Hipkins Chris: Urgent Debates — Student Achievement—OECD ReportText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Urgent Debates — Student Achievement—OECD Report[Sitting date: 04 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15213. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I moveThat the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. The public do indeed deserve to have confidence in their Government’s education policies but they cannot with this current Government. What we have seen under this current Government is that every time it has been called upon to make decisions about education it has consistently made the wrong call.In the National Government’s first Budget in 2009—its first Budget—it cut the professional development funding for teacher professional development. It cut that by $35 million. In the same Budget it gave another $36 million to private schools. That says everything about this Government’s education priorities.We should be concerned about the fall in our OECD rankings. The Minister of Education yesterday argued that this is an ongoing trend. There was a modest decline in 2009. That modest decline has turned into a freefall under this Government. Our figures have absolutely plunged. We have fallen significantly from seventh to 13th in reading from seventh to 18th in maths and from 13th to 23rd in science. Those are significant drops that have occurred under this National Government and those are issues that we should be very very concerned about.I have spent a lot of time going into schools over the last year and talking to teachers about what is making a difference to them and why it is that our kids in our education system are not achieving to the level that we should be able to expect. What they are saying quite clearly is that this Government is so focused on constantly measuring the problem on constantly testing kids that the teachers have not actually got time any more to teach the kids. The teachers want this Government to remove the red tape so that they can get on with the job they entered the teaching profession to do which is toactually teach kids. What they are doing now is filling in forms to satisfy this National Government. That is not leading to better educational outcomes for kids.The studies that have been coming out in the last few days and weeks have clearly shown that the Government’s education approach is absolutely failing. Let us look at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research’s report that came out last week. Only 14 percent of principals—only 14 percent of principals—and 23 percent of teachers say that national standards provide a valuable record of student learning. If national standards are the Government’s flagship education policy for lifting student achievement and yet the people who are being forced to implement them say they do not work and they do not provide reliable information how is it that they are supposed to lift student achievement? They simply do not. Only 7 percent of principals—7 percent of principals—and 15 percent of teachers believe that national standards are robust. They are flimsy standards that are neither national nor standard—they are neither national nor standard.It is no wonder that this Government has got our schools and our teachers focused on the wrong things. Hekia Parata in her answers to questions today talked about how wonderful national standards were and how parents were so happy with the information they were getting and yet overwhelmingly parents are complaining that the information they are getting as a result of national standards is inferior to the information they were getting before national standards were introduced. Fifty-four percent of parents did not agree that national standards were providing a valuable record of students’ learning. What was HekiaParata’s response to that? It was to attack the survey. Rather than actually listen to what parents are saying Hekia Parata decided to instead attack the survey and once again she was totally wrong.Sixty percent of teachers and 70 percent of principals say that national standards have created more work for little gain—more work for little gain. What that means is that more of our teachers more of our principals and more of the people who work in schools every day with kids are spending more time filling in forms for the Government constantly assessing kids but not actually focusing on raising student achievement which is exactly where they should be focused. If a child comes to school hungry putting them on the scales every day to see whether they have gained weight simply will not work. The same principle applies with their learning. If a child cannot read at school simply giving them the same test every day to see whether they have improved is not going to improve their ability to read. Giving them some additional support so they can actually learn to read is what the Government should be focused on but it is not.What it is busily devoting all of the resources in the education system towards is implementing national standards. Of course national standards as I said are neither national nor standard so now the Government is putting the money into trying to make them more consistent. Well again making the standards more consistent will not improve student achievement. What it will do is put a whole lot more money and a whole lot more time and energy in to a bureaucratic exercise rather than actually focusing on lifting student achievement.If we are going to get serious about lifting student achievement why does the Government not look at the things that actually work? Take Reading Recovery a programme that has established credibility and that works. The Labour Party has said we will extend Reading Recovery so kids who need that support will be able to get it. That is actually a very very important and a very very sensible thing to do. Reading Recovery says that if a child is falling behind in their reading they need intensive one-on-one support—they need intensive one-on-one support. We cannot simply go to teachers and say that if students are falling behind in their classes—and they have gotquite large classes—they can give all of the time they need to absolutely every student. Sometimes some of those kids do need more intensive levels of support and that is where we should certainly be putting money. The Government is simply turning a deaf ear to those concerns from teachers principals parents and everyone else who is saying they are not getting the support they need.The Government says it needed national standards to identify where students were falling behind so it could target the resources to deal with that. The problem is we already knew where students were not achieving. When National came into office in 2008 it talked about the areas where students were not achieving already and said that it would do something about that. What it has done is spend its entire 5 years in Government measuring the problem over and over again and it has done nothing to actually address the concerns and the issues.What was National’s one solution? Let us go back. What was National’s one solution in last year’s Budget? Its one solution in last year’s Budget was to make class sizes bigger. HekiaParata’s best attempt at improving the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms was to put more kids in front of every teacher—more kids in front of every teacher. That is not going to improve student learning in New Zealand. Of course National was forced to back down because every parent in