Turei Metiria: General Debate 
Turei Metiria: General Debate 
[Volume:624;Page:19658] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 Tomorrow’s Schools is a disaster because bulk funding is keeping our schools in debt neglecting and destroying the basis of our education system. Years of neglect have left a budget deficit that schools have had to catch up on as new money has been made available. Although increases in operational grants on a per-student basis may have outpaced inflation the actual increase in levels of expenditure has far exceeded those increases in grants and funds raised locally—by parents and communities—have had to almost treble in the last 10 years. That has almost trebled the work parents are doing. Parents are paying more and working harder for their schools than they ever have while this Government sits on a surplus that could relieve parents and schools of at least the most acute underfunding through operational grants and special-needs funding. 
The Greens are entirely opposed to bulk funding like operational grants because it frees the Government from its responsibility to fund schools properly. Whatever the problem—information and communications technology development health and safety special needs G3 equivalence even the provision of support staff—the answer from the Government remains the same: “Reprioritise it and fund it yourself out of your existing operations grant.” But there simply is not enough money for our schools. Small schools face even more problems in not being able to make the economies of larger schools and that is especially true of kohanga kaupapa Maori schools and rural schools which are critical to the development and maintenance of our rural communities. The problem is that too much of the school’s income is based on roll numbers and the base-funding component is far too small. The special-education grant is a classic example where children with moderate special needs do not receive the education they require the education they deserve because the bulk-funding model completely screws their school’s ability to provide adequate services. 
The bulk-funding model is a complete and dismal failure. But this Government’s response is to create small pools of contestable funding so that schools are left to fight over the scraps of funding like hungry dogs around a well-worn bone. There are as many as 35 separate contestable pools of funding in the education system. Contestable funds cost schools money and time and the competition is fierce. Therefore many schools and many students are missing out. Schools that are desperate to gather funds to run a quality education system are having to resort to the commercialisation of their schools—offering advertising space in their playgrounds installing vending machines that spit out obesity tooth rot and diabetes–inducing foods spending precious dollars on marketing education services overseas to attract fee-paying students and even we see now this week threatening parents with legal action when they do not pay their apparently “voluntary” donations. 
The Greens are appalled at these desperate measures that schools are having to undertake. They are all means to the destruction of our free public education system. No schools should have to resort to such measures but they are because this Government and previous ones have choked them and in part it is because the increased commercialisation of schools and the increased number of fee-paying students are making our Government money. Is that what this Government considers the education system is for? Is it a revenue-generating activity? 
Communities teachers and parents are not complacent about these issues. The New Zealand School Trustees Association has a campaign across the country to increase the operations grant by at least 10 percent. The Post Primary Teachers Association report talks about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and recommends an increase in the operations grant to help deal with this Government’s failure to implement NCEA properly. The New Zealand Educational Institute report of a support staff funding grant clearly demonstrates that support staff are losing out on money; that there is an increasing casualisation of that workforce because their funding is coming out of the operations grant. Any increases in wage levels for these critical support staff positions are resulting not in more pay in the pockets of the administrators and the office workers but in a reduction in their hours as their positions are being increasingly casualised. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.