Stanford EricaEDUCATION (SOCIAL INVESTMENT FUNDING AND ABOLITION OF DECILE SYSTEM) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): I move That the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.This bill deals with how to better tackle the effects of disadvantage in our schools through an improved funding system. This bill is based on existing National Party policy that we announced prior to the 2017 election. This bill is in line with a whole lot of work that the former Government and ministry worked on. The concept is that you can be more sophisticated and targeted around the delivery of funding to disadvantaged kids because fighting disadvantage is at the heart of this bill.This bill is about getting the right funding to the right kid at the right time so that they have a better chance of a happy and successful life by succeeding at school because there is no better way to fight disadvantage than through education. The decile system was originally introduced as an attempt to target extra funding to those schools in poorer areas to lift the achievement of disadvantaged kids at these schools. However the decile system is a blunt tool for achieving this goal. It assumes that household income is the best and only factor in determining whether a child will or will not achieve at school and that all children who need this funding attend schools that are identified as low decile.It has been the best way of guessing where these children are and that is the problem with the decile system. It is a best guess based on a flawed assumption. The decile system is failing many thousands of students who are at risk of not achieving because they don't attend low-decile schools and it has created a class system amongst our schools. Those lower-decile schools are stigmatised as poor neighbourhood equals poor quality school" in the eyes of the public. Not only does this unfairly stigmatise schools but it unfairly stigmatises the students attending those schools. They know their decile rating and they know what it means.This bill amends the Education Act 1989 to remove the decile system as a means for allocating public money to schools to fight disadvantage. The bill proposes a sophisticated alternative model that more accurately targets funding to those students who need it regardless of where they attend school because with better data better analysis we can better predict which young people are at risk of not achieving and actually by analysing the data we see that household income alone is not the best indicator of whether or not a child is at risk of not achieving at school. We now know that there are a range of factors that more accurately predict educational non-achievement. This bill creates a needs index based on a social investment approach. The needs index will consist of a number of weighted and ranked indicators that when taken together more accurately predict whether a child will achieve at school.To allow for flexibility the bill sets out that these needs indicators would be prescribed by the Minister in regulation after consultation with the relevant people and would be updated annually. These needs indicators may include proportion of time spent on benefits father's offending and sentence history Child Youth and Family notifications youth justice notifications school transiency mother's age at birth—just to name a few. Using sophisticated data we know where these students are. The funding model doesn't guess where they might be. This funding model identifies the child and delivers funding to the school that they attend. This way we are getting the right funding to the right child at the right time.It is of utmost importance that we protect privacy. No parent wants their child to be stigmatised. We spent a great deal of time considering how we could protect children's privacy in this bill. We have ensured that data collected under this bill must comply with the Privacy Act 1993. The bill ensures the anonymisation of individual data so that individual students are not able to be identified. What this means in practice is that schools receive funding for those students at risk of not achieving but there is no identification of individual students.In reality teachers and principals know who these students are. We have always trusted them to direct funding to those students in need and we will continue to do so under this bill. Furthermore the data collected for calculating the needs index including needs indicators of the individual students is not subject to the Official Information Act (OIA).Another important consideration when drafting this bill was combating the potential for schools to continue to be ranked but this time based on the level of funding they receive for children who are at risk of not achieving via an OIA request. This is why we included a clause that ensures information regarding the level of funding a school receives for children who are at risk of not achieving is not able to be requested under the Official Information Act. This clause protects schools from the current stigma they receive under the decile funding system.As I have said this bill is based on existing National Party policy and as part of that policy we made a commitment that no school would receive any less funding than they do now. This bill would see many schools receive more funding as those students at risk of not achieving are more accurately identified. Under our policy those schools identified as having fewer students at risk of not achieving would receive the same level of funding as they do now. We would expect that the Government would make the same commitment.The reality is that we need to get funding to these children if they are ever to take advantage of any tertiary fees-free policy. If we have $2.8 billion to spend on free tertiary for kids from wealthy families it is unconscionable that we don't have more funding to put into disadvantaged kids at school so that they have a chance of success.When I asked Minister Hipkins to meet me about my bill he assured me that after he received a ministry briefing on my bill he would meet with me. What transpired after emails and phone calls to his office requesting a meeting was silence. Then at the eleventh hour at 4:40 p.m. last night the Minister sends me an email with a letter explaining that he will not support the bill based on advice he received from a memo from the ministry dated nearly a month ago on 5 April. A memo and a letter I am disappointed to say make a range of false assumptions about my bill without providing me the courtesy of sitting down to talk through his concerns.This range of false assumptions will no doubt make up the basis of Mr Hipkins' and indeed his colleagues' contributions to this debate. Had we met the majority of these false assumptions would have been easily reconciled. In lieu of this meeting I will work through some of those assumptions now: number one that my bill misunderstands the equity index the ministry has been developing and creates something completely different. Well we do understand the equity index because it was developed under the previous National Government. We designed the overall system that the ministry and this Government continue to progress. The premise behind my needs index is exactly the same: a child is at low or high risk due to the full combination of factors in their lives not because they have one specific indicator.Number two that a decision to replace the decile system would be better achieved outside of legislation. The reason I am proposing this bill is to bring transparency to this process. National announced the decile system would go; we announced the equity index. Six months into the new Government and there has been silence. We don't know what they're doing behind closed doors we don't know whether or not they're progressing the equity index and we don't know what the indicators are—it is all a mystery. My bill gives greater transparency to the process of replacing the decile system. My bill would require that the needs indicators be consulted on and published but remains flexible about which ones are prescribed and how they are weighted.The Minister is being incredibly clever by sitting on this memo for three weeks. By not meeting with me and asking questions he has enabled the ministry to rule out the bill based on incorrect assumptions. What he didn't realise was that we wouldn't get to the vote tonight so the good news is we have a couple of weeks so that he can meet with me to clear up these assumptions and so that he can change his position.Minister Hipkins simply doesn't have a reason to vote against this bill. He has tried to gather up every little excuse he can find all based on assumptions and misunderstandings and that he knew could have been cleared up had he met with me which is why he didn't. This bill just doesn't suit Mr Hipkins' political purposes. He's probably going to do 95 percent of what we were going to do but he hates the thought of giving National any credit for this work in social investment. It's clear that he wants to repackage all the work that we've done and wants to call it his own and he cannot stomach working with me or the National Party on my bill that gives disadvantaged kids a better chance. And that is very sad."