Coddington Deborah: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:18077] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 The ACT party will also be supporting this bill’s referral to a select committee but we have grave reservations about this legislation. It has wide-ranging reforms especially to do with the early childhood sector and we look forward at the select committee to receiving what will be some very good submissions from the early childhood sector. 
The Minister has almost decimated early childhood education in this country. Yesterday he would have received—as would some of the members sitting over there—a letter from a woman who has been running early childhood care centres for 27 years and has loved it but is just fed up and is now putting her centre on the market. The end of her letter states: “Many who have brought their children to us and those children now are grown up and bringing their children to the centres confirm what joy they have brought to childcare over the years. The pleasures I have experienced educating and nurturing preschoolers through the years has been snuffed out by over-regulation and bureaucracy.” That says it all. 
The serious concerns we have revolve around having things like a national identity number. There has been a call for years now for the Government to do something about truancy and the number of children in schools who just disappear. However I do not see that having a national identity number will do anything to get children back into education. Many children are just resistant to school—they are not necessarily resistant to education—and if we keep dragging them back in front of a classroom with 30 other children and doing things the same way we will get the same results. I seriously question having a national identity number for under 5-year-olds children who are not in the compulsory education sector. I do not believe that I am being hysterical here or over-reactive and I am sure that the Greens have serious concerns about this too. 
For years we have seen Governments try to bring in national identity numbers. We saw it with National with drivers’ licences with Maurice Williamson and Jenny Shipley. Is this another Trojan Horse for a national identity number for everyone? Will babies get a pin number when they are born so that we can trace them through the health system and through the education system—so called? Those sorts of State interferences are always brought in in everyone’s best interests and when it is in the best interests of children that is when people’s antennae should go up. 
Early childhood education in this country used to be the best example of how parents could exercise choice in their children’s education. We have a huge amount of competition. There are kindergartens kohanga reo playcentres private centres and community-owned centres. Most parents can choose where they want to send their children—or they could until recently with the distortion of funding and the free hours for community-owned centres which the Minister brought in against Treasury advice. Just this week I received Treasury papers that warned the Minister that that would cause distortions. Treasury gave other warnings which I will come to later. 
The Minister does not like private education centres or early childhood centres. He has called them “Kentucky Fried childcare”. I have been to numerous conferences on the early childhood sector. Those people are extraordinary teachers. They take children probably at the most difficult time but the most receptive time when children are little sponges and are the most vulnerable to good or bad education. There is the old saying that whatever one has put into children by the time they are 7 will make the adult later. These people are not nappy changers. They are educators and teachers. None the less it is not a one-size-fits-all sector of the education system. One can go to a kindergarten where kindergarten teachers give 3 hours or 2 hours of intensive education then go down the road or next door to an early childhood centre that is open for 8 or 10 hours and has two or three shifts of teachers where they are catering to a vast variety of needs of children some intensive education some just play education and all sorts of issues. None the less this Minister has driven through a new regulatory scheme whereby all so-called persons of responsibility in an early childhood centre need a minimum qualification of Bachelor of Education in early childhood education—not the qualification of Bachelor of Education in primary teaching or of being a mother and not even of being someone who has had 30 years’ experience. 
I have four children the youngest of whom is 19. Clearly I was a danger to children because when all my children were under 5 most of the time they were at home with me. They were on unlicensed premises with an unlicensed teacher—a teacher who did not have any tertiary qualifications. Clearly those children should have been removed from my care just as I should have been removed from my parents’ care and just as a lot of the people in this House who were brought up in the country where there was no early childhood education should have been removed from their parents’ care. Goodness knows how we grew up to be as sane as we are! Thank goodness this Minister is riding to the rescue and saving children from having such a dreadful upbringing! At last every person of responsibility in an early childhood centre has to have the right piece of paper to wave in front of his or her employer. 
Treasury advised the Minister that there would be serious risks to bringing this measure in. It advised the Minister that up to 400 early childhood centres throughout New Zealand would close. That is exactly the case because 400 centres are now under threat of closure by the end of January. This legislation does amend that by introducing provisional licensing that can go up to 18 months but those centres have to comply by January in a month’s time. This bill will not do anything for them. 
If the Minister knew this legislation was coming in why did Kawhia Early Childhood Learning Centre—which is 90 percent Maori is attached to the Kawhia Primary School and has total community and parent support—a brilliant centre have to go to the High Court in Hamilton to remain open? Why was the Minister in his bullying way going to close it? Was it because the children were not safe? No. It was because the person of responsibility had a Bachelor of Education in primary teaching. She was also fluent in te reo totally bilingual and perfectly suited to the centre because 90 percent of the children attending are Maori. But despite all of that she did not have the right piece of paper to wave in front of the woman who was running the centre and the centre had to take its case to court. 
I want to mention briefly the other concern I have and that is the Teachers Council which is to get extra teeth with this legislation. The Teachers Council has been a complete and utter failure. What we had the Teacher Registration Board was not broken. But bowing to union demand the Minister brought in the Teachers Council which now passes people to teach despite their being red-flagged by the police. I will tell the House what that has meant in England. Obviously the Teachers Council has never heard of 190-page report called the  
Bichard 
 Inquiry 
 which was published in June this year. That inquiry investigated how Ian Huntley the man who was convicted of murdering schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells was able to be employed as a school caretaker when he had a history of allegations of rape burglary indecent assault and unlawful sexual intercourse. Here was a man who had been red-flagged by the police in England yet he was still able to be passed as someone who could work in a school. This bill will not do anything to improve the Teachers Council. It should be dumped and we should start all over again with checking teachers.