Hipkins ChrisEDUCATION AND TRAINING AMENDMENT BILL (NO 2)Second ReadingHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2).ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I move that the Education and Training Amendment Bill be now read a second time. I'd like to begin by thanking the Education and Workforce Committee for their careful consideration—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Order! Order! Can the Minister just start again with the correct name of the bill please.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Did I not read that correctly? I move That the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Thank you. You just missed the (No 2)".Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Oh right—OK. Very good.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Thank you.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Thank you. Well I'll start again. [Interruption] Hon David Bennett: I don't know if he did actually—I think he might have spoken once. Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Well the second one's even better than the first. I know that—I moved the first one as well. Can I start again by thanking the members of the Education and Workforce Committee for the careful consideration that they gave to the bill and to Supplementary Order Paper 118 which relates to early learning network management which I'll speak more about in a moment. To briefly recap what the bill does it covers a range of different issues and it's part of an ongoing programme of work to tidy up effectively education laws and regulations in New Zealand. It started with the Education and Training Act which drew together the existing legislation into one place and put it into a more streamlined version. Now this along with other bills that are progressing is tidying up the various policy issues that were identified during that process.So not much of this will set the world on fire but they are in fact important provisions. They cover almost every aspect of our education system: early learning through to tertiary. They'll help to strengthen the network management provisions for early learning. They'll make the Teaching Council complaints process more efficient. They'll enhance learner wellbeing and safety for international and tertiary students. They will provide more flexibility in the way that we regulate compulsory student services fees that are charged by tertiary education providers. The changes will authorise the use of national student numbers to support work-based training—something that we're expecting to see a lot more of. They'll also authorise the use of those numbers to support the teaching and assessment of NCEA in other jurisdictions and the changes will give the Education Review Office the ability to review professional learning and development.A range of submissions were received by the committee so I'm told. They covered a range of views and suggestions. I understand that they were quite constructive and broadly supportive of the changes in the bill.So to run through a few of the key changes that are being endorsed at this second reading for police vetting an amendment closes a minor loophole in the bill by requiring registered but non-certificated persons employed in non-teaching roles to be police-vetted before they start working. For the Teaching Council disciplinary process—and this is quite important—we got a lot of feedback over the last couple of years that the disciplinary process that is used by the Teaching Council has become too cumbersome and in fact is adding significant cost to teacher registration fees unnecessarily with no real increase in professional standards and no real justification so we're making changes there. The bill is aiming to make the handling of complaints more efficient and more streamlined but we also need to balance the rights of teachers and are ensuring that teachers continue to have a say in the sanctions that may be imposed by the Complaints Assessment Committee so the select committee has proposed retaining the existing requirement in the Act for the Complaints Assessment Committee to reach an agreement about a sanction with a teacher who is the subject of a complaint. The bill's been updated to make sure that if minor or technical amendments are made to the code of pastoral care by the Minister the code administrator needs to make reasonable efforts to notify representatives of affected persons or the staff of affected providers. That makes sense to the Government: people need to understand what the code is and what it means for them. The notification requirement will mean that affected parties will be able to scrutinise any of those changes as well. Concerns were raised about information-sharing provisions in the student contracts dispute resolution scheme so the bill now clarifies what those provisions are to better ensure that they're aligned with the information privacy principles in the Privacy Act of 2020. So I want to thank the committee for those technical amendments.I know the committee spent quite a lot of time discussing early learning network management. It's an issue that I've grappled with quite a lot in the period of time that I've been the Minister of Education and I've heard from providers who invest a lot of time and energy and in many cases their capital in building up early learning services to find that suddenly the area where they've built up that service is subject to significant oversupply. Then likewise in other areas we get complaints from communities that they have undersupply in other areas. So we want to take a more strategic approach to the way we manage early learning services and the granting of new early learning service licences. Having said that we've also got to recognise that there are some constraints there as well. So we've got to make sure that the licensing regime allows a practical window of opportunity for people to build a service. There are certainly challenges at the moment—and I've had some good conversations about with the Opposition spokesperson about this—where services are finding that the building and construction sector is particularly heated as many are and therefore they were concerned that they wouldn't be able to build services within the time frames allowed. So we have done some work to push out the deadlines for when these provisions apply. Now the Government is intending to propose some additional changes at the committee of the whole House stage around the length of time someone can take from being given a provisional approval to when they actually build their service because we recognise that that will be particularly difficult at the moment. So again I want to acknowledge the discussion that has happened there and thank the committee for their consideration of that.The bill touches on the Crown's obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi in relation to partnership and active protection and as such we have had further conversations about that and made the decision to exclude kōhanga reo from early learning network management at this point. In fact we need to see an expansion of Māori-medium early childhood education and provision on quite a significant scale. Growing the number of early learning services that are teaching children in te reo Māori is a priority for the Government so hence we want to exclude them from these provisions at this point and I want to signal that there'll be some further changes that we'll considering there in the committee of the whole House stage as well.I also intend to—well actually I think I've covered all of the changes that I intend to move through the committee of the whole House stage. So it really just remains for me to thank the committee once again for their work and say that I'm looking forward to the debate when the bill reaches the committee of the whole House stage. Thank you Madam Speaker."