Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): I rise to speak on the Education and Training Bill. I want to first acknowledge Nikki Kaye because she was the education spokesperson for National who worked on this bill most closely with the Minister of Education and who has led our education policy development. In doing that role Nikki Kaye has been a fierce advocate for the interests of parents and communities. That has particular relevance in this bill because without her this bill would have been a lot worse than it is today. It's still unfortunately a bill which National will oppose but I am absolutely certain that without the advocacy of Nikki Kaye it would be a far more radical piece of legislation. That's because the context for this bill was the Government's Tomorrow's Schools Review Independent Taskforce.That task force was commissioned by the Minister with an extraordinarily broad mandate. It came back and it made radical proposals the shadows of which are still apparent in this bill. I will in this contribution take you through where that shadow still lies. When that task force reported back it proposed centralised bureaucratic hubs that would control schools instead of parent boards. It proposed absolutely marginalising parental involvement in the governance of schools. It proposed that all school property management would be taken over by the Ministry of Education that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Education Review Office would be discarded that intermediate schools would be abolished and that an education service agency would take over all servicing of schools. This idea was abhorrent to National and that is why Nikki Kaye embarked on 30 public meetings throughout the country. In those public meetings she engaged with parents she engaged with teachers and she engaged with education experts and their feedback was resounding. The feedback was that that sort of radical change would take New Zealand's education system backwards would reduce the achievement of children would loosen the engagement between parents and their schools and would all in all be bad for our education system. So that was rejected.I thank Nikki Kaye for working constructively with the Minister to help him see the light and to help him see that these were very bad ideas and were going to get him into a lot of trouble and frankly his colleagues into a lot of trouble in their communities up and down the country. She did a good job. But Nikki Kaye was only the Opposition spokesperson and so she wasn't able to save things completely.I want to step you through now the aspects of this bill which National remains very concerned about. The first is the significant change which takes away from school boards of trustees from locally elected parents the ability to develop consult on and review their enrolment schemes. Now it is bad enough that at the moment the ministry can come along and say to a school Too bad you're having an enrolment scheme; here it goes." But the saving grace that we have at the moment is that at least when that happens boards of trustees are the ones that drive the development of that zone who are the ones who drive the consultation who are the ones responsible for engaging effectively with the community to discuss where the boundaries for that zone should lie and they are the ones engaged in reviewing it.What this bill does is it takes that ability from local boards and it gives it completely over to the Ministry of Education to drive that process entirely. What we heard tonight in the committee of the whole House stage of this bill is that such is the magnitude of that task for the Ministry of Education that they need a few more months to gear up. They need more resources we are told in order to take over this function. We on this side of the House are alarmed by that prospect because we anticipate a future in which local communities are less able to influence which neighbourhoods of children schools take on. We anticipate a future in which ministries will impose enrolment zones that school boards disagree with.I want to take you through a specific example. The example I want to talk to you about of how the ministry can get these things wrong is one that's very current in my colleague Hon Dr Nick Smith's electorate in Nelson which is Nayland College. Now Nayland College is a coeducational secondary school and for many years parents from surrounding communities including in Nelson have wanted to send their children there because their local school was a single-sex school. Some parents prefer single-sex schools and some parents prefer co-ed schools and so they've made the choice to send their children a little bit further away to go to the co-ed school. But in recent years the Ministry of Education has been particularly slow in replacing classrooms that needed to be fixed has not done a good job of getting them built and the result is that that school is now reaching capacity constraints and the ministry have said they're going to impose a zone. Now this I think is a portent of the future we will see under this bill because what we can expect is that the Ministry of Education will have far less incentive to manage its development of property well because actually it's going to be the one in charge of setting the zone engaging on the zone consulting on the zone and the power of the local board to influence that will be lessened considerably. So we will see more Nayland College - type situations where a school community wants it to be able to take additional students but it is unable to. We will see more situations where schools are unable to create the community of interest that they wish for their school. This will diminish parental choice and it will diminish community involvement.We also remain concerned about other aspects of this bill because as the Minister says what it does is it brings together the operation of early childhood primary secondary and tertiary legislation into one piece of law. In doing so it involves all of the changes we've seen as part of the Reform of Vocational Education review which centralised control of our tertiary education system so that the innovation and excellence that we've seen at institutions like Southern Institute of Technology (SIT)—like the wonderful SIT in Southland. Instead that is swallowed into an amorphous bureaucratic body and we say that's wrong. Why would you get rid of a wonderful independent institution like SIT?It then also introduces a two-step licensing system for early childhood education that we remain concerned about. In the committee of the whole House stage of this bill the Minister said that this was about quality. Well then why is the bill so specific in providing that the Minister can use this for a network management approach? The former Minister sitting in the Chair—the Speaker Hon Anne Tolley—will be aware of what network reviews have meant in the past when Labour have used them. What network reviews have meant is Ministers making arbitrary decisions about what should be closed and what should be opened. We are concerned that giving a Minister considerable discretion in this way will mean that we will see delays in the opening of new early childhood services and we will see uncertainty and cost added to that process. If an early childhood centre wants to open we think it's very important there is a clear process that they can go through and the two-step licensing process proposed here remains vague.The fourth area of concern I want to highlight is around the changes relating to physical force and restraint. In one sense actually on this side of the House we agree with the need for some change. We have like all members of Parliament heard concerns about the way the rules currently work in schools. The previous National Government made a very well-motivated attempt to make changes in this area that would meet the concerns of parents and of teachers. There have been some challenges with those. We then saw a model proposed in the bill that went through a select committee and National discussed that in some detail. Again concerns remain particularly from members of the disability community who felt that it gave too much discretion to teachers.But what's happened today is we've had Supplementary Order Paper 544 land on the Table of the House. That proposes a totally different set of rules in this area from those that were considered in depth by the select committee. My concern is simply that we on this side of the House have not had the adequate opportunity to assess what those changes mean nor to engage with the experts in this area or the members of the community who would have a view on those changes. That is what the select committee process is meant to provide for but in this instance these changes haven't gone through that process. So our concern is not whether these are right or wrong but simply that they have been rushed. We are concerned that there could be problems in the implementation because of that.Finally what we see in this bill is actually missed opportunity because in this country we have an education system that by and large does a great job but we still have one in five children leaving our schools without the literacy and numeracy skills they need to achieve. If the Minister thinks that this bill contains a single thing in it which will really address that challenge then he is dreaming. We need to do a much better job in education. This bill is not the bill that will deliver that."