Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1032. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I am pleased to take another call on this Education Amendment Bill (No 2). In particular I want to concentrate on the clauses that cover the limited authority to teach so clause 38 inserting new sections 365 366 367 368 369 and 370. These new sections of the bill fundamentally change the very notion of a limited authority to teach as we understand it in New Zealand.At the moment before this bill is passed into law a school that has a particular gap in its workforce can apply for someone who does not have the necessary qualifications to be a teacher to have a limited authority to teach. There are all kinds of rules around what they are allowed to do. This legislation that we are debating tonight utterly expands out this provision. Instead of a school being able to apply because it has a gap that it is not able to fill an individual can apply for a limited authority to teach. Instead of the 1-year authority that is granted to a school an individual will themselves be granted essentially a 3-year ticket to rove around the country teaching at will without the necessary qualifications. We can see how these provisions change this.I want to turn to a number of the submitters who came in and addressed this part of the legislation throughout the select committee process. We had a number of school principals come and address the Education and Science Committee. We made a point of asking each of the principals who came to the committee: “Are you having a problem in terms of fulfilling some of your positions and do you see it necessary for there to be this massive expansion of the limited authority to teach so that you can fill gaps that you are not currently able to and get good teachers in front of your students?”. Almost 100 percent of principals told us that it really was a completely unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem.In fact the number of people teaching under the limited authority to teach has drastically reduced in recent years. Actually around 70 percent of the people who are currently teaching under the limited authority to teach provisions are in fact itinerant music teachers who move around the country supporting music programmes in secondary schools. The way in which this was operating was absolutely adequate as far as the principals were concerned. They came from a mix of urban rural and provincial schools to address the select committee. Nobody saw the need for the change that is being proposed in the legislation that we have been talking about.What we are seeing in these provisions to expand the limited authority to teach to individuals and to expand it to a period of 3 years is mirroring what we have seen in previous legislation in education from this Government in the last Parliament. It is a continuation of what we have seen in the charter schools where unqualified individuals are able to stand in front of our classrooms and teach our children without having the necessary or requisite qualifications. We do not ask that anybody in this country goes to see a doctor who does not have the necessary qualifications. On this side of the Chamber we think it is vitally important that our children are being taught by someone who does have the necessary qualifications.If we go through each of these provisions and look at new section 365 which amends the 1989 principal Act and amends the notion of the limited authority to teach it tells us: “The purpose of granting a limited authority to teach is to enable employers to have access to skills that are in short supply and to enable those with specialist skills but not a teaching qualification to teach.” This notion of skills being in short supply is indeed what the principals did talk to us about when we asked about the need for these provisions in this bill. When we asked whether there is a need for this—whether this is something that would benefit their school and would benefit the students in their school—they said no as I have mentioned earlier in my contribution. But they did say that if there was a problem the problem was actually with the Government’s lack of workforce planning in the teaching profession. They said that if the Government really did perceive that we had such gaps within our education system instead of saying we should just warrant unregistered and unqualified people to stand in front of our classrooms—