the country understood something that Hekia Parata and John Key did not—that putting more kids in a class is not going to allow the teacher more time—That is right. Well I will get on to private and charter schools in a moment Mrs King. It is not going to allow the teachers more time to spend with each child to focus on actually raising student achievement.So where is the money going under this Government? Well we have seen a significant increase in funding for private schools and of course we have seen money ploughed into that ideological experiment that the National Government would have us believe was forced on it by that convicted criminal John Banks—Mr SPEAKER: Order!CHRIS HIPKINS: —when he forced upon it the charter schools experiment which every credible academic doing research has argued will not work and will not lift student achievement.Let us go back to the OECD study. The OECD study proved very very clearly that in fact when you control for socio-economic factors private schools do not do any better than public schools do. And yet under this Government because of its ideological predisposition we have seen significant amounts of extra money going into the private schooling sector through private schools and through charter schools. Actually we should be focusing on making sure every school in New Zealand is a good school. The Government has put in place Aspire Scholarships so that it can send more kids into private schools and yet the results from that are abysmal. The kids who are attending private schools under those Aspire Scholarships are not actually achieving—they are not achieving. It is not a good use of money.We know the things that are working. If the Government members actually took the time to get out there and visit schools to listen to teachers and principals to listen to parents and to listen to the academic experts they would actually know what is working in schools. But they do not. They are completely deaf to the feedback that educators are giving them. This is a Government that has declared a war on teachers—a war on teachers—because it believes that National knows best. It believes that the people who are in the classroom every day teaching kids every day do not know what is going to raise student achievement and that they have to be told by the National Government what they need to do to raise student achievement. Well I tell you what. I would put my money on a schoolteacher or a school principal knowing what is best for the kids in their school far ahead of HekiaParata’s knowledge of those issues. I trust theprofessional judgment of the people who are in our schools and who know how to raise student achievement. That is not something they will get under this National Government.Let us look at HekiaParata’s list of excuses for the decline in our OECD ranking because that is what they are—they are simply excuses. First of all she talked about the fact that we have had a “significant increase in the number of teachers but under-investment in raising teacher practice;”. Well yes we have had under-investment in raising teacher practice because this Government cut the funding for that in its very first Budget in 2009. Coincidentally that was the last time we had the Programme for International Student Assessment results out. So we are seeing now in the next Programme for International Student Assessment study after the Government cut the funding for teacher professional development what the impacts of those kinds of Draconian policies are.Other excuses from Hekia Parata include that there is “a focus on compliance rather than … performance;” and yet national standards are all about compliance. That is what this Government is focused on. It is all about compliance and—Grant Robertson: Bureaucracy gone mad.CHRIS HIPKINS: —bureaucracy gone mad—tying schools and teachers up in red tape and not trusting them to make judgments about what is best for students. It is about making them fill in forms to satisfy this quest of the Government to rank everything and to have league tables rather than focusing on teaching the whole curriculum which is where our schools should really be focused. Hekia Parata said there is “Inadequate … data on student achievement …”. That is absolute nonsense. We have always had very good data on student achievement. What we have not been good at doing as a system is matching the additional resources to where student achievement is failing. This Government has been among the worst because what it has been doing is cutting the funding to programmes that have targeted areas of underachievement.We in the Labour Party recognise the links between inequality in our society and under-performance in the education system. That is something to which this Government turns a blind eye and a deaf ear. This is a Government that refuses to measure child poverty—refuses to even measure child poverty. And yet we acknowledge that the conditions that kids are growing up in have an impact on their readiness to learn when they get to school—something that the National Government is simply not willing to hear.This is a wake-up call to the Government; its education policies are failing. Other countries that have experienced a similar decline in the education rankings are taking that very very seriously. They are willing to reassess and re-examine the policies they have put in place that are not working. So why is our Government trying to continue to push along the policies that have been proven to fail? They have been proven to fail and that is exactly what is happening with this Government. It is arrogant and out of touch. As in so many other areas this Government is not listening to the people whom it is relying on every day in schools to get out in front of kids to teach kids. It is not listening to them.The first thing this Government should do is admit that it is wrong. Then it should actually go out there and say to teachers and principals: “Actually we think that you are professionals. We actually trust your judgment. What is it that we need to do as a Government to lift student achievement?”. That is the very first thing this Government should do. But we will not get that from Hekia Parata because Hekia Parata knows best. Instead she will go and lecture schools about all of the things that they are doing wrong and about whether they are pronouncing their kids’ names right but she will not actually put the effort the energy and the resources into areas where we know that kidsare not achieving. Instead National wants to import failed ideological experiments from overseas. It is no surprise that other countries that have adopted standardised assessment and standardised testing are either stagnating or declining in the education rankings as well.What we need to be doing is embracing the whole curriculum. We have one of the best curricula in the world. It is internationally recognised. It was put in place by the previous Labour Government. I will say that it was put in place by the previous Labour Government but it was supported by the then National Opposition. National was right then; what it has done instead since it came into Government is undermine the world-leading curriculum that we have. It has undermined that consistently by saying to teachers and to schools that it does not want them teaching the whole curriculum; it wants them to focus on only a narrow range of things. That is not going to lead to a more prosperous future for our country. The OECD statistics that are out this week show that the Government’s education policies are failing.