Calder Cam: Education Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCalder Cam: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 04 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10677. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr CAM CALDER (National): The Education Amendment Bill amends the Education Act in the two principal ways that we have heard. The Minister of Education gave a very lucid explanation of how it sets out a legal framework for a new type of school the partnership school. It alters another very important area by establishing powers around surrender to schools of harmful items and retention by schools of harmful items. These harmful items may be defined as items that pose an immediate threat to the physical or emotional safety of a person or that detrimentally affect the learning environment. These might include such things as knives drugs grenades guns and items stored in electronic form.This is a bill that as introduced included a number of new sections intended to clarify the powers of schools in searching and retaining students’ property. We made some key recommendations towards that. The Education and Science Committee looked at this in a huge amount of detail and some of these key recommendations are worth delineating because these were not clear in the original bill. I have to once again acknowledge the hard work of most members of the committee for achieving this end.Some of the key recommendations on the bill are as follows. We recommended allowing authorised staff members to exercise surrender and retention powers. I want to acknowledge Mike Sabin and his work in this area for a number of years. He made an outstanding contribution. We recommended allowing teachers to require the removal of outer clothing or the surrender of bags with safeguards. The Minister alluded to the safeguards in this legislation. We recommended allowing teachers to require the removal of any head covering gloves footwear or socks; clarifying that students may be encouraged to participate in voluntary drug programmes; clarifying that drug dogs can be used to search school property; and making it mandatory to have rules and guidelines about the implementation of this. I hear some barracking from the Opposition. This is crucially important. This is legislation that this committee can take great pride in because it has made the life of students throughout New Zealand a lot safer. It has made the life of staff principals and members of boards of trustees a lot clearer. So I want to acknowledge this work by members of the committee. There were some who stood to one side but in fact those opposite and Tracey Martin from New Zealand First did work hard on this.We have mentioned the key recommendations. I would like to now come on to why we have this extra strand in our cable of lifting student achievement that is called partnership schools. One of the simple reasons for it is that the only area in which New Zealand is leading the world is inequality. The gap between our best students and our lowest-performing students is the biggest in the world—the biggest in the world. As one submitter asked—I will repeat it—are we living in two different countries? Can we afford to be complacent? The committee heard that the Partnership Schools Working Group had received from sponsors 34 indications of interest in setting up a partnership school. Groups were saying that they want to do something about this.Contrast that with the unions which were ineluctably locked into opposing anything that showed the least bit of innovation. Most of those 2300 submissions were form submissions and there was not a lot of original thought but the people who are actually wanting to get involved with these partnership schools were saying that they want a chance to do something about this. They want to use innovation to enable their kids to engage in learning and get a decent start in life and they are willing to be held accountable for doing that.The significant point is that it is a matter of choice. Nobody has to go into a partnership school. As outlined earlier the most fundamental difference in the relationship between the Minister and the partnership school is that the relationship with the Minister will be contractual rather than regulatory. It is a contract to deliver engagement and achievement outcomes—