Maharey Steve: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Maharey Steve: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:631;Page:3056] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I thought the previous speaker might like to take another call because the issue is an important one. I welcome the fact that the speech was one of the few times I have heard him sustain an argument rather than just criticise so it was good to have the chance to listen to it. 
I want to go back over the year in respect of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. As a new Minister coming into this portfolio over the last little while I want to thank first of all the board particularlyCatherine Gibson who I think worked very hard over the summer period and Karen Sewell who came from the Education Review Office. I remember meeting with them and saying that the one thing I wanted for this summer was a good exam season. I think of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority as being a bit like the Reserve Bank: there is no point in having a Reserve Bank if it is not blue chip. We rely on it to set the tone for money in this country. We want the same blue-chip feel in respect of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It has to be an organisation that teachers parents and students can rely on to tell them that the qualifications our young people are getting are top-notch. That is what it has to be. 
I know that in politics it is always a great thing to be able to get up and slag off public officials who of course cannot answer back because they are required not to. So it is pretty easy to be a bit of a bully-boy and stand up in the Chamber and consistently slag off those people who have to be polite in return. I say to Mr English that that kind of behaviour just ain’t good. It is the kind of behaviour that should really be reserved for slagging off each other. I am happy if he has a go at me because then I can have a go at him. 
I also say to Mr English that I regard Karen Sewell as being an outstanding public servant. She took up the challenge right through the summer of not only trying to make sure we had a good exam season but also every time there were issues getting up and explaining them in public taking questions and making sure we were able to move on. Thankfully there were few problems this summer. We had a system that worked pretty well. During that period Mr English put out something like 13 or 14 attacks including one on Ms Sewell’s integrity. But we came through it pretty well and that is something members should applaud. 
I know that right across the education sector people are sick and tired of the kinds of criticisms that took place over the summer when as Wyatt Creech said when this policy was introduced under the National Government this is the kind of policy that deserves bipartisanship. How else do 14 15 16 or 17-year-old young New Zealanders apply themselves to their exams when one of the leading politicians in the country—the previous leader of the National Party—is consistently preferring norm referencing over standards-based assessment and is slagging off the people who run the exam and undermining every aspect of it without there being any evidence for him to do so? 
I see National people in the Chamber just having a quiet wee think—thoughtful people like Maurice Williamson— 
Darren Hughes 
: Reflective. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: —reflective people intelligent people like Katherine Rich. I just say to them that they ought to take Mr English aside and tell him to look at all the clippings from principals and teachers from right across the country who are saying they have had enough of this. 
What Mr English did today was I think good because today was an example of his trying to engage with the problem. Let us now look at how going from a good exam season we can improve this system. That is what I want to spend my year doing. But I am very grateful and thankful that over this summer all the hard work of last year paid off that we had a better exam season and that everybody other than Warwick Elley and Bill English agrees the system has improved. 
I think that Warwick Elley is an outstanding New Zealander with an enormous research record. I just happen to think that on this matter he is wrong. His argument was based on looking at one standard within a subject which is like one question within the exam and looking at the variability on that standard. He is condemning the whole system when he should be asking how all the standards added up into the biology exam for example and whether we got reasonable variability across the subject. The answer is that yes we did and that therefore it is fair to the students. Can we do better? I think we can. We have had only 3 years of this examination system. We can do better yet to get our consistency and fairness right. 
But for this year we did pretty well and I want to applaud those young New Zealanders who stepped up and did those exams after an internal assessment season that was busy for them as well. They had more assessments than they have ever had in their lives but they stepped up and did the exams. They are stretched because they are able to move towards excellence and we should remember that the kind of excellence that is built into those exams has never been present in our exams before—never. For example in the area of mathematics there has never within the maths exam been a standard like the standard of excellence that we have now—a standard that seriously stretches the young people who are taking those kinds of exams. This is something we should be applauding amongst our young people. We should be telling them that it was a good thing they did so well this year instead of sending them message after message that somehow on the basis of no evidence at all—just because of political expediency and just because Bill English prefers norm referencing—we are going to end up slagging off the exams those young people took. 
I think that every parent in this Chamber with young people wanted us—on the back of knowing that this year those exams worked for us—to say “Well done!” to those young people. So I say that to them. I thank them for trying so hard and say to them that they are great young New Zealanders. Now they need to step up into the next stage of their assessment which may be to level 2 or 3 or on to their further education after that. I thank those people in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority who worked so hard to get us through the exam season this year. 
We are not finished by any manner of means. No one has to tell us the problems—we will be the first to recognise them. We do not need Bill English to raise them. We will do that. What we want from Bill English is for him to engage with the issues and tell us how we can work together in a bipartisan way to make the New Zealand Qualifications Authority system a blue-chip system that we can all have total trust in because that is what we need in this country. I say to people who are involved in this debate that if they do not want to do that then they should go and do something else. Our young people are far too important to become some kind of football for someone who just wants to take over the leadership of the National Party. 
Report noted.