Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you for this call on the Education (Update) Amendment Bill. This is a deeply concerning bill to us. This legislation would amongst other things see the sci-fi scenario of Kiwi children as young as 4 years old plonked in front of the computer screens alone for all of their learning. It was bad enough allowing charter schools to be established with no involvement of registered qualified teachers but this legislation will take it one step further. It will allow our children as young as 4 years of age to be taught not by human beings and not by fully qualified registered teachers but it will allow our children to be taught without any teachers whatsoever.I am sure many of us as members of this House would probably think back and remember that some of the most influential people in our lives have been teachers—most of them registered qualified teachers. Another of the concerns that we have—Labour New Zealand First and the Greens—is that we sat through the Education and Science Committee hearings and heard hundreds of submissions from a lot of key leaders—from teachers from professionals from the Children's Commissioner and from principals. A lot of these submissions though—hardly any of them have been taken into account. When you look at the bill now and you read this current bill that we have in front of us—after the select committee it has hardly changed and it certainly has not taken a lot of those submissions into account.The Education (Update) Amendment Bill refines the education system. We have a world-class education system. It was well suited though for the 20th century. We had a lot of hopes for this Education (Update) Amendment Bill. We had hoped that it would bring our education system into the 21st century but the bill that we have in front of us does little to bring the education system into the 21st century.We believe that the Government should be focused on ensuring that every child that every student in Aotearoa New Zealand attends a school a great school preferably their local school and that every student achieves to the best of their ability—that they can actually realise their full potential. Unfortunately this is not currently happening right now in Aotearoa New Zealand. I can tell you that what this new system that we have would mean especially if the bill is to be passed and we indeed see a lot more of our students from age 4 upwards not even needing a teacher is that a lot of our students would need to know how to read. They should be able to read so that they can learn themselves when they are looking at these computer screens.Can I tell you just a very short story from South Auckland. One of the things I do when I go around my local schools is I talk to principals I talk to teachers and I ask many of them the same question: when 5-year-olds enter your school what kinds of skills do they bring in with them? The consistent answer I hear from our teachers and our principals is that many of these students that come do not know what their colours are. They do not know A to Z most of them—many of them—and many of them do not even have vocabulary.But what really hits home for me is when they tell me that many of these kids do not even know how to speak one language. What I mean is if these kids are Tongan born here many of them come into school and they do not speak Tongan fluently and they do not speak English fluently—similarly if they are Samoan and similarly if they are Māori or Cook Islanders. For a lot of our Indian kids unfortunately it is the same thing. What the teachers tell us is that it makes it so much more challenging for them to teach these young 5-year-olds when they do not have a core language to teach from. Our kids need to be literate. If we are to expect our children to be able to teach themselves from computers as this legislation would allow with the COOL—community of online learning—how are we going to expect many of our kids who do not even speak one whole language to be able to succeed like other 5-year-olds?Cohort learning—having our children start school as early as age 4 was one of the issues that teachers and parents said they did not agree with. When we look at other developed countries many of them do not even start school until kids are 6 years old or 7 years old and yet New Zealand is proposing that we should allow our children to start as early as 4 years old. When we asked the officials to please explain why it is that we are looking at allowing our children to start that early it seemed to us on the committee that the explanation was that it would be a cost-saving measure. Saving costs and cutting costs should not be a good enough reason for having our children start school as early as 4 years of age.Another of the issues that came up was from rural communities. Teachers from the rural communities as well as Rural Women New Zealand—what they told us was that they are very disappointed that there is no mention in this [Education (Update) Amendment Bill that it will be] addressing inequalities in the current education system and the issues … facing low decile rural schools." in rural communities. They asked why we do not address those issues first before we go addressing allowing communities of online learning to be a feature of the future. They also told us that when online learning schools were allowed they saw them—rural schools—being affected. They told us that in the last 15 years so many of the schools in rural communities have already closed and they saw that communities of online learning would affect them because when you actually have a decrease of 20 students per school that is one whole teacher whom they see going. They see even more of the rural schools being closed down because of the availability of these communities of online learning.As I said earlier on the Labour Party New Zealand First and the Greens as well as hundreds of our parents and our teachers and our community leaders and educational experts and advisers are very concerned about the passage of this education bill. Labour strongly opposes this bill. I know that the Minister of Education the Hon Hekia Parata is about to leave in the next few weeks but that should not be the reason why we are rushing through the passing of this legislation.Similar to what my colleague Chris Hipkins said earlier on when the Children's Commissioner came to present to us he actually put up a stop sign—a red stop sign. He said to the Education and Science Committee that we should stop this education amendment bill and what we should do is go and consult with the people whom it would affect the most—meaning the children. It is our children who will be affected the most by this education amendment bill. We have not even had a full consultation with our children to ask them for their opinion on how this education amendment bill is going to influence and affect them in the long term. We are strongly strongly opposed to this education amendment bill. Thank you so much."