Flavell Te Ururoa: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2667] 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker kia ora tatau katoa i tenei po. Nau mai hoki mai ki nga mahi o te po otira nga mahi o te Kawanatanga. 
[ 
Greetings Mr Assistant Speaker and to us all this evening. Welcome welcome back to the business of the evening and indeed Government matters 
.]  
Earlier today the Minister of Health outlined the strong actions taken by teachers at Rangitoto College in Auckland to protect the health and safety of students recently returned from Mexico. They took actions that demonstrated compliance with what I used to refer to as the NAGs—the National Administration Guidelines—to uphold and protect the health and safety of their students and from the Maori Party perspective the Education Amendment Bill adds to that record by fixing up some of the policy gaps that could make our students rather vulnerable. 
One of the key issues initiated by this bill are the amendments surrounding the question of registration of or authorisation for teachers to teach. According to the Teachers Council in 2007 an estimated 3500 teachers working in New Zealand schools were unregistered—3500. This means that 3500 people had not been vetted by the police or did not have in place a current practising certificate to show they were fit to work. Even more disturbing was the admission late last year that there was an unknown number of unqualified people teaching in the country’s primary and secondary schools. The admission from the former Minister of Education the Hon Chris Carter was that unregistered teachers were undermining the profession and that public concern could arise if it was found that there were significant numbers teaching without a current practising certificate or authorisation. I have to say that I find that a rather shocking admission from the former Minister. When we take our car to the garage we expect that the mechanic is qualified to know one end of the carburettor from the other—or so one would hope. Similarly if we suffer from the pain of a toothache we expect that the dental surgeon will have some skill to know what to do with the decaying tooth. So why should we risk exposing our children to teachers who are not registered or qualified to take on the responsibility of learning and teaching? Surely the education of our future leaders must be something we invest in and take seriously. 
We must protect the professional quality of the teaching sector we must maintain teaching standards and we must do both in the best interests of the student population. In our Maori Party policy document “He aha te mea nui?” a very good policy document we considered the notion— 
Hon Georgina te Heuheu 
: And National as well. 
TE URUROA FLAVELL 
: Oh OK. We would like to add a little bit more that the Maori Party brings to the debate which is a consideration of the notion of moving towards standards of cultural competency. That comes off I suppose the back of the developments around Te Kotahitanga project. So I am just signalling that if there is an acceptance of cultural incompetency almost signalled by Te Kotahitanga project in the teaching profession then the Maori Party intends to address that in the near future. 
We support the moves in this bill to enable the Teachers Council and the Minister of Education to share data about whether teachers have current registrations in place. This was an initiative that the previous Government introduced and that Minister Tolley has now advanced into this legislation. It is a move we understand that has the support of the teacher unions and the School Trustees Association and now indeed of the Maori Party. We believe that information matching will ultimately lead to the potential to raise the educational performance of students and that that should be supported. 
We note that a range of fines can be instigated for those boards that fail to employ registered teachers. Boards that employ unregistered teachers will incur a fine of up to $5000 while the unregistered teachers themselves will incur a $2000 fine. But surely the greatest penalty will be where the educational prospects of our students are compromised or hindered in any way by people who lack the skills and indeed the capacity to support and promote matauranga the love of learning. 
Although the information-matching proposals are supported the amendments to place some management around the mechanisms for police vetting are a very positive development in the Education Act. This bill removes the requirement for all contractors to be police vetted and replaces it with a requirement to vet only those who are likely to have unsupervised access to children at schools and early childhood centres. This change has come about from very strong reaction on the part of those in the education sector to what they saw as being a rather over-the-top approach. Those in the education sector have told us very clearly that such measures would create immediate problems for school communities by setting artificial barriers beyond which volunteers would be barred from entry into schools. 
Sheridan McKinley of Ngati Kahungunu and Ngai Tahu background has written as a researcher about the perspectives of Maori parents as they consider their aspirations for their children’s schooling. The research report entitled  
Maori Parents and Education/Ko nga Matua Maori me te Matauranga 
 
identified a key conclusion: how well Maori children do at school is strongly linked with how well parents and children relate to school staff. I ask members to just think about the possible scenarios that could have occurred with the previous proposals. For example imagine a kuia decides that she has some spare time to assist with helping her mokopuna to read at school a young dad on shift work decides he will give up some valuable sleep time maybe to help coach the school rugby team at lunchtime or a koro decides that he would like to support the kohanga reo by just turning up where and when he can. Imagine the reaction of their whanau when upon arriving at the school or centre they are taken off down to the police station for a police check. 
As someone who has had a fair bit of experience in the school education sector I want to make it quite clear that every school benefits from the enormous contributions of volunteers from throughout the community. They run the cake stalls and sausage sizzles. They go on camp and help out at the marae if their school has a marae. They help out on sports days provide the transport supervise the school discos and so on. They are there in big numbers. As a nation the volunteers who keep our communities afloat contribute more than $3 billion to the economy. But this is about more than simple dollars. Helping our schools to be reflections of their communities is an important goal in its own right. Strong communities come from everyone feeling that they have a role to play through their participation and ongoing contribution. During times of economic downturn such a role is even more important in the growth of resilient and thriving communities. 
We support the amendments which minimise needless police-vetting and rapidly downscale the compliance costs that would have landed on school administrations. 
Finally this bill proposes some minor changes to the current processes for teacher complaints and disciplinary measures. In essence it enables a complaint assessment committee to suspend a teacher’s practising certificate for up to 3 months if that teacher is being investigated on a complaint of serious misconduct by the committee the employer or the police. It seems a thoroughly sensible mechanism which is how other speakers have alluded to it. Indeed the possibility that a teacher could still be teaching while under investigation for serious misconduct is surely one that should not be entertained. 
These measures are sound sensible and most of all they are effective approaches towards ensuring health and safety issues are regarded as a priority in our schools and early childhood communities. For these reasons we will be supporting this bill. Kia ora tatou.