Delahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12085. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe. The estimates debate on education is a little bit depressing. It is a little bit like Alice has fallen down the rabbit hole and ended up in a parallel universe. I sincerely believe that all of us in this House care about education and see its value. I do not think there is anyone who does not. That is not the problem. The problem is whether we are going to have an evidence-based policy or whether we are going to have an ideology-based policy. It is clear from the estimates priority setting that despite the rhetoric that all children must have access to high-quality education there is actually a narrow focus in the National Government’s policies. There is a narrow focus around assessment and around failed examples of charter schools which lack evidence.I read today some of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment volume 4 report. It makes some very interesting points. The Programme for International Student Assessment now believes that choice and competition have failed to lift achievement. It provides some very substantial examples and studies that show that there is a strong socio-economic issue as well as a strong issue around teacher status and society’s attitudes towards education and towards the profession. So we have this bizarre situation where on the one hand the Government is saying that we need quality teachers and the best teachers and then we have the proposal that some schools will have only a proportion of registered teachers. So there is very much a double message coming out of the education policy at the moment.Recently the Government hosted a gentleman called AndreasSchleicher I think it is from the OECD and I went along to his presentation. One of the things he said was that low-income United States students did far worse than high-income students but poor kids in Finland and Canada do far better despite disadvantage. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment that is because—Colin King: What a lot of rubbish.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Well the Government hosted this gentleman from the Programme for International Student Assessment the OECD people and he said this. He said that it is because the focus is on equity or the focus—Colin King: That member misheard him.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I am quoting his written statement. He said it is because the focus is on equity or the focus is on the idea of competition and choice which has failed. We can have either a focus on high trust in teachers a broad curriculum quality teaching and a goal of equity which is certainly the model that the Finns are committed to or a model that talks about choice and competition which has actually failed. It is interesting to see internationally—it is a little like New Zealand still trying to build motorways when everyone is trying to stop building motorways—that we are now trying to introduce policies that other people are abandoning because choice has turned out to be no choice. It has failed the children whom we most want to support and we all agree that those children need that support and deserve it. Even when a numbers guru who believes that education is some kind of mathematical formula has conceded that charter schools have not made a difference we carry on like lemmings to the cliff edge of choice except it is our least advantaged children whom we are chucking off the edge to the non-existent ambulance at the bottom which used to be second-chance adult education before most of it was cut. That is not a pretty sight.Today in the House we learnt that charter schools otherwise known to some people as partnership schools will have a significant percentage of registered teachers but we do not know how many. One to 200 kids or 50 percent qualified—who knows? We are relying on the idea that there is such a thing as a limited authority to teach. The limited authority to teach was brought in for people who were going to transition into full registration. It was not brought in as a mechanism for getting rid of qualifications and registration in teaching. I am all for the idea of a limited authority to teach and I am all for the idea of bringing people into schools with different skills to support our children’s learning in a variety of ways. But I do not believe and neither does the OECD that you should put the most vulnerable children in a situation where they do not have people with a pedagogical grasp. If you are going to look at who is missing out—if you are going to look at students with disabilities for example—are you going to put people in front of them who have no pedagogical background in how learning works?These are critical educational questions and the answers have to be evidence-based. We cannot just randomly hope that some experiments that have failed elsewhere will randomly work better over here so long as we meet outcomes and contracts. The language of outcomes and contracts the language of business is not the language of educational success. I think that is what the international work has shown—that we are actually heading in the wrong direction when we come down to who it is who is missing out. It is a fundamental question about disadvantage and about the idea of investing in children in terms of cultural inclusion which is a big issue for this country and equity and quality. So we need to invest in those programmes—and some of them are costly—that are going to make change in schools. That does not mean getting rid of registered teachers.