Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2661] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Tena koutou katoa. This bill is entitled the Education Amendment Bill but from my analysis it could also be called the “Education Inc. Masquerade Bill”. Some highly significant clauses are just not mentioned in the regulatory impact statement and they need to be deconstructed. The community has a right to know what this bill intends over and above the two innocuous areas of apparent focus. The Green Party does not have a problem with the dates of the elections for boards of trustees being changed and we see that the general policy statement claims to have two broad areas of focus: information matching between the Teachers Council and the ministry and the reduction of compliance costs relating to police vetting. If those two issues were actually the key focus of this bill then the Green Party would most probably be supporting its referral to a select committee at least. However the general policy statement refers to some so-called minor changes that we think are substantive and unhelpful to the advancement of public schools equitable public education and the community as a whole. 
Those “minor” changes of a supposedly technical nature are actually a scene-setting for further privatisation of the education system under the guise of greater efficiency. “Efficiency” is one of those words we just have to question. Efficiency in education is a philosophical issue that could take up more than 10 minutes and given that it is undefined in this bill I will try to figure out what the Government means by it. The Green Party thinks that this bill is a wolf dressed in sheepskin. This efficiency wolf is a manifestation of the underlying ideological purpose of the Government’s policies on education. It is one of a suite of bills expressing a neo-liberal position and as such it is setting the stage for the further privatisation of the public education system. I say “further privatisation” because only this week the media reported a cost of around $1500 per family for children attending public schools in terms of their donations and activities. That sounds like a pretty efficient way of externalising the costs of education on to families and of making sure that the poor families remain poor and less educated. 
It may not seem to be about privatisation but when we look at the clauses and at those so-called minor changes we need to address some issues. I do not have a problem as I said with the general purposes of focusing on the matching of teachers and the reduction of compliance costs but we have to look deeper. When one lives in a town like Gisborne where the Minister of Education lives and which I have just left one sees that we have a public education system with a huge inequity already. We already have schools where half the kids go to Mexico—although now they might be sorry that they did—and the other half cannot afford to go to McDonald’s. It is the sort of place where there is a huge gap in terms of what the public system is delivering and we do not need any further privatisation in those sorts of communities. How does that relate to this bill and what is this bill specifically trying to do? 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY 
: What is this bill specifically trying to do? Having passed over the relatively innocuous clauses on matching and vetting we come to the issues associated with boards of trustees. The bill proposes that boards can be combined to manage multiple schools under one jurisdiction. This sounds pretty sensible and efficient in some local contexts but if we read the next clause we get a sense of where this is leading. According to the bill the Secretary for Education can combine schools under a single board and appoint a corporation sole or body corporate to manage that cluster. The sole and body appear to be getting corporate control of several schools and there are no requirements that they have any educational background or experience. Does this mean that schools can be managed by bodies corporate from Singapore Australia China or anywhere else where we have free-trade or GATT agreements? Maybe that will not happen next week and maybe it will not happen for a long time but this bill certainly helps to facilitate that kind of possibility. 
If one happens to believe that education is just another business then of course a body corporate is the perfect structure for the management of schools. But as education is not a business but a common good the business model is highly unsuitable and will lead to further privatisation of the common good. The Green Party supports comments made by Chris Carter and Sue Moroney about the changes to the original Labour bill. I was disappointed to hear that the very useful clauses about the responsibilities of boards of trustees had been omitted. There are very important issues about the rights of all students who are entitled to be enrolled at their local schools. As disability spokesperson for the Greens I have been told disturbing stories about schools that are in receipt of special-needs grants but which encourage families with children living with some impairments to attend another school as that school is better set up to address their needs. We need boards of trustees to be highly educated in their responsibilities to these the most vulnerable of students in their communities and fully committed to ensuring that schools uphold their rights to appropriate education at their chosen school—in practice not just in theory. So I am sorry to hear that those useful clauses are absent. 
I was a member of a board of trustees of a small rural school and we needed all the help and guidance we could get as just being parents of our own children does not make us highly aware of the broader needs of the diversity of children even in one small school. Schools that are failing to provide a safe environment and a quality education do need help. They do not need corporate help and consultants; they need some real engagement from educationists who understand what can be done to foster positive change. Charmaine Pountney who wrote  
Learning for Life 
 and achieved a remarkable turn-round at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School was one such educator and she has some great ideas for circulating teachers around who need to be refreshed or sometimes retired and for addressing issues of failure in schools. We need to listen to creative and experienced educators and help schools do better by being honest about the failures of boards and sometimes of teachers. 
But another concern we have about this bill is the clause on Education Review Office issues in relation to private schools. Any dilution of the Education Review Office’s supervision is a concern but especially in regard to private schools. It is important that the Education Review Office continues to visit private schools every 3 years because public money is being spent on private institutions and we need to know what is going on. These schools set their own agenda but they get our money so we want to know they are spending it appropriately. This bill reduces the certainty of the 3-year review and that is not wise in our view. Private schools are not the same as public schools. While working for Greenpeace I once gave the same speech to many schools in the Auckland region in both public and private schools and the difference in resources and the delivery of the curriculum was enormous. Some may be happy to see public funds going into private schools so they can teach their world view but accountability is vital. Some of the issues associated with “discipline” as they love to call it in fundamentalist religious schools definitely need the regular scrutiny of the Education Review Office. 
The idea of options for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) assessment of special schools again sounds really desirable and may well be as long as it does not result in a compulsory imposition of assessment models that are inappropriate for children with specific educational needs who do not fit the NCEA assessment models but are still learning and can have a rich educational experience in a respectful environment without credits. I know that this is heresy but qualifications are not the only reason we go to school. 
Perhaps the most fascinating clause of this bill is the one that deals with retrospective validation. It is not clear what mess this was designed to fix up but it is odd that National is introducing it given the passionate and vehement attacks it made on Labour for the retrospective validation of illegal matters in regard to electoral finance in the last term. From what I can gather some schools integrated with each other without Crown approval so they are now getting validation. The Green Party is not convinced by this kind of lawmaking. I refer members back to the early days of retrospective legislation including my favourite example the Validation of Invalid Land Sales Act 1894. The principle behind this and other such retrospective validation is that if one does something stupid or as in the 1894 case downright illegal it can be validated with the stroke of a pen. I am all for reasonable restorative justice but not for validating the invalid otherwise we make laws that are a cross between George Orwell and Kafka and no one is better off. 
I would also like to know which teachers teacher unions and schools have called for some of the underlying changes mentioned in the bill. Looking at the bill in isolation I think it looks like a tidy-up of anomalies and a rationalising of resources but the Green Party will not be supporting it because of the undertones and context that I have referred to and because it is part of a suite of changes that disturb us on a deep level. We mark the bill “not achieved” and we will vote against it.