Strange JamieJAMIE STRANGE (Labour): Mr Assistant Speaker thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. I'd like to acknowledge our Minister of Education the Hon Chris Hipkins for the excellent work he's been doing. This Government will listen to our teaching professionals. The education sector breathed a collective sigh of relief when this Government was elected. How do I know that? Because I was involved in the education sector for many years. I've got a number of friends in the sector and they're very excited that they have a Government who will actually listen.There's two aspects that I want to talk about in this bill—and they have been covered already so I'm going to just add my thoughts to it—and that's charter schools and national standards. So firstly on the aspect of charter schools I've personally spoken with two principals of charter schools one in Auckland and one in Hamilton and both of them are looking forward to the opportunity to apply to become schools of designated character. In fact they feel that the funding for the charter schools has not been administrated in a fair manner. They are in the third tranche and hence they missed out on extra money so they're actually very excited to become designated character schools.I'd just like pick up on a couple of points here the first one for the Hon Tim Macindoe: sir I appreciate your passion for the education system and I say that genuinely. I'd like to assure you that alternative education can and will still take place within the context of a designated special character school. I think there's a little bit of fear around this that with charter schools transitioning into designated character schools the alternative aspects that many of them do provide will be lost but that's not the case. In my personal opinion I believe that charter schools are part of a wider agenda I'd like to call a privatisation agenda and it's around privatising the education system so it becomes more like an American model. However this Government are defenders of a strong public education system focused on equal opportunity and that's where the key difference lies. A question for the member David Seymour—he may address it in his speech when he speaks—I'd like to know: what can a child learn in a charter school that cannot be learnt in a designated character school within the context of our public education system? I look forward to hearing that answer when the member speaks.In my last couple of minutes I'd like to speak about national standards. Now I believe national standards were never about performance; it was never about assessing to parents; it was about performance pay. I believe the previous Government wanted to rank teachers and they wanted to pay teachers different levels. The teachers didn't want that because the teachers knew that a system like that would not work in an education system—it would not benefit our young learners. So in order to hang performance pay on something the previous Government brought in national standards. However because of the strength of the teacher voice they weren't able to progress to performance pay. Who knows—if they had another term they may have rammed it through. So fortunately for us we didn't get to that stage.My wife and I also have four children like the member opposite and we regularly meet with the children's teachers. We meet twice a year. We sit down with the teacher the teacher pulls out a piece of paper and shows us quite clearly what level of the curriculum our children are at in each of the subjects and that satisfies us in terms of where they are on the level. We know that we might be able to provide some more support as parents in certain areas but we don't need the extra judgment which is not accurate in many cases of a national standard. There are a number of reasons why national standards will not work: they narrow the curriculum they promote dishonesty they're not holistic they foster low self-esteem and they limit creativity. So I'm very excited particularly around those two aspects of the bill—the transition of charter schools and the removal of national standards. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.