Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you for this call on the Education Legislation Bill. We had so many teachers professionals parents and a variety of organisations come to present to us at the Education and Science Committee and I would like to thank them all for their submissions. The education legislation in Aotearoa should be simplified modernised and made less prescriptive. However the bill that we are debating in the House today does not deliver on any of those things. This is a bill that the Labour Party does not support. This legislation will allow a principal to run multiple schools—a super-principal" if you like. However what is the role of a principal right now? They are the supervisor. They are the mentor for all their teaching staff and support staff. They are the curriculum leader they provide overall leadership for the school and they set the tone and the culture of the school. A principal does more than a full-time job looking after just one school. This legislation will allow a principal to look after and manage more than just one school. However what would we expect from a good principal when they are actually for instance the manager of up to four schools and how would the relationship work between the principal and say the boards of trustees? Who would be the employer? Would it be one school board would it be two would it be three or for instance if it is four would it be all four school boards? These are questions that we asked at the select committee and these are questions that were posed by submitters at the select committee. We also asked the officials for their opinion on this and it was not actually clear how the issues would be handled. Say for instance the working relationship with a "super-principal" was to break down—who would make the call to disestablish the role of that "super-principal"? Would it be one or would be all four school boards? Who would be the mediator overall making sure that such a relationship would actually work moving forward? None of these things was answered to our satisfaction at the select committee. I move now to the provisions about school opening hours. We in the Labour Party were open to discussing school opening hours but we need to look practically at the implications of allowing schools to open at different times. Say for instance two working parents have three kids: one at preschool one at primary school and one at high school. What if all of these three schools were to change their opening hours by half an hour in the morning? What if the preschool opens half an hour earlier the primary school opens half an hour later and the high school changes its school time as well so that they are not well aligned? How would that affect the parents especially if they are both working? It will have an impact on their jobs unless both parents work for themselves and are able to actually have control over their working hours. It would affect a lot of our parents. When we posed this question to the officials at select committee the answer that we were given was: "Oh the communities at the local level will come up with the answer." But what if the primary schools the intermediate schools and the high schools do not actually get together and make sure that their hours align? It will as I say affect working parents especially. This legislation will also allow as we heard from the honourable Minister for a new category of teaching positions: a trainee teacher. The Hon Hekia Parata spoke about Teach First NZ which allows for teachers to teach at high school but this legislation allows for trainee teachers at all levels. Most of the submitters when they came to the Education and Science Committee did not agree with this particular proposal. Most of them were teachers some were parents and they said things like that they want their teachers to be qualified and registered. As a parent I have got to agree. When I actually send my kids to school my preference is for the teachers of my kids to be registered and fully qualified teachers. I would like to acknowledge my colleague Chris Hipkins at this time because it was he who actually went begging for our committee to be allowed a period of time for the public to make submissions on this new part of the bill to allow trainee teachers. Allowing trainee teachers to teach all of our students is a proposal that so many of us do not agree with. We would prefer as I said earlier on that our teachers are registered and 100 percent qualified. We think that one of the reasons why this proposal is being proposed at this time is you know the other legislation that is coming through that would allow bulk funding—global funding. This would actually then ensure that if teachers moved on allowing trainee teachers would be a way for schools to probably manage the funds that they have. As we know there is not that much funding going to education right now. The compulsory sector has a freeze in its operational funds. I move now to the partnership school model. Allowing our tertiary institutions to sponsor partnership schools or charter schools is in our opinion an admission by the Government that the partnership school model has failed. When partnership schools and charter schools were introduced in this House we were told that one of the things it would do is attract funding from private folks—capital funding would come in to help establish these partnership schools. When we do a fact check on this we know that almost all of the charter schools that we have right now—almost all of them—do not have any funding from outside coming in. Most of them are 100 percent covered by public funding. What we also know when we look at the Partnership Schools Authorisation Board is that it has expressed its disappointment at the calibre of applications it has had coming through to establish partnership schools. We think that allowing polytechnics to fund partnership schools is indeed an admission by this Government that the partnership school model has failed. We know that one of the schools—at Whangaruru—has failed; indeed it has now closed. Millions of dollars have gone into that school and we know that we may not even get any of that money coming back to us as taxpayers. Labour strongly opposes this bill. Thank you very much."