Hipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 27 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:952. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am very happy to take a call on the Education Amendment Bill (No 2)—Grant Robertson: One of many.CHRIS HIPKINS:—one of many; one of the first of what I am sure will be many—and say that we will be wholeheartedly opposing this legislation. I am intending to go through clause by clause in fact and explain why that is.I want to turn my comments first of all to the clauses of the bill that establish the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand—EDUCANZ as it is to be known. I want to start by talking about the first amendment that I have put forward in my own name which would ensure that this new regulatory body for the teaching profession may in fact be able to develop the confidence of the profession by giving it some democratic oversight of that body. As it stands at the moment the New Zealand Teachers Council which this body replaces has members who are drawn from the sector and there is a democratic process for doing so. This new bill removes that entire democratic process and allows the Minister of Education to simply hand-pick the full membership of the board. That is not going to engender the confidence of the teaching profession and that is why the amendment that I have put forward restores democratic representation to the governing body of EDUCANZ and I think that is very important if the sector is going to support it.The Minister has indicated that she will be appointing at least five registered teachers. It is important to note that the original drafting of the bill allowed for only up to five of the nine members to be registered teachers. The Education and Science Committee has changed that to be that at least five of the nine members must be registered teachers. However they are still going to be hand-picked by the Minister. I think that that is going to be one of the things that creates resentment within the sector and that prevents the new EDUCANZ body from achieving the objective it is there to achieve. So if the objective is as the Government has indicated to raise the status of the teaching profession to provide leadership to the profession and to be an independent voice for teachers how can the body do that if the teachers themselves do not have any say over who represents them? If it is a representative body then where else would we say that a body is representative if the people whom it represents do not actually have any say over who makes it up? It is just a nonsense and therefore the amendment to restore a democratic process which I have put forward is a very important one.The second thing that I think we need to consider in light of that is some of the new powers that this legislation confers on the new body EDUCANZ. One of the things it will do and one of the things that I think is important—and I support the introduction of it but I think it needs to be jealously safeguarded—is the power for EDUCANZ to conduct what you could call own motion investigations. At the moment the existing Teachers Council can investigate the conduct of a teacher only where it receives a formal complaint. If it becomes aware in the process of investigating one formal complaint that there is another issue involving another teacher or even another issue involving the same teacher the council cannot investigate that unless someone then subsequently makes an additional complaint. So there is no provision in the existing legislation for the council to launch an own motion investigation.This bill changes that and I welcome that. I think that is important because we have had a bizarre situation where in order to investigate some complaints the director of the Teachers Council was the complainant. This was because actually the council would become aware of an issue in the process of investigating something it would not have the power to launch another investigation into that additional matter so therefore the director would be the person who made the complaint to the body that he—it was a he—was responsible for the oversight of. I think that that was a nonsense and therefore this new own motion investigation provision makes that clear.But there has to be some safeguard about this. One of the anxieties that we will hear back from the subjects of this legislation the teaching profession throughout the country is that if the Government is going to have the power to completely hand-pick who is on this body and the Government is giving them the power to conduct investigations on whatever they want to at their own instigation that is an awful lot of power that the Minister effectively is going to have. It is not actually going to make this body more independent; it is going to make it less independent and it is going to result in the profession having less confidence in it. So I think those two things together—[Bell rung]The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am going to give the call to Chris Hipkins but just before I do these microphones—oh it is working.CHRIS HIPKINS: I think we are having microphone issues all over the Chamber at the moment Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I was told it was not working so my apologies.CHRIS HIPKINS: That is all right—it seems to be working. I am happy to continue my comments. I am very happy to talk louder if that would be desirable to the Committee of course. So to return back to the comments that I was making—Grant Robertson: Stay on track.CHRIS HIPKINS: —to stay on track—that unlike the current Government the issue we are dealing with here in this legislation is around whether the teaching profession can have confidence in the regulatory body that is going to have oversight of the profession given its lack of direct representation on that body and the increased powers that that body is going to have. I think it cannot and that is one of the reasons that I have put forward the amendment that I have.I want to then turn to some of the additional powers in addition to the own motion investigations which I have mentioned. EDUCANZ is going to have responsibilities for the leadership of the profession for raising the status of the profession. I want to be clear here that there were 1032 submissions dealing with this particular part of the bill. So 1032 submissions dealt with the creation of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand and there were fewer than a dozen of those that actually supported it. So there was overwhelming feedback from the people who are covered by EDUCANZ that they do not want it and they do not support it and that has fallen completely on deaf ears when it comes to the current Government. So having overwhelmingly rejected it they are still going to be subject to it.This body is supposed to raise the status of teaching. Well there are some interesting aspects to that the first of which is obviously that the profession clearly does not support it. The second is that if it is going to raise the status of the teaching profession why has the word “teaching” been banished from the name of the organisation? That was something that a lot of submitters commented on. They said that actually they wanted to see “teaching” back in the title of the organisation and I think that is fair. The third point—I think; I am up to about three now—that many submitters raised amongst the additional responsibilities the organisation is going to have is around the dissemination of best practice. The overwhelming feedback was that that is not the responsibility of this body. This body is a regulatory body. It is about ensuring that teachers are registered and that there is appropriate professional conduct and so on. This is not a body about sharing professional best practice. What that is going to do is result in the transfer of cost from the agencies of the State in the form of the Ministry of Education the Education Review Office and so on on to a body that is paid for through teacher registration fees. That is unjust and that is overwhelmingly the feedback from the profession. I think before the Government goes ahead and tries to impose these additional responsibilities on to the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand it needs to make sure that it is supported by the profession. I can say from the submissions that that certainly is not the case. Those were some of the concerns that were raised. There were many many others. Overwhelmingly the teaching profession was saying that it does not support this legislation. The question really becomes whether it can discharge its responsibilities effectively if the people who are covered by it do not support it and the answer to that clearly has to be no.My colleagues are going to talk about the changes to tertiary governance that are covered in this part and I will come back to those in a subsequent intervention I guess if I get the opportunity to do so. But I want to talk more about this: I mentioned that one of the issues around the regulatory nature and the responsibilities of the regulatory body is setting professional standards. The Teachers Council as it exists at the moment sets a code of ethics which is aspirational but it does set minimum standards for what the conduct I guess of the teaching profession should be but it is more aspirational than that. It is more than saying this is not about setting minimum expectations; it is about saying this is what we are striving for and it is much more than just the minimums. So yes it clearly establishes minimums by definition but it actually goes further and says actually we want to go further than that and we want to be an aspirational profession. Once upon a time of course the National Government claimed to be aspirational. It no longer does. Instead this bill replaces the aspirational code of ethics with a very arbitrary code of conduct which would be narrower and set minimum expectations for the profession. Overwhelmingly those who submitted to the Education and Science Committee said they did not think that was good enough. They actually thought that the teaching profession should be striving for more than just a minimum code of conduct. I absolutely agree with them. That is why I have put forward an additional amendment to return the focus to the code of ethics which is an aspirational document rather than the code of conduct which is around minimum expectations.Finally in this contribution I want to talk about the requirement for the council to audit 10 percent of teacher registrations. That is going to create a huge bureaucratic burden which teachers will have to pay for.