Donnelly Brian: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Donnelly Brian: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19418] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 As they say a week is a long time in politics. I will read a statement from the financial review of the Ministry of Education which was tabled on 3 February 2005 which includes a statement on the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA): “According to the ministry the recent NCEA examinations went relatively well. Scholarship examinations were introduced this year and feedback from schools indicates that students found them challenging.” Well I think that the results from the scholarship exams were more challenging to the Ministers than they were to the students. But that is not the issue that I want to talk about this evening. 
The issue I want to talk about is one I first ran across in January when I met a deputy principal of a relatively large secondary school. We got chatting about a variety of different things and I happened to ask about how they were coping with the non-contact policy issue. He said that they had no problem at all—they just sent the kids home. I asked what he was doing and he said that once a term his school sends the kids home and they have a teacher-only day and that is when the teachers can do their preparation and planning. I made some muttering noises about compliance with the law and he just grinned at me and said that it was the only way they could do it and that the staff were happy. 
During the adjournment week it was reported in the  
Northern Advocate 
 that two secondary schools in Whangarei are doing this in order to comply with the conditions of the secondary collective contract. Students are being asked to stay at home. Why is this of concern? There are two reasons. Firstly educationists know that one of the most critical factors in determining learning is what is known as engaged academic learning time which is the amount of time the learner is actually actively engaged in activities related to his or her learning. One can certainly guarantee that if secondary students are back at home they will not be engaged academically in learning as they would be if they were at school. But there is a second little problem and that is that schools are required by law to be open for instruction for 380 half-days per annum. When schools are asking students to stay at home how can they possibly be open for instruction? 
New Zealand already has a very low number of days that students are required to attend relative to our international counterparts. I also tell the Associate Minister of Education David Benson-Pope that there was a report in 1997 by the Education Review Office that showed that there was already considerable slippage within our secondary system of the days open for instruction or of the interpretation of the days open for instruction. What is actually happening as a result of the terms of the collective contract plus the lack of provision of additional teaching resources to the schools is that students are being robbed of academic learning time. It is the only way in which schools are able to meet the commitments that the Government has entered into with the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA). 
How did this situation come about? It came about in 2002 when the Minister of Education the Hon Trevor Mallard got himself into a bit of a problem with the PPTA. There was a looming election so his way out of it was to give it to an independent body. The independent body came up with a solution that in fact neither New Zealand First nor the Minister agreed with. New Zealand First said: “Yes we do need additional staff and we have lobbied the Government for 2 years to put in more staffing particularly with NCEA coming up. Put them into the secondary schools. It has to be done otherwise you will have a real problem on your hands.” The Minister said no. The reason why we did not go along with the guaranteed non-contact time on a weekly basis was that it took away all the flexibility that secondary schools need to be able to determine how to best use the staff resource they have. The Minister agreed with that—but when it came to the crunch he bowed to the pressure and gave in. But he did not come up with the resources. 
I have been hearing for a number of years now that we do not have the resources to provide the non-contact time that we have to provide under the collective contract. So how is it being done? There are only two ways that it can be done. The first is to reduce the number of subjects and the second is to increase class sizes in order to get the commitment there. Schools quite naturally are not planning to do that. Instead they have taken away learning time from the students. Who will suffer from students being asked to stay at home for another 3 or 4 days of the year? Of course the schools are still supposed to be open for instruction so there is a breach of the law there and I will be asking the Associate Minister what he is planning to do with the schools in this particular regard.