Katene Rahui: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Katene Rahui: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:661;Page:9653] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 The issues affecting the educational horizons of our young people are of the utmost priority to the Maori Party so when the Education Amendment Bill appeared on the Order Paper today I was pleased that I would have an avenue to talk about the pressing educational issues impacting on the good people of Te Tai Tonga. If ever there was a need for educational amendments they would be around the availability of Maori medium immersion education and bilingual educational options and their accessibility to the whanau of Te Wai Pounamu. In Marlborough recently we saw the closure of bilingual units at Whitney Street School and at Bohally Intermediate. In reflecting on their loss former bilingual unit teacher Nan Kahu Chadwick noted that the unit had been able to teach the students “who they are where they come from and give them a sense of belonging”. It seems to me that this could have come directly from Ka Hikitia—Managing for Success the Maori education strategy which is meant to be about transforming the way the education system performs for and with Maori. 
Of course it is not just the closure of bilingual units that concerns us; it is the transition for those who have been forced to leave such units and start again. The catastrophic way in which former students of Aorangi School in Christchurch have been treated stands out in my mind. In today’s  
Press 
 the principal of Burnside Primary School Matt Bateman describes the “stress on us all” from not having classroom space for a bilingual unit nor enough time for the transition. Former Aorangi pupils have been receiving bilingual lessons in the school hall for nearly a term. I listened carefully to the Minister of Education during question time today when responding to the questions of my colleague Te Ururoa Flavell. The Minister was asked directly about the level of commitment from the Government to fulfil the requirements of the new curriculum that all students will have the opportunity to acquire knowledge of te reo Maori me ona tikanga. Is being shunted into the school hall the evidence of that commitment? This Education Amendment Bill has avoided the ideal opportunity to address the issues impacting on bilingual provision in the South Island. 
While on the topic of Christchurch I will mention the crisis situation occurring in Aranui where the school has been providing breakfast for 110 children every day but has been forced to end that because it has run out of donations of food. The trouble is that the essential problem that created the need for the breakfast club in the first place remains. Food poverty—the fact that children turn up without breakfast hungry and unable to concentrate—is a key determinant impacting on educational opportunities for our young students. 
These are just some of the key issues occurring in my electorate and no doubt in many electorates around Aotearoa. If the truth be known they are the persistent problems that make it hard for kids to be at school hard for teachers to teach and hard for schools to succeed. The issues around information matching and whether the fee for police vetting should be $10 or $15 simply do not measure up here. Notwithstanding these concerns the Maori Party will support this bill today because we see it as effectively a tidy-up bill that addresses a host of issues raised in the last few years. The provisions around information matching are relatively straightforward. We are told that the Ministry of Education is aware that there are unregistered teachers by the simple process of deduction: there are more teachers on the payroll than there are registered and authorised. So clearly it is simple for an information-matching programme be set up between the Teachers Council register and the Ministry of Education payroll database. We support the intention of the bill to have only registered teachers teaching and of course we also support that provision to ensure that our children are at all times safe and protected from harm. This is where the police vetting issues come in. We always believe that it is of paramount importance that we do what we can to invest in the well-being and quality education of all students whether by the provision of bilingual units or by helping out at breakfast time. This bill will improve the requirement around police vetting of non-teaching staff. 
One of the things that this bill does is change the threshold for police vetting of contractors and their employees to just those who may be likely to have unsupervised access to children during opening hours. The goal in mind is to put in place procedures by which the police vet only those non-teaching staff for whom it is necessary to do so. I know that this change is one that the New Zealand School Trustees Association particularly welcomed in that it now means that parents and whanau acting as parent helpers on school premises will not be affected by the police vetting clause. 
While we are talking about school trustees I want to raise the concerns that we share with the Green Party around the new powers to appoint corporates as statutory managers or commissioners of schools. Many of our kura tell us that one of the awesome things about the Tomorrow’s Schools policy is the chance to have a shot at running their own school themselves. It is about supporting schools to determine their own solutions. It is about empowering whanau. It is about Whanau Ora. The fear that we have with putting the decision in the hand of the Minister is that the chances are that the schools that are picked will be the ones where the board comprises members who may be from communities that lack the specialist capacities inherent in the accountancy or legal fraternity. Chances are that these communities will be low-income and high-deprivation and probably many of the people in these communities will be Maori and Pasifika. The introduction of a body corporate or corporate management model for schools may result in our communities losing their unique ownership of their kura. We are concerned that in the process of the school going into the transition of coming under management by a commissioner or a limited statutory manager communities will feel alienated and dislocated from schools—and we could never support that. I would hate to see “McDonald’s Aranui School” anywhere in the country. 
This is only the second reading of this bill so there is we hope every chance of changes being made to encourage and enhance community confidence in boards of trustees. While we are at it perhaps the Minister could also look at addressing the issues around the implementation of Te Kotahitanga throughout Te Wai Pounamu. We will support this bill at the second reading and we look forward to some of the unresolved issues being addressed.