Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16326. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) 
: 
 Firstly I will respond to what the Minister of Education said about being unable to legislate for good teaching or words to that effect. I agree with what she said but I think that as a Minister she is the person who is able to create the conditions in which teachers can weave their magic. 
One of the conditions that will have some effect is the provision of secondary-tertiary programmes. I would like to think that the Government could have taken the whole change of context idea a step further and perhaps it could have introduced an idea that I raised in the second reading around specialist schools. Legislating for specialist schools could provide something similar to secondary-tertiary programmes in that they change the context in which students are learning. 
I know that the ACT Party and the National Party often talk about choice for parents and students but that choice normally revolves around a student in a decile 4 school in one part of a city being able to go across town during the day to a decile 8 school. That is fine for upwardly mobile folks but it does not address the issue of choice for those who cannot get around cities. The problem is that a decile 4 school teaches basically the same sort of stuff that a decile 8 school teaches whereas with specialist schools someone who lives in the middle of a city could within 20 minutes go to a school that offers a different type of learning such as specialisation in the arts specialisation in sports or specialisation in science or technology. The Minister could legislate for different contexts that provide real choice for parents and students and I would like to lay that thought on the table. 
To go back to the parts of the bill we are debating I point out my that colleague Trevor Mallard has already brought up the enrolment scheme priorities and changing the law so that the children of former pupils can attend the school their parents used to go to. How many students will pass National Certificate of Educational Achievement purely because they were able to attend the school their parents attended? We are talking about maybe a couple of hundred pupils at the most. It will not have an effect on the greater need of students across schools in New Zealand. So I fail to see why this provision has any real need to be discussed at a time such as this when we have more serious concerns—for example the fact that one child in five is failing. This adds nothing to the raising of student achievement. 
Likewise if there is someone who lives in the Hutt Valley but is a member of a board of trustees here in the city so that their child can go to a school here in the city how many students are we talking about who will benefit from this? The critical mass of students across New Zealand will not have their educational standards lifted by this. I believe that it is just another example of education legislation focusing on the wrong issues when we should be fairly and squarely focusing on the aspects that will raise achievement the most. 
I believe that there has been a change in position in relation to limited-attendance centres since the second reading. I thought that was silly lawmaking at its worst in that limited-attendance centres would not have to vet people who were going to work there. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous and in fact dangerous for the little kiddies who would be attending those limited-attendance centres. There is no way on earth that a parent taking their child by the hand to drop them off at a limited-attendance centre for a couple of hours while mum or dad goes and does the shopping—