Hipkins ChrisEDUCATION (SCHOOL DONATIONS) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I move that the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. [Singing begins in the gallery]SPEAKER: Order! Order! Order! Order! I'm warning the people in the gallery to stop now. [Singing continues] All individuals in the gallery will face a one-year ban from the buildings. Please take all their names. And I'll say that as someone with some experience of similar behaviour in 1977. [Members of the public were removed from the gallery]Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: You would never have done a thing like that Mr Speaker. SPEAKER: The Hon Chris Hipkins start again. Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I move That the Education (School Donations Amendment) Bill be now read a second time. This bill amends the Education Act of 1989 to support schools to access the Government's extra funding in lieu of school donations scheme that we announced in this year's Budget. [Interruption]DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! Could I just ask—the Minister's struggling to even hear himself let alone anyone else here. Thank you.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Thank you Madam Speaker. This bill reflects the Government's commitment to breaking down the financial barriers to participation in education at all levels and it delivers on our commitment to restore the right to a free school education for all New Zealand students. The bill is actually very simple. It creates a new category of grants called discretionary grants. It enables the Minister to place conditions on the payment of this extra funding—primarily that boards would stop soliciting voluntary donations from parents or voluntary payments from parents and if these conditions are breached then the bill allows that the funding can be recovered from the boards. These changes are necessary because they give participating schools a strong incentive to comply with the conditions of the extra funding in lieu of donations scheme and it will ensure that parents are actually relieved of the pressure to pay voluntary school donations. I'd like to thank the Education and Workforce Committee for their careful consideration of the bill and to thank those who took the time to make submissions. One issue that arose very clearly during the submissions process was the place of school camps. I think everybody recognises that school camps are a very important part of the Kiwi tradition of schooling and they are one that we want to see continue. School camps are a great tradition but we also need to be very clear that under the current law schools cannot legally charge for school camps that are part of the curriculum and that's an area that's been hotly contested. But the current law is clear that if a camp is part of the delivery of the curriculum a school can ask for a donation to cover the cost but they cannot charge a fee for the school camp and they cannot exclude a student from the school camp if their parents don't pay that donation. Now there's often been a lot of misunderstanding about that but that's the state of the current law. We will be moving in the committee of the whole House stage to exempt school camps from the prohibition on asking for donations. So schools who accept the extra funding will still be able to ask for a school donation to cover the cost of a school camp. They will not be able to exclude a child whose parents do not pay that donation from the school camp. They could not do that now under the current situation. So if at the moment they ask parents to donate money to cover the cost of the camp and those parents don't pay that child is still entitled to attend the school camp—that's the status quo and that will prevail even for those schools who opt in to the scheme.I want to briefly cover the amendments that the Education and Workforce Committee have recommended. They recommended by majority some changes in response to the submissions. The first of the changes is a recommendation that any extra conditions attached to the payment of the discretionary grant beyond the mandatory requirement not to ask for solicited payments must be communicated by a Gazette notice. That means that everybody is clear and up front about what that is. I agree with that change.The second recommendation is that the bill should clarify that a school board may receive a discretionary grant only if it is decided by resolution to do so. We were very clear when we announced the policy on Budget day that we expect boards to go and consult with their communities before making a decision as to whether to opt in to the scheme. This makes it very clear that it will be ultimately the board by way of a formal resolution that will make that decision.I acknowledge that many of the submitters who went to the select committee submitted not on the bill itself but on the policy that the bill allows the Government to implement. In particular there were submissions from decile 8 9 and 10 schools who argued that they should be included in the eligibility for the policy. The bill itself allows them to be included in eligibility. And at any future point that a Government chooses to do so it can change the eligibility criteria so that additional schools can be made eligible for the scheme. I want to be clear here that this is the first roll-out of this and we are open to extending that to other schools to those decile 8 9 and 10 schools in the future. And of course we'll be considering that actively as part of our work around ultimately deciding the future of the school decile system.Too many schools are dependent on financial contributions from parents and we know that for those low-decile schools—particularly those decile 1 and 2 schools—many of them receive very little by way of donations from parents because those parents simply are unable to pay. When you stack up the donations that those low-decile schools get compared to those decile 8 9 and 10 schools it is a substantial difference in the overall revenue that those schools are able to generate through school donations. And that is one of the reasons why we targeted this policy to the decile 1 to 7 schools in the first instance.So this bill will go a long way to allowing the Government to deliver on its commitment to reduce the financial pressure on parents to pay donations—of course we'll keep the policy that underpins this under review. But the bill itself is a very sound bill and I commend it to the House.