Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I want to thank the Minister of Education for her contribution to the debate earlier when she addressed some but not all of the questions and issues that members had raised. In particular the question that she did not address around principals managing more than one school is about what the employment relationship would be. Would the principal be reporting to one board of trustees on behalf of a number of boards? How would that actually work? The Minister did not address that. She also did not address what would happen if the relationship between one of the school boards of trustees and the principal broke down but the others were happy to continue with the arrangement. What would happen to the employment relationship in those circumstances? She did not actually address those issues and to me that cuts to the heart of a lot of the concerns I have about it. How is this actually going to work? The Minister talked in her contribution about an area school and drew an analogy with an area school. There are two essential differences with an area school one of which is that they are governed by a single board of trustees and the second of which is that they are all typically geographically located on one site. What we are talking about with this change is that a principal could be managing a number of schools in different geographic locations with different boards of trustees that have different pressures on them. I want to understand how that is actually going to work in terms of the employment relationship which is not an issue that the Minister addressed. We then come to the issue that has not yet been canvassed and that is Supplementary Order Paper 176 introduced by the Minister after the public hearings process had been completed by the Education and Science Committee which introduced an entirely new category of teachers called trainee teachers". The provision that this bill puts in place gives the Minister power to require a school to create a teaching position called a "trainee teacher" and it could only appoint somebody to it who was taking part in one of the teacher training programmes. There is no guarantee that this position would be in addition to rather than instead of one of the positions that the school currently gets within its teaching allocation. That would be one of the issues where if the Government were to give me that assurance I am open to the debate because I think that there is a huge scope for more on-job training for teachers. That is certainly the feedback that principals give and actually a lot of the initial teacher education providers themselves acknowledge this. But if those trainee teachers are going to replace teachers who are fully qualified and already in the classroom then that creates a concern. It also creates a concern that there do not seem to be any restrictions around how widely this will be applied. For example there is an evidence base around Teach First and the evidence base is largely positive. It has been evaluated by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and the evaluation came out positive. It deals only with secondary school teachers. The relationship in a primary school would be very very different and yet there is no restriction that would prevent one of these trainee teachers replacing a primary school teacher. So there are really big issues around the Supplementary Order Paper as presented by the Minister and as now incorporated into the bill that have not been adequately canvassed. I want to be really clear: I think that we need to do a much better job of initial teacher education in New Zealand and that there should be a larger on-job practical component to initial teacher education because that is what a lot of the experts working in this area have been saying and we should certainly take note of that. There is goodwill within the educational community to addressing that issue and to actually creating some practical solutions but what this legislative amendment does potentially tears away all of that goodwill. We managed to negotiate with the Government an extension of the time frame for the report back of this bill so that the select committee could have a week to hear submissions from people who have an interest in this particular area. They did not have time to adequately prepare their submissions but we did at least as a select committee have an opportunity to hear from them and they were overwhelmingly opposed to it. Even within the group of people who were opposed there was some support for some of the concepts contained within the Supplementary Order Paper but they were concerned that they were being rushed that they were being poorly thought through and that they did not have the evidence base that they needed to back them up in order for people to be able to support them. This is quite a significant issue because that part of the bill has not been through the parliamentary process that it should have gone through. It is almost akin to passing it under urgency because it is not going to get the proper select committee scrutiny that it should have received although it is not being passed—"