Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:631;Page:2888] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to comment on the three earlier contributions and I will comment firstly on the one from Allan Peachey. As a little bit of a history lesson on education I point out that the term “governance” did not enter the educational lexicon in any meaningful form until a paper put out by Russ Ballard the first chief executive officer of the Ministry of Education called  
Governance and Management 
. But that paper did not arrive on the scene until well after the Picot report well after the policy on Tomorrow’s Schools was put forward well after the legislation and in fact well after boards of trustees were put in place. We then have to ask what the purpose of boards of trustees was in the first place. I happen to believe that he has got it right but we need to look at the actual chronological sequence of events. 
The second thing—and I am loath to do this—is that Moana Mackey stated that our early childhood sector has lagged behind internationally. I have to question that. In fact New Zealand has been at the cutting edge in many of the developments in early childhood education. The Reggio Emilia approach in Italy certainly led for part of the way but in some areas—for example putting in place an early childhood curriculum—New Zealand was first. The most critical point in the Before Five policy was that we cannot separate out care from education. This philosophy has actually been bought into by all parties in this House with one exception that I know of—ACT. We were world leaders. 
I say to Bill English who has talked about standards that when we came on board in the first coalition Government in 1996 National’s view on educational standards was to give two half-hour pencil and paper tests in literacy and numeracy to years 4 and 8. Those tests were going to be devised by the New South Wales testing agency and that agency was then going to rank schools in terms of performance. If that is what Mr English believes are educational standards then I am sorry but I do not believe in educational standards in that particular manner. 
This is an omnibus bill—it goes across a whole pile of territories. But I guess the part that has been most misunderstood is the development of the regulatory framework for early childhood education. The bill actually replaces section 26 of the principal Act with a new regulatory regime for the early childhood sector. Members particularly from National have said that this will mean a whole lot more regulation. In fact it will mean the opposite. Through the 1990s we had an ad hoc development of licensing procedures chartering procedures Te Whariki and the statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices. The latter were very stringent in terms of the regulations. 
I will give members one example of the regulations that went through the Desirable Objectives and Practices. They required early childhood centres to keep a record of everything fed to children at lunchtime on every day they were there. That is the sort of regulation I think that is probably going overboard but the philosophy of the time was to be quite tight and then to loosen up. That is what this process is to be about—a process to bring it into one more rational framework and to ask whether we really need that stringency that level of prescribed criteria. I have to say that the National spokesperson on early childhood education actually sat around the Cabinet table when the last version of the Desirable Objectives and Practices went through and that version was very stringent. 
Now the people in the sector are talking about this whole process as a process to collapse the Desirable Objectives and Practices. In fact it is to remove the level of prescription in the regulations as they exist at the moment and we certainly hope that that will be the outcome. I think in one of my earliest speeches I talked about the process—which they have been going through for 2 years—and the terms “described” and “prescribed”. However it would also be fair to say that the way the legislation was worded opened up opportunities for bureaucracy to go mad. That was pointed out by myself in the second reading debate. New Zealand First said we would try to do something about it and we believe we have done something about it. 
We have in fact put in the amendments that will overcome the potentially—and only potentially—Draconian aspects of the legislation where the prescribed criteria would be set by the Secretary for Education or in other words the bureaucrats and as I pointed out in one of my earlier speeches someone could come along and say all early childhood centres had to be painted blue and if a provider did not do that it would be fined up to $5000 etc. I do not believe there was any intention of that happening but the legislation provided for it so it was bad legislation. We believe that we have put in place provisions that will overcome that by ensuring first that the Minister will actually prescribe the criteria and second that the criteria will go before the Regulations Review Committee. So Parliament will in fact scrutinise those prescribed criteria and we believe that that provides a level of protection against over-zealous bureaucrats. 
The House became tied down in one or two other issues and I want to talk about those. One is the issue of teachers being insulted and intimidated in front of students. I must admit that we looked at that issue in quite a bit of detail because of some of the matters around our teachers and principals in some of our more isolated rural communities where they are living in anxiety about the outcomes of the P epidemic and asking what we can do about it. However once we explored the legislation we found that the relevant provision was already in the Education Act of 1964. All this legislation was trying to do was to extend that provision down to the early childhood sector. We recognise that it was about protecting children from being exposed to observing that intimidation or insulting behaviour towards their teachers while in their presence. It was not actually aimed at protecting adults because they are protected under the Crimes Act. Therefore we looked at it and asked about whether the law that has been there since 1964 would apply to the students in a school. Of course our advisers came back and said that yes it would. The provision has never been used. In fact schools have greater powers and authority to use within their own means. By the way what those schools use within their own powers are not open to judicial review anyhow as a result of the Maddever case. We said we have to make sure that what we are applying that to is clear but that we will ensure greater penalties. So the penalties go I think from something like $40 to $1000. In that respect there is additional protection for teachers. 
The other issue that came up which I think was a very genuine issue on the part of National and Bill English had to do with the reporting issue. This bill was intended to get rid of the provision for the requirement for boards of trustees to have an annual general meeting. There is no need for an annual general meeting as boards already have to report annually through other means. All we have to do is make sure that communities have available to them the knowledge that the reports are there and that they can go along and read them. So there is no rationale for having an annual general meeting. It is basically just a pain in the butt. It is an unnecessary procedure and no office bearers are elected at those particular meetings. 
However Mr English used the opportunity—and I do not believe that he was talking about national testing—to ask whether we could actually get boards during this process to report on how well students were going in literacy and numeracy. There is a problem because the requirements of boards to report at the moment in terms of their financial reporting do not require that level of reporting. So that is a problem in itself. Secondly the means of how that is to be done really does require a fair bit of discussion. But the idea the concept is not to be dismissed out of hand. Therefore although we rejected the notion we still think there is some merit in some of the ideas or the concept of it. 
Finally I want to make a quick mention of the extension of the use of the national student number. I am really quite surprised that the Greens have not raised this issue more strongly. We really do have a problem in this country since Tomorrow’s Schools and boards of trustees took over with students falling through the cracks. We just do not have that system of keeping a good track of our students for a whole range of necessary information to ensure that they are in fact getting their rights—particularly transient students or students between one level of schooling and another. The unique national student numbers will give a greater opportunity for us to be able to provide what we in New Zealand First believe is the required level of supervision for all young New Zealanders for the benefit of meeting their rights to an education.