Shearer David: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Shearer David: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to support the Education Amendment Bill in its second reading. It is always curious to me when other parties in the House say that they support excellence in education; it is almost as if it is a novel thing to do. All of us here in Parliament support excellence in education. 
I am not so sure that this particular bill will enhance educational standards dramatically. In some ways what is not in the bill is perhaps more important than what is in the bill. This bill really tightens up the scrutiny around who can be close to our children and who can be around our children. I think it will give parents—like me for example—added confidence that our kids will be in school and will be safe and that the people who will be around them even though they will not necessarily come into contact with our children in the course of their formal teaching duties will at least have been vetted. For that reason this bill is important and it is worthwhile supporting. It will also as many other speakers have said tighten up the registration of teachers. When there are more teachers on the salary roll than there are registered teachers one realises that a number of teachers out there are in fact not registered and I think it is important to take that into account. 
Much has been made of the fact that this bill is really a modification of Labour’s bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 3) of September 2008 and that is the reason for the degree of cooperation across the House to make sure that this bill is in a form that both sides can be happy with. 
I mentioned when I began that I think one of the issues about this bill is not so much what is in it as what has been dropped out of it. I will raise two particular issues. The first which Kelvin Davis mentioned as well is the issue of career guidance and obligating schools to have that service in place for students. There is probably no more important time certainly in the last generation for that sort of service to be offered to students. It is not in the bill; it was dropped from Labour’s 2008 bill. I want to speak on it because we have a 7.3 percent unemployment rate and one in five young people are out of work so right now one of the most important things is that we have an education system that caters for children and that caters for students to ensure that they are able to match their qualifications with the market place. 
A number of other elements were not put in the bill. One which I thought would have been supported as it went some way to promote and encourage a better education system—a system as I said before that all parties seem to want to support—was to promote a school environment that supported the highest standards of educational achievement for all students by actively managing and monitoring the performance of the principal. That provision did not make it into this bill nor did a provision to ensure that the performance of the school’s other staff was actively managed and monitored. I thought the Government would have liked to include in the bill those issues about quality and standards particularly as it believes that its national standards as we have heard time and time again every day in the House are supposed to deliver the excellence that everybody wants. 
I have a question; I will just touch on this topic. My children went to British schools that had national standards and my children were tested in maths English and science. It is interesting that they were tested in science because it seems to have dropped off the table here. In an era when growing science research and development and innovation is probably the most important thing we can do in order to lift our prosperity we have dropped science as one of the critical issues this Government believes that we should be testing. But the broader point is that all my kids did under the British school curriculum was get tested on English maths and science. At the end of that year they knew how to pass tests but they did not really have a much better understanding of what they were doing more broadly in the education system. The following year that was borne out because the standards in many other areas—like history geography and many other areas that reinforced the very skills they needed to learn—were dropped. 
What is interesting for me about national standards—and I taught for a short period of time—is that as a teacher— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I am sorry to interrupt the member across the House but we have had a lot of discussion in this second reading on bits that are not in this bill at all. There is nothing about national standards and there is nothing about the two previous subjects the member referred to. I ask that the member comes to the content of the bill. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: The point is well made. In the series of debates that the House has around a bill the tightest part of those debates is actually the second reading when members are required to speak on the process what happened in the select committee adaptations relevance—all of those sorts of things. I have been waiting patiently for the member to draw in his comments and I ask him now to speak about the bill. 
DAVID SHEARER 
: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker Roy. As a new member of this House I thank you for your advice in particular on the second reading. 
Chris Hipkins 
: The newest. 
DAVID SHEARER 
: The newest on this side yes. Not the newest in the House. 
Perhaps in my final couple of minutes I will go back to the purpose of this bill. As I said before it is supported by the Labour Party which put a lot of effort into making sure that the bill was improved through the performance of the Education and Science Committee. The amendments that are coming through this bill will introduce information that will match the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education in order to identify individuals teaching in schools without registration. As I said before the fact that the payroll has many more teachers than there are teachers registered is cause for concern. The bill enables those schools to check registration in the course of tightening up their performance. 
It also removes the requirement for all contractors to be police vetted with a requirement for the police to vet only those contractors who have or are likely to have unsupervised access to children at schools and early childhood education services. That too improves children’s performance and parents’ confidence at school. The bill proposes that the New Zealand Teachers Council will no longer provide a police-vetting service; schools and early childhood education services can apply directly to the New Zealand Police. Finally it proposes that the initial maximum 3-month suspension of a teacher’s practising certificate or authority to teach will be amended so that the suspension can be reviewed after 3 months and extended for another 3 months if necessary. 
Once again I believe that the Education and Science Committee has done a good job in amending what was a much narrower bill. We will be supporting its second reading.