Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
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KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) 
: 
 The main parts of the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) have been described by other speakers but I will run through them quickly. As we have heard secondary-tertiary programmes are part of this bill. It updates and clarifies the law affecting private schools it changes the refund provisions for international students enrolled in private training establishments and it exempts limited-attendance centres from early childhood education licensing standards to make it easier for recreational facilities shopping centres and similar organisations to provide short-term childcare. The bill also makes changes to school enrolment scheme priorities to make it easier for the children of board members and former pupils living out-of-zone to attend a school. 
Labour will not support this bill because as Trevor Mallard has said a number of changes that the Labour members of the Education and Science Committee wanted were not included in it. I was not a member of that committee but I have my own reasons for believing that this bill will do very little whatsoever to make a difference for the core purpose of education. This bill in my opinion tinkers at the margins. It does nothing to address what really needs to be addressed in education in order to improve outcomes for kids and in order to shorten the tail that we hear so much about. 
Everybody in this House needs to realise that when it comes to talking about educational policy and educational legislation we need to fix on what will make the biggest difference in raising achievement. We make the biggest difference in raising achievement when we focus on teachers—no not even on teachers but on teaching. It is not teachers who raise achievement; it is what teachers do that raises achievement. We will not raise achievement until our legislation and our policies send a laser beam down on what teachers do and how we can support them to better do what they do. 
The person whom the Government refers to most of all when it wants advice on education policy is Professor John Hattie. He has done his best to create a science out of the art of teaching and I agree with a lot of what he says. One of the big things that he says in his book  
Visible Learning 
 is that teachers engage in about 136 strategies and he makes it easy for us because he lists those strategies in order of what is most effective to what is least effective. He talks about strategies with an effect size of zero. Anything a teacher does with an effect size of zero will have no impact on learning. Of those 136 strategies about five have an effect size of less than zero. So about five strategies actually make kids dumber. That means that all the other strategies do have a positive impact on student achievement. But there is no point fixating on those strategies that have an effect size just above zero. Professor Hattie says that the strategies we need to use are those that have an effect size of 0.4 or higher because they are in the top half of the strategies that make a difference. He is not saying that we need to follow those strategies as a recipe and just tick them off; we need to focus our policy on those strategies because they have been proven to make the biggest difference in raising educational achievement. 
Rahui Katene mentioned Te Kotahitanga. Te Kotahitanga is about the relationships that teachers have with their students. But on that scale that Professor Hattie talks about relationships are No. 11. They are the 11th most effective strategy that can be employed. That means there are 10 other strategies or things that we can legislate for and can support teachers to do in their classrooms that will have a bigger impact on educational achievement than the Te Kotahitanga programme. And we all know that Te Kotahitanga is extremely effective. 
It is not until this House fixes its educational legislation and its educational policies on those strategies that are proven to make the most difference to raising achievement that we will address the tail of underachievement and lift up everybody. I implore the Minister of Education when she brings the Education Amendment Bill (No 3) to the House to make sure that what is included in that bill focuses squarely on those strategies that are proven to be the most effective at raising achievement. 
The secondary-tertiary programmes that are being talked about here probably will make a difference I believe. They may not make a huge difference but they may make some difference. What the secondary-tertiary programmes are doing is as Colin King mentioned providing another pathway for students to learn. They change the context in which they are learning. In themselves they may not make a difference. It depends again on the teachers of the kids in the secondary-tertiary programmes; it is what they do that will make the difference. I think it is good that the Government is thinking along a different context. 
I want to bring up something Allan Peachey said in a book he wrote which I read while I was still a principal. He wrote that New Zealand is scared to allow students to specialise at an early age. I think we could be a bit braver in allowing students to specialise at an earlier age. We have in this bill the secondary-tertiary programmes pathway and we already have the academic pathway that is going on in schools at the moment and not all kids are successful at that pathway. We should try to think outside the square and come up with other pathways that students can participate in. One of the pathways that I believe we should look at is quite simply the art of teaching kids how to make money how to use money how to invest money how to be entrepreneurs and how to be enterprising. If students do not want to go off to a technical school or a practical school or to do the academic stuff but might want to set up their own business before they leave school then that is a really worthwhile avenue that we could focus on. 
Another strand could be that we allow students to specialise in sports. I am not saying that a sporting academy for want of a better name should be any less academically rigorous; it is just about changing the context of those kids’ learning so that instead of learning in the traditional classroom with fours walls a whiteboard and a teacher standing at the front they are learning in a context based on sports. If we look at the career pathways that that could lead kids into we see that they could be trained to become All Blacks or netballers or rowers but also sports managers sports psychologists personal trainers physical training instructors nurses or doctors. It is all about giving kids a whole heap of options and pathways forward to their futures. We should not think that because we have secondary-tertiary programmes we are catering for all the needs of all the kids. I think we need to be brave and bold and explore other pathways for children to achieve beyond their potential. 
Finally I am a very concerned about the limited-attendance centres not having to screen employees. It is very dangerous that people can just set up shop as an early childhood centre in a mall or shopping centre and start looking after kids. I think that is a really dangerous thing for us to pursue.