Peters Jim: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Peters Jim: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:18085] 
JIM PETERS (NZ First) 
: 
 That speech was made by a member who has been away from the classroom for too long. He no longer has any understanding of the classrooms of today. The speech was made by a Minister in a Government that has closed schools. In actual fact 2004 will go down as a year in which the Government closed more schools than it opened and even more ironically for a party that espouses the Treaty of Waitangi as one of the core components of its thinking a year in which the Government has done more to deny that reality in its day-to-day practice in relation to schools by closing down schools with significant Maori rolls. So as the Minister departs from the Chamber I say “So be it.” I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Education Amendment Bill that is before the House but I am confused about where I should start because in these omnibus wash-up bills there is so much elusive material. 
I will look first of all at clause 4 where a little slip states that the phrase “for an unspecified period” is to be taken out of section 14(1)(b) of the principal Act. There is no explanation given of that. Yet there is one because those who have been in schools know about the immense problems of stand-downs and suspensions. They know that the figures the Ministry of Education has in its database are not correct. I have been collecting figures from Northland schools throughout this year and I can say absolutely that the ministry’s figures for stand-downs in some of those schools are not correct at all. In fact many schools do not want to tell the wider world just how serious the problem is in their schools with robust children and robust communities. No one wants to be upfront but the figures are there in reality and the figures if they were real would show that a large number of schools have problems even in maintaining day-to-day order and discipline. In clause 4 there is a solution. For some strange reason we are to take out the phrase “for an unspecified period” which has historically been part of the wording of the provision since the 1989 Act and before that in regard to “gross misbehaviour or continual disobedience” or the situation of a student’s behaviour making it “likely that that student or other students will be seriously harmed”. 
But that leaves an issue. If the word “unspecified” is taken out which is the current term used by boards of trustees there is the lurking suspicion in my mind that boards will then have to justify a specified period. If they have to justify why there is a specified period that will introduce into the whole business of school stand-downs and suspensions a whole new category—a very interesting category for boards that are endeavouring to maintain fair order and discipline in the classroom and endeavouring to maintain that safety in the classroom room by room is paramount with regard to the operation of their charters in their schools. So I believe that schools ought to be aware of that major issue and I hope schools will bring submissions on it to the select committee. 
That issue is also behind the whole issue of truancy. If ever there was an issue that the Ministry of Education has not handled with any great ability I say it is the issue of truancy. Throughout the 1990s—at least in the late 1990s—there was a move towards dealing with truanting students and students who were not being recorded. And that brings me to the matter of the national truancy database. The issue is that there were thousands of truanting students in the 1990s. In Auckland an estimated 7400 students under the age of 16 were not in any school. They were unrecognised and unrecorded and the numbers today are not much changed. In other words after almost a decade of tracking and monitoring truancy in schools the situation has not changed and the moves in this bill will not make things any better. 
The other issues are these. Why would the Minister remove the function of requiring boards to provide an annual report to the community? Why are those reports to be no longer a requirement? Why would a board of trustees not wish to have an annual meeting at which it presents the annual report? Why would a board not wish to be scrutinised by the community and have dialogue with parents on the proper function of recognising whether a school is doing its job? 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: What have they got to hide? 
JIM PETERS 
: That is right—exactly. In this day of spin of public relations people working for schools it simply fits in with that that if boards can get away with not presenting their annual report and can send it off to the Minister of Education via the local regional office that will be it. That is what the suggested amendment will allow. It is just not good enough. We are living an age when schools that do not have favourable Education Review Office reports will not bother to publish their community report. They will now no longer be required even to meet with their community to discuss the annual report and the effectiveness quality and competence of their staff. 
That brings me to the next matter. If ever there was an organisation that has performed dismally with successive chief executive officers coming and going every year it is the Teachers Council. I can say that the Teacher Registration Board did a far far superior job working with limited staff and within the framework that it had. So here we have the suggested disciplinary functions of the board being enhanced when the board does not have a reliable database and when there are unqualified teachers who have just finished in schools—teachers who were not experienced in any sense. But worse than that many people are working beyond the 20 half-days allowed for unqualified persons to work in schools and the council has no ability to do anything about it. When applications are made to the council—and they were being made over the last year—the delay in processing them was not just days; it was weeks and sometimes months. So we have an inoperative system. The council ought to be out there scrutinising—and it should be in 2005—to ensure that every teacher is registered and qualified and that those who are not qualified serve for no more than 20 half-days. In fact that has not been happening and it will not happen after this bill is passed. Yet the board is demanding greater powers of discipline—to hear what? I hope that those who come before the select committee will demand an answer to that question. 
The other matter that I want to quickly mention is clause 32 “Preparing charters”. There is an underlying issue there about why there is and has been some disparity between the charters of industry training organisations and the acceptance of those charters by that fabulous group known as the Tertiary Education Commission. We all know that the Education (Tertiary Reform) Amendment Act of 2002 had many pains in its set-up period. It is no wonder that that was the case because the Tertiary Education Commission the Ministry of Education and those who are responsible tried to take a Skill New Zealand group and incorporate it into a group that had tertiary oversight of the polytechnics in a major way—and universities—and did not give it the required staff or funding. The set-up period of what was called reforming legislation has actually shown no ability for there to be reform at all. I find the final acceptance of the alignment of the tertiary charters with the needs of industry training groups to be quite interesting. That provision seems to have a history to it and it would be very interesting if one knew what it was all about. 
In summary in an omnibus sense the amendments in this bill may seem to be just a tidy-up but I want to come back to the first one. What does “unspecified removal” mean? It means problems for schools and boards of trustees. What does it mean when the annual reporting requirement is taken away? It means a lack of accountability on a face-to-face basis—parent to teacher and teacher to the community. And what does a change in the Teachers Council rules mean? It means more of the same: a supposed workload and a supposed ability to monitor effectiveness and the quality of teaching but in actual fact the reality that because of how that group has worked out in a practical way nothing will be changed from this day on despite the intention that there should be change. I look forward to hearing and seeing the submissions that are made on the bill because these matters are worthy of serious attention.