Coddington Deborah: Estimates Debate —  
Coddington Deborah: Estimates Debate —  
[Volume:610;Page:7245] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 In these estimates the Minister of Education has managed to secure $8200 million to spend on education. One has to feel sorry for education Ministers in this Government because they are captured by the teacher unions and those in the debate who believe that increased spending on education brings improved education. New Zealand actually spends more on education as a percentage of gross domestic product than any other OECD country. In the last 50 years spending per pupil has quadrupled but has that translated into education standards going up? No it has not. Education standards have gone down parents have remained shut out of the picture and we have a situation now where only middle-income and high-income families have a choice about where their children go to school. We allow parents to choose which doctor they send their children to but we do not allow poor parents in particular to choose which school their children go to. 
Unlike my colleague from the Green Party I am more concerned about those children who will never ever get to the gates of a university and who will never even have the chance to take out a student loan because in this vote the Government has ignored the issue of truancy once more. Nowhere in this estimate is the public more badly served than in the area of truancy. We are not investing any more resources in dealing with the growing problem of truancy. I note that the Education and Science Committee made the point that there is still no national database and that it has now been put off till about 2005. The Non-enrolment Truancy Service has repeatedly called on this Government for help in trying to get children back to school. 
I acknowledge that a database is not the silver bullet. There are a number of reasons that children do not go to school. Teachers rely on parents to get children to school parents blame teachers and we all end up blaming the Government. Well I am not going to blame the Minister of Education. I ask him to take some advice to think outside the square and to put some more money into the Non-enrolment Truancy Service so that it can explore some of the reasons that children in the crucial age group that is hit by truancy—that is ages 14 to 16—are school-resistant. They might not necessarily be education-resistant; they might just be resistant to the one-size-fits-all system whereby they are put in a class with all their peers and come under peer pressure to be naughty and not go to school. Not all of them have parents who are educationally irresponsible. They might be bullied or they might not fit the system. We have the classic situation where Auckland Metropolitan College has closed down and a number of the children who went there are now probably figuring in truancy statistics. They are not necessarily bad children; they just do not fit the rigid structures of other schools. 
Why not spend a bit more than the measly $4.1 million that we give to the Non-enrolment Truancy Service? Truancy officers do an amazing job acting as social workers—better social workers than those from the Department of Child Youth and Family Services in a number of cases—and working full-time by necessity but being paid for only part-time hours. I ask the Minister in the chair Steve Maharey and Trevor Mallard to take some of the $30 million that has been tagged for the America’s Cup and invest it in the area of truancy. 
Let us look at how bad the problem is becoming. In case people do not think we have a problem with truancy I shall share with them the figures I got yesterday from the Parliamentary Library. In 1997 there were 3172 referrals to the Non-enrolment Truancy Service and last year that figure went up to 4345. In 1 day in Manukau City 1200 children were identified as not being at school—and those are only the ones the service could pick up. Because we do not even have a database we do not know about the others we are not picking up. 
This Government is wasting money on film makers musicians and the arts in order to shore up its voting public at the next election; what about the wasted resource of these children? The Government is not investing in getting these children back to school but is instead wasting resources on potential artists film makers musicians and those sorts of people. We should look at what truancy costs the country further down the track. In most cases children who are truants end up in the criminal courts and move on to become repeat offenders unless something is done to look at why they do not want to go to school. Does this Minister want us to end up in the situation in Britain where there are police in schools and where mothers are being sent to jail?