Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1033. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e te Whare Paremata i tēnei pō. I was very pleased to join my colleagues in discussing this bill at the select committee stage because that stage was as they have shown very interactive. There were a lot of people who came before the Education and Science Committee with a big background in the teaching profession. They had a lot of things to say and they answered a lot of questions that we asked them about the issues that have been covered so far tonight including the limited authority to teach.I want to touch on a couple of Supplementary Order Papers that the Green Party is putting up because we have some fundamental concerns about the purpose of the bill that we never got clarity on at the select committee no matter how many times we asked. So I have got Supplementary Order Papers 31 32 33 and 36 which are all about the functions of this body. The last thing we need in this country in education legislation is more loose and confusing rhetoric that does not tell the person reading it what it means. We never got answers from anybody about the reason for changing the functions of the Teachers Council. I could also expand at length about the reasons for changing the governance structures at universities but I think the first contribution will start with the issues relating to the functions of the Teachers Council.The changes that have been made were basically changing a body that was set up to oversee the quality of initial teaching education courses that lead to registration; to manage registration; to issue practising certificates; and to manage conduct and competence processes. These are the functions that are appropriate to a registration body. If the Government wants to change that and has some vision why do we not understand what it is? Why did we sit through days and days weeks and weeks and thousands of submissions and never get clarity about why the Government had decided to change this body? The clarity we got was that the Minister will decide who is appointed.And then we are going to change the functions to do things such as raise the status of the profession. What does that mean? I think the very least that we need to know is what is meant by “raising the status of the profession” that the profession itself is not doing or is not capable of doing and why a non-elected body would be fitting to do that.It is very bewildering—that is a very polite way to put it—because we already have these agencies that are under direct Government control such as the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office which look after quality in schools and supposedly support and help to raise the status of the profession and ensure quality education. There are a number of other research groups that also contribute to that but now we have got another one. So instead of having a registration council with clear functions elected by teachers for teachers we now have a Minister-appointed organisation with broad powers that will be paid for by the registration fees in some part at least of the teachers themselves who do not actually get to choose and we do not know what it is for. We do not know what it means to talk about these things.A number of submitters raised issues about what was going on and how ensuring safe and high-quality leadership teaching and learning in all settings was going to be achieved with no information and no backup. We tend to support the submitters who said that the council needed a narrower function and that actually a narrower function is clearer.Like most professional bodies that are run by the professionals themselves it is about registration. It is about competence it is about safety and it is about maintenance. If the Government believes that is no longer important and that what is important is to muddy the waters and have a huge broad set of functions that no one really understands it has done a great job—if that is what the purpose was.Of course nothing is context-free. We have to look at the clauses that the Green Party has put up in these Supplementary Order Papers in terms of the political context in which these clauses have been introduced. It is a low-trust model as I said in a previous contribution and it is not based on listening to the people who want to raise the status of their own profession. It is quite concerning. It is about a confusion of roles. The long list of functions in section 382 enables all kinds of things but basically does not clarify the reason for the changes that are being introduced. Why is the registration body needing to morph into some kind of status-lifting best-practice profession? I will give you an example of a statement. The functions have been—