Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): This is a sad day for education in New Zealand as the National Government continues to dismantle our public education system continues to treat learning as if it is a commodity to be bought and sold on a privatised open market and continues to narrow the focus away from what is our world-leading curriculum and towards a narrow set of targets that can be manipulated and gamed. That is the narrowness of its vision and it is continuing to reinforce a very low-trust approach to teaching New Zealand's young people.The Children's Commissioner was absolutely right in his submission on this bill. This bill needs to be started again from the very beginning. If this bill is designed to give purpose to our education system if it is designed to put young people at the heart of the education system then why have their voices not been more included in its development? If this is really about gearing up our education system for the needs of future generations why are they being shut out of this debate?We had I think a handful of young people submitting to the Education and Science Committee and that was a great tragedy. But what was more concerning was that they were not involved in the development of the bill up until that point. They were not involved in the policy. Their voices were not present and were not heard. What a wasted opportunity. I think the Children's Commissioner was right when he said we should start this again.In her contribution Hekia Parata said that she wanted to put students front and centre. I think those were the words that she used and yet they have not been consulted. They have not been engaged in the development of any of these policies. Of course sadly they are not alone because the voices of pretty much everybody who submitted to the Education and Science Committee have also been ignored. Time and time again when sensible contributions were put forward by people working in education the response came back It is not Government policy to do this." and therefore simply—that was the response.The select committee for this piece of legislation I am sad to say was more or less a waste of time. I sat through all of those submissions and I was frustrated that by majority the vast bulk of amendments that could have arisen if those submitters had been listened to were blocked. This was a complete farce of a process. There were useful contributions from people who wanted to improve the legislation who actually supported parts of the legislation that I do not and they were ignored as well because the Government took the attitude that "We've got the numbers. We're going to ram it through and we're not actually going to listen to the contributions from people who might have to implement it." I think that is a great tragedy.On the issue of seclusion—I want to deal with that one first because that is an area where I do agree with the Government. I think it is useful to get this part of the law clarified. We have certainly supported including that in the bill. However the Minister said in her contribution that she wanted to "prevent and de-escalate dangerous situations". I wrote that down because I wanted to remember those words—"prevent and de-escalate dangerous situations"—and yet last week she was in the House saying that schools that had violent pupils should immediately call the police. That is not de-escalation. I am not entirely sure on what planet calling the police on a 6-year-old could be described as de-escalating the situation. If schools are going to have to deal with children with challenging behaviours and they do—all day every day—then they need to be given the resourcing and the support. Those schools that are saying they have got a crisis when it comes to dealing with students with behavioural needs deserve to be listened to and yet they are not.So now I want to turn my attention to some of the more specific provisions in this education bill. The first is the goal in the bill to establish a clear set of purposes for education in New Zealand. I think that is a desirable and noble act. I think the Education Act would be improved by having a clear purpose clause—a purpose statement—within it. But what we heard from educators and what we hear around the country when it comes to debates on education is that people are worried that this will simply be used as a mechanism to once again narrow down the focus of the education system on a narrow band of targets.The current Government has the attitude that the only learning that matters is learning that can be easily measured and plotted on a graph and that the only measurements that matter are national standards and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. The Government is absolutely wrong. It is not measuring student progress. It is not measuring students' overall well-being and development. The Government is trying to narrow the focus of the whole system on to a very narrow range of schools and all to meet these narrow targets that it has set.So when this bill gives the Government the ability to establish a statement of national education and learning priorities whilst at the same time establishing a set of national performance measures we can understand why people in the education community are so nervous about that. I think a statement of national education and learning priorities could be a very valuable thing. It could be a powerful discussion for the education community to be engaged with to play a role in agreeing what that might be as it did with the development of The New Zealand Curriculum which is so broadly embraced. And yet the consultation provision in that simply says the Minister has to consult with the people whom the Minister wants to consult with. There is no guarantee the Minister even has to consult with the people who are going to have to implement this national statement of education and learning priorities so it is no wonder people are worried.Education can be such an engaging and rewarding experience and yet the current generation going through the education system now is being robbed of so many opportunities because schools early childhood centres and tertiary education providers are being told to focus their energies on this very narrow range of targets so that the Minister of Education the Prime Minister and whoever else in the Government can stand up and say: "Aren't we great? We're making progress on these measures."The reality is they are not making progress on what matters which is giving kids a rich deep varied education that will allow them to achieve to their potential and that recognises that all children are different with different strengths and weaknesses and abilities and passions. The education system needs to cater for all of that and yet it is being told it has to focus on this narrow range of targets.On communities of learning—everyone in the education system says they want to collaborate. Collaboration is something that they want to do and what have we got from the Government? A heavy-handed bureaucratic managerial—Todd Barclay: My schools love it.CHRIS HIPKINS: —model called the communities of learning. They do not love it. Schools hate it and yet they are doing it because it is the only way they can get their hands on the extra money. I will tell you if it was so popular why it is that of the $360 million that the Government has put into it only about $20 million of that has been spent. It is because people do not like it and they do not want it.But let us then turn to cohort entry. I am open to a debate about cohort entry and yet the only justification put forward at the select committee for it was administrative efficiency. If it is better for kids' education let us have that debate. But no educational research was produced to demonstrate that cohort entry is the way to go. I am utterly opposed to the idea that 4-year-olds should be starting primary school. At 5 we already have one of the lowest school starting ages in the OECD. We do not need to go any lower than that.But then of course we get to one of the really meaty issues in the debate on this bill which is the establishment of communities of online learning or COOLs which is a privatisation by stealth method by the current Government and also it is totally and utterly ill-defined and misguided. Very little detail has been provided by the Government about how this is actually going to work and yet there is a plethora of international evidence and evidence from in New Zealand that if the Government gets this wrong it will have hugely damaging impacts on the kids who will be involved.A private pro-charter foundation in the United States—a group whose job it is to promote charter schools and promote these types of learning arrangements—did its own research. It found that students attending those schools—the online private charter schools—lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in maths during the course of a 180-day school year. In other words they did not learn any maths at all and they lost roughly half of their literacy learning as well. That is just wrong. Yet the Government wants to implement this model without working through and without defining how it is going to work. "Just trust us." it says "We'll make it up as we go along." I do not think that we should give the Government that level of flexibility when kids' futures are at stake. I actually think it should front up and explain how it thinks this new model of COOLs is going to work.I think there are provisions in the bill that the Labour Party would support but nobody on this side of the House trusts that the National Government would do a good job of implementing them. As a result of that and for all of the other reasons that we will debate during the Committee of the whole House stage the Labour Party will be vehemently opposing this legislation."