Mallard Trevor: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Mallard Trevor: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9493] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I was not going to take another call—I have spoken with the Labour whips and I may be in a little bit of trouble—but I think that that speech by the Hon Anne Tolley cannot go unanswered. The first thing we should focus on is the comments the member made about standards and her suggestion which has been made here and around the country that every single student will when standards are properly implemented leave with a National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 2. I have never heard so much nonsense in my life. There are hundreds if not thousands of students in every cohort in New Zealand who are not capable of getting NCEA level 2 unless the standards are dropped enormously. It is inappropriate for a Minister of Education to be so out of touch that she is going around the country promising parents—promising parents—that their children will achieve at that level when she if she has a modicum of intelligence will know that that is absolutely impossible. She has a system that she is putting $62 million into— 
H V Ross Robertson 
: What? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: She is putting $62 million which was stripped out of professional development and a number of other areas into an objective that is absolutely and utterly impossible. 
Next I will make a comment about the academies to which she referred. I tell her that as I move around the country in the areas with academies I am discovering absolute chaos. No one has bothered to tell the schools which of their kids are at the academies. The schools have pastoral care responsibilities for those students; they are meant to be on school rolls—[ 
Interruption 
] Well truant officers will not be looking for them because they are not on school rolls but no one has told the schools. At the start of the year apparently there were thousands of kids all around the country at the academies but no one had told the schools which kids had gone to the academies. What a shambles in implementation! 
What about qualifications? What shambles is this Minister putting into secondary qualifications now? She is taking out a number of unit standards—quite a large number of unit standards—and what is the result of that? The result of that is that if people want to run a sports academy for example at a school they now have to have moderation from one two or three different industry training organisations. Instead of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority doing the moderation if a school is running a series of academies under the implementation of the policy started by this Minister in the financial year under review that school has to have one two or three different industry training organisations doing that work. If a school is running six seven or eight different types of non-traditional programmes it might have up to 20 different organisations coming in— 
Hon Member 
: Get on the planet member—get on the planet. Don’t insult us with such stupidity. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: —no no; absolutely—to that school to moderate because of the abolition of unit standards under the direction of that Minister. Some people do not understand how our system works; some of us have been working with it now for about 20 years and we know that we make haste slowly. That Minister is someone who with her changes is making an enormous difference but it is negative. 
There is a very easy way of doing what she should have done. I agree with her basic thesis that differentiating an equation for calculus and making a cappuccino should not have equality for university entrance. For people going to university they are not the same thing. There was an easy way of fixing it which was to say that unit standards did not count for university entrance but that Minister was too slow to pick that up. 
Report noted.