Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. He mihi nui ki Te Whare Pāremata mō tēnei pō.[A huge acknowledgment to the House in regard to this evening.]Is it not great to be talking about something that really matters even though everybody is claiming to be child-centric—whatever that is? Child-centric is not a very pretty word; I do not even know what it means. It sounds really odd—child-centric.Alastair Scott: It means the child is at the centre—it means the child is at the centre.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I think it means children at the centre but child-centric sounds very mechanistic. But of course this is a very mechanistic bill. It has got all kinds of bizarre processes and ideas that nobody asked for and I would have to ask where it comes from. Where is the evidence of educational benefit to children whom those members are supposed to be so centred on? Who asked for these changes? Who came and begged for more flexible hours for schools so that children could all finish at different times? Which schools came and said: Oh please we need a 'super-principal'. We need three or four schools under one principal."? No one came and asked us that. No one came and said that was a brilliant idea either. All of these "wonderful" changes in this bill—which I would describe as a mishmash of dubious ideas—were not asked for by the education community or parents. But it was somebody's idea because—Hon Hekia Parata: Tomorrow's Schools.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Yeah Tomorrow's Schools. They have had some very odd ideas—ideologically consistent ideas. If you think a principal is like a business manager an inspiring captain of the ship a distant figure with an entrepreneurial gleam in their eye gazing across the vista of a number of schools where they give the odd bit of inspirational guidance—that might be what this Government imagines a "super-principal" does. But a real principal—and we all talk to them—is up to their neck in multitasking and building relationships within their school every single day. There might be one or two rural schools that would benefit from this provision but most of the schools actually need somebody who has that relationship with the students and the member Jenny Salesa described one example of that very clearly. It does seem like an odd provision given that there is no outcry in the community for taking the idea of a principal who is intimately involved in the relationship with students in their school and spreading them around. But I do think it is part of an ethos. If you see education as a business then of course efficiency is a key value and it is sometimes more "efficient" to do things with one leader over a number of modules shall we call them or a number of widgets or a number of organisational blocs. It is a business idea much like the idea of getting people to come in who are not particularly well trained so long as they have got a graduate degree and then saying that they have got the pedagogy of education after 6 weeks. That is another idea of efficiency. It is pretty efficient because you do not want to waste your graduates; some of them might be quite good at it! However the values behind education are a lot more profound and that is why we cannot support the bill. We looked through it and we thought: "Well what can we support?". There were a few good things that happened at select committee. A few improvements were made but most of the time as Chris Hipkins said we could not get any of our questions answered about the practicality of some of these ideas. We could not get that question answered about who would be the employer of the principal. We could not get the question answered about how you would manage school transport when you had a complex family arrangement—probably already complex and then the schools decided to make it even more complicated. We could not get questions answered about home care. It is a very very contested space. Again these provisions open up and facilitate the further development of a business. It is fantastically lucrative in some ways for some of the franchises—these businesses that have not been properly reviewed some of which do a great job and some of which do not but none of which experience the kind of scrutiny or rigour that the kindergartens and the community-based education centres that are under scrutiny actually receive. We did manage to improve some of this section because originally they were going to be allowed to have no more than six children but they could have—I do not know—12 of their own. We managed to tighten up some very loose drafting there and make it a little bit safer but we are concerned about home care. We are very concerned about the frozen review and what that actually means for children because the Government's goal in early childhood education is participation not quality. Participation—meet the target 98 percent. Home care plays a big role in—it is not education mainly it is home care—actually meeting the target. From a business point of view the Government has met the target but we do not know whether the kids are safe or not and that is not really acceptable. Other aspects of the bill were pretty interesting. The Teach First issue—you can debate its contribution to secondary schools but the New Zealand Educational Institute made a submission in which it raised some concerns about primary schools. When we asked the Teach First people who came as submitters they did not seem to know whether it was for primary or secondary or who it was for. We did not have a whole lot of schools come and actually attest to their brilliance. They did not seem to know what the law said but the law actually does say in this bill that it could possibly be primary schools as well. What it is suggesting is that subject graduates in specialist subjects can now teach in primary schools under this model because the pedagogy of learning is not important. That is what concerns me about this Government's members' attitude towards the education system as a whole—that the teaching pedagogy does not exist as a thing in their minds. What exists are ways of being innovative or ways of being flexible but the core ideas about what it is that one needs to be able to do to understand how children learn do not get much of a look-in so we do not get much discussion about children as learners. We get a lot of discussion about measuring targets flexibility choice efficiency blah-blah-blah but we do not get much talk about how different children learn particularly at the primary level where it is not focused on subject but focused on child. A graduate might turn out to be the most brilliant teacher or they might not have a clue how a child with dyslexia entering the school system actually learns or how a child who is non-verbal or a child who will become a capable learner but is relatively slow and does not "meet the standard"—how they operate in the complex new environment for that child. We all know that early childhood and the early years of primary are the most important time in a child's life so let us throw some untrained people at them and see what happens. Would that not be a good idea! We are particularly concerned about that. As for the charter schools being sponsored by the universities I think Chris Hipkins is right. I think this relates to the disappointing patchy performance of the existing charter schools and also the problem of getting new ones on board. When there is a strong push to make this work because the ACT - National Government agreement says we must have these schools—and then there are incidents that take place like Whangaruru which was a disaster for those children. It is the children we should never forget who suffered from what happened at Whangaruru. The evaluation of the first round of charter schools showed that this expensive model failed some children and the only area in which they were innovative educationally was in governance—which is actually not particularly innovative. What it means is again they got rid of the parents they got rid of the boards of trustees and they have corporate sponsors who can be unaccountable governors with no input from parents. So that is the big innovation in charter schools. But educational innovation is not about governance it is about education and we are not seeing amazing educational or pedagogical innovation in those schools. If you look at the results some of them are as good as other schools; some of them are worse. It is not worth the money we are putting in let alone trying to get the universities—which have a very interesting pedagogical model but it is really not about young people who are unconventional not neurotypical different types of learners. It is actually about lecturing people and hoping they can go away and do their own research. That is not the model we want in primary schools let alone charter schools which are not accountable. So we have got real concerns about some of those issues. I think that an education bill like this—a sort of dubious mishmash like this—could have been improved by answering questions at the Education and Science Committee and that is what we did not get. We could not get any answer to the question on flexible school hours. We could not get any answer on the employment of principals. We could not get any clarity. What we did get was Supplementary Order Paper 176 which was forced upon us and then we had to go into a rearguard action and debate. So really it has been a mess and it is still a mess. Thanks."