Delahunty Catherine: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:10936. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):This speech will not be as melodramatic as those in the previous debate. There will be no offence I think no personal abuse and no—Chris Hipkins: I am going to speak in it.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: True true. Mr Hipkins alias Metiria Turei is speaking today so anything could happen that is true. There seems to be a bit of identity confusion in Parliament today.I would like to speak about the Teachers Council. Despite its lack of Shakespearean drama I do think it is an important issue. The Teachers Council has been reviewed in the past year and this review appears to be welcome across the education sector and across the parties. Everybody felt that this was a useful thing to do although not all the 24 recommendations from the Teachers Council review are acceptable. The debates that have come through about the work of the Teachers Council in the past year are around whether we should create an independent statutory body such as the Medical Council of New Zealand for example where doctors basically look after the issues of doctors—teachers would be more than capable of doing something like that—or whether we should just improve the existing Teachers Council. I think there is a lot of support for the idea of an independent statutory body because it would recognise the importance of the profession.The Teachers Council as it exists right now is about the protection of professionalism mainly through registration and the discipline of registered teachers. The Government has said that this is ineffective. However the Government’s response to this supposed ineffectiveness which may have grounds is curious. There is an opportunity for the Teachers Council to do some interesting professional work around teacher appraisal registered teacher criteria and professional standards but what has been suggested for one of the recommendations is quite strange and it relates to the underlying privatisation agenda of the Government. The Government says that professionalism registration and standards are extremely vital but it is now suggesting a whole new category of unregistered staff in schools which can undermine the whole raison d’être of having a teachers council that looks after registration and professionalism. So it is actually quite a contradictory situation.This new authority to educate which is broader than the current limited authority to teach may not appear to mean anything but actually like many things in the education sector it has a strong drive towards policy that the Government is pushing through around privatisation and the lack of recognition of what a teacher actually does. This broader authority to educate can include scenarios such as this one where a former teacher who has been deregistered possibly for serious misdemeanours can now apply for a broader authority to educate if they have “proven expertise”. The examples that were discussed at our select committee with this Crown entity were alarming because the entity itself did not raise these issues but some of the committee members talked about how anyone who might have a degree in physics for example would be suitable for teaching in a primary school.Presumably under charter schools or using the authority to educate in its broader sense a lecturer can be a teacher. This is a fundamental destruction of the profession if it says that no skills in teaching are actually required; all you need to do is know how to lecture. As for myself having been a tutor like many other people here I would never call myself a teacher. The point about this is that people can have knowledge and have expertise in tutoring adults as some of us do but that is very very different from having the pedagogical process that teacher training offers. I am all for improvement. I think there is more we could do to improve the pedagogy but definitely allowing more deregistered teachers under the Teachers Council and making this Crown entity responsible for a contradiction is not going to be an improvement. It was really concerning when we heard that idea. The idea that teaching is not a skilled and dynamic process that relies on a pedagogical background is very scary.Of course what is behind this in terms of this Crown entity is that it is now being possibly asked to have oversight over the new charter schools—the legislation for which passed through the House last week—where you could have up to 100 percent unregistered teachers. I would suspect that they probably will not have 100 percent unregistered teachers but they will have some staff who are under the Teachers Council who are registered properly meeting professional standards and who will be managed by the Teachers Council in that form and then they will have a category of people who are not registered and who are not required to meet those same standards. This is going to create division confusion irregularity conflict and practice that by no means—even in the Government’s own terminology the idea of “national” or “standard”—means there will be a national standard for teachers. There will not be consistency.