Hipkins Chris: Education Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8659. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): There is absolutely no doubt that the education legislation in New Zealand does need to be modernised it does need to be streamlined and it does need to be simplified. It needs to be less prescriptive and certainly the education legislation needs to be consolidated.Of course this legislation—the bill being brought before the House by the Minister of Education—does none of those things. It does not actually deliver on that. We will end up with no fewer Acts governing the education sector at the end of this than we have now. It is a missed opportunity.We do need to streamline and simplify the Education Act and we need to remove a lot of the red tape and restriction that currently wraps up our education system. This bill far from doing that actually adds more. It makes the law more prescriptive it puts more constraints around what schools can and cannot do and I think that this is an opportunity that is being completely missed.I do want to deal with some of the smaller provisions in the bill before I get on to what I think are some of the more substantial ones. The Minister mentioned school hours. School hours are one of those topics that I think people look at and think “In theory yes it’s a good idea. Give schools more flexibility.” but actually think through the practical implications of this and you do start to uncover some difficulty.Parents who have kids at multiple schools and at multiple ages actually may find it quite difficult to have those kids starting and finishing school at different times of the day. So although it may sound nice and easy and simple in theory in practice this could have significant implications for parents that have not necessarily been thought through. I think that is the first thing.Principals running multiple schools—in theory you would think particularly in the case of very small schools would it make it sense to have one principal overseeing the management of more than one school? You would think “OK in theory yes maybe there is some merit to that.” but where they are reporting to multiple boards of trustees where does the ultimate accountability lie? Who can sack that principal if a principal is reporting to multiple different employers? What happens if one of the employers has a difficulty with them but the others quite like them? It potentially sets up a whole heap of conflicts for the boards and for the principals and potentially undermines the entire model that we have.There are certainly issues with the legislative model that we have around how schools are governed and run in New Zealand. It does not adequately promote cooperation amongst schools and collaboration amongst schools and we do need to deal with that. But I am not sure that giving principals in isolation the power to run more than one school without dealing with many of the other issues that hinder collaboration is necessarily going to deal with that particular problem.In terms of the expansion of home-based early childhood education services to allow them to provide out-of-school care I think the first question that we have got to ask is how satisfied can we be as taxpayers and the parents of the kids who are attending those services that they are getting a quality outcome as a result of sending their kids to home-based early childhood education? The reality is they cannot be because there is not any research. No research has been done to assess the quality of home-based early childhood education and it is one of the fastest-growing parts of the early childhood education system. No research has been done to assess the quality of the outcomes from home-based compared with centre-based early childhood education.I have visited home-based services; there is no doubt that there are some really innovative and interesting things happening within the home-based sector but there are also some cowboy cut-price operators who are not doing a good job of educating kids in home-based services. I think until we get that particular issue sorted out why massively expand the remit of the home-based sector? So we will be looking at that very closely.Then I want to turn to the amendments around charter schools because this bill massively expands the potential number of operators of charter schools in a way that again confuses the accountability mechanism. We already know that charter schools are less accountable than State schools. They have less scrutiny applied to them than State schools because they are not covered by the Official Information Act.So let us deal with the first change. The first change is that the Government wants to allow tertiary education institutions to set up and operate charter schools. But of course those tertiary education institutions would no longer be covered by the Official Information Act and the Ombudsman in so far as the operations of charter schools go.So potentially here we have a State institution—a State institution—setting up a charter school that would then have less scrutiny applied to it than the institution itself or the comparable school down the road. Despite the fact that it is a 100 percent owned operated and funded taxpayer operation there would be no scrutiny over that charter school under the Official Information Act or through the Ombudsmen Act and that of course is wrong.If the Government is so comfortable with the way charter schools are operating why is it being so secretive about it? Why will it not release all the information? Why will it not have—Hon Hekia Parata: They are more transparent than every other kind of school.CHRIS HIPKINS: —them covered by the Official Information Act and the Ombudsmen Act?Hekia Parata screeches that they are more accountable. That is absolute nonsense. If that is true why is it that after nearly 2 years of operation she is still sitting on massive amounts of information that she will not release about the operation of charter schools and the complaints that there have been from parents about the operation of those charter schools?There have been multiple complaints from parents about the operation of the charter schools and the Government simply sits on that information and chooses to ignore it. Of course the tertiary education system is not without fault itself. The Government is going to allow tertiary education institutions some of which have been enrolling their own staff in their tertiary education courses in order to boost their numbers—the Government’s response to that is to say: “Well let’s let them operate some charter schools as well.”The tertiary education system is full of rorts and the Government wants to expand—expand—the potential for more rorts in the education system by allowing it to operate charter schools as well and that is simply wrong. It is no wonder that the Government does not want them to be covered by the Official Information Act when it is opening up massive loopholes—massive loopholes—that will allow for more and more rorting of the system.And let us deal with another aspect of the charter school system. If charter schools are so successful why is it that in this legislation the Government is proposing that it would allow charter schools to contract out of the very education provision that they are set up to provide? Let us be clear what this bill does. This bill allows a charter school to go to a State school and pay the State school to provide the education that the charter school was supposed to provide in the first place.So what on earth is the point of the middle man? Why pay for a charter school to deliver education that it then contracts out to the State school? Why not give the money directly to the State school instead of having for-profit—for-profit—charter schools creaming the money off the top which is what this very bill allows them to do. It is an extension of the powers that charter schools have to opt out of the education provision that they are being contracted by the Government to provide.If the Government thinks that charter schools are doing so well why is it that it wants to allow them to opt out of the responsibilities they have to provide education? Why is it that it does not want them to be scrutinised under the Official Information Act? Why is it that it wants to hide their activities from the jurisdiction of the Ombudsman—not that I have a lot of faith in that particular organisation after the events of today. Why is it that it is so secretive about the operation of charter schools?There really is not a lot of justification for this extension. The only justification the Government has is that it could not get enough people—and it says so in the regulatory impact statement—who wanted to operate charter schools. So in its desperation to get more of them set up it is now going to go to tertiary education providers and say: “Please please set up charter schools because it is turning into such a disaster for the Government.” It has had problem after problem.And of course what was the ideology behind charter schools? Well if they fail the Government will close them down. That is what John Key said. The Government has had a massive failure of a charter school with drug use absenteeism high staff turnover student failure students dropping out—and what did it do? It said: “Oh we’d better give them a bit more time.”Well how many more kids have to have their futures ruined by that charter school before Hekia Parata will step in and live up to the promise that John Key made that failing charter schools will be closed down? How many more kids? Because there have already been plenty of kids who have had their futures ruined by that school and there should not be more. So the Government members can stand over there with their crocodile tears about it but these are real kids and they are ruining their futures by allowing them to attend that school which is absolutely failing.If the Government was sincere in what it is saying it would close that school down—which is what John Key said the Government going to do and that is what the Ministry of Education recommended to Hekia Parata. It said that the case was already there for the Government to close that school down because it was failing and for whatever reason Hekia Parata decided to do her own thing ignore that advice and leave that school open.So charter schools are not more accountable. There is no justification for expanding charter schools. This is a bad piece of legislation. Although there are good aspects to it the negatives outweigh the positives and we will be voting against it.