Turei Metiria: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Turei Metiria: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:634] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 In some of my earlier contributions I mentioned my concern that private schools will not be included in this policy. Private schools will not be subject to the national standardised testing regime introduced by the National Government even though they get a considerable amount of public funding. Indeed it is National policy to increase the public funding of private schools from around $40 million a year to $70 million a year. That is nearly a 100 percent increase in funding from public money going directly to private schools but without the imposition on those schools of the same obligations that State schools will need to have in order to meet the national standardised testing. That then raises the issue about how the schools that might not meet the standardised testing regime of the Minister will be funded and resourced in order to meet that standard or to support their children to meet those standards. 
It recalls to mind the No Child Left Behind policy of the US legislation which I talked about in my second reading speech. The experience in the US is that the standardised testing regime had a major impact on the schools that failed to meet that test even if they were improving. None the less if they continued to fail to meet those tests then one of the obligations was that the school potentially had to hand itself over to be run by a private company rather than by the community. Indeed there has been a great deal of interest in the No Child Left Behind policy in the US. Privatisation advocates in the US have said that in their view the schools that fail to meet the standards would be the first to be privatised. They would be the first to be either handed over because of the law to private interests or just bought out by private interests and run by private companies as private schools. 
What will it mean for New Zealand if in the future schools consistently fail to meet the standard? They might be progressing and making advances but they might none the less not be meeting the standards. What will this mean for schools in poorer communities such as Aranui Highbury Otara and Porirua at the same time that decile 10 schools and private schools will get almost a doubling in their public funding? For example if we look at Kings High—and I understand that John Key is a parent of a child at that high school—it will get an increase per annum— 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: King’s College not Kings High. Kings High is Dunedin; very good. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: King’s College—that is quite right. King’s College is to get an increase in public funding of $1.2 million per year from the National Government. I am sure that will be very helpful to John Key’s children but at the same time that school may not necessarily be subject to the new national standards. We might get some clarification on that. However schools in Otara Aranui or Highbury may well desperately need those resources to try to meet these standards and provide support to their children—particularly decile 1 and 2 schools. 
Where will that money come from? I have said in earlier debates in this House that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have said that there will be no new money for Ministers to spend in their portfolios and that if they are to have any new initiatives then they will have to find the money from within the portfolio for themselves. So where will this new money come from to fund private schools? It will come from the poorer schools in our community. The money will be used to do the standardised testing and to force our State schools into league tables which will identify some of them as failures and make them more subject to criticism and disregard even though those schools actually need a great deal more financial support. The money will be sucked out of the decile 1 schools and funnelled into the expensive private decile 10 schools that do not need those resources. 
This is another means by which the National Government will suck money out of poor communities and funnel it into rich ones. All the legislation passed under urgency so far has been exactly about that. 
What will be the next steps? National’s policy talks about allowing popular schools to expand in the future. It talks about having capital funding for those schools that are growing their role which will again extract money from out of the schools that need support and into the schools at the high decile end that have community support. It will be helping them to grow at the expense of the other schools.