learned because actually many of our vice-chancellors—all of them in fact—see having the student voice involved in an institution as a positive thing and they actually think the institutions benefit. So we would like to see the legislative protection for that contained and enshrined in this legislation. Actually they have found that when they have multiple student representation they do actually get better input from the students. We also heard from the vice-chancellors as well as academics themselves and the collective bodies of academics about the very need to have academics involved in university councils.Our universities are not businesses. These are colleges of colleagues. This is a place where people come together in a collegial way to advance the field of human knowledge. This is not something that the Minister can just muddle with. This is something that has evolved within our culture over centuries. It has always been about academics having a major stake in their institution. We cannot stand by and support changes that chip away at that. The critic and conscience in our society is so important. We are seeing ways in which we need to hold power to account in this country. We need the protection for individuals within our universities to be able to think to be able to voice criticism and to not live in fear of that. Labour opposes this legislation.