Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16693. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare Pāremata. The Education Amendment Bill (No 2) is a consistent continuation of Government policy. It is a plan to further privatise the governance of tertiary institutions reform the Teachers Council without the support of teachers and continue to create two tiers and lower standards for schools such as charter schools versus those in the State sector. Therefore the Green Party will not be supporting this bill. There are useful elements in small parts of the bill but the overall thrust is depressing. One of my colleagues will take a later call on the debacle in the tertiary sector the reduction of democracy and the increasing of ministerial powers over tertiary governance. I do agree with Grant Robertson that this is an out-of-date backward-looking failed management theory which many people have abandoned. Inclusion broadness and representation are how we all know better decisions are made. One of my colleagues will expand on that in her later call.I would like to make some general comments about the overall direction of the bill. The overall direction is not only the National Government’s policy but also part of an international process we are seeing that has afflicted the education sector. Education has always been a politicised and deeply debated space but now it is an eroded space in this country where concepts like education for lifelong learning and educators as the conscience of society are being minimised and marginalised by the overarching and depressing determination that education is mainly a business. From early childhood to the tertiary education sector it has been carved up for profit and the compulsory sector is being redefined from the perspective of business efficiency and standardisation.I would like to talk about a parent whom I met with today who said to me that their 5-year-old had been kept in at lunchtime to improve their spelling because the school was worried about meeting national standards. That is a very very depressing experience for a parent. And a teacher told me that she was forced to put up a picture in her classroom of where every child was at in relation to national standards—those who were failing supposedly and those who were achieving. If that is what we call expert teaching that is a tragedy. That teacher who is a remarkably good teacher is destroyed by the introduction in her classroom of competition and the exposure of so-called achievement for 5-year-olds 6-year-olds and 7-year-olds. That is what I am talking about Minister—not that she wishes to hear it.There is endless rhetoric in the education space about meeting student needs creating outcomes and fulfilling potential for all. We can all buy in to that. But when we read the clauses of this bill it is pretty clear that it is about advancing changes that will fulfil a very different power shift. The reform of the Teachers Council was heralded with some excitement. Teachers expressed interest in the idea of a professional body that was by teachers for teachers. They were interested in the model that would regulate and represent them as professionals just as medical professionals have their own professional bodies.However things started to go badly awry when the transition chair of this process John Morris put out a series of papers advocating right-wing education solutions such as performance-based pay through The New Zealand Initiative when he was supposedly leading a neutral process of developing the new Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. The “see no evil” Government saw no conflict of interest in his behaviour but the teachers organisations smelt a big rat because performance pay is divisive inefficient destructive and irrelevant to student well-being and it should have had no place in the discussion around the development of the new education council. It was deeply conflicting that the transition chair actually focused on that and politicised that process.Now we see the enabling legislation but we do not see the robust involvement of the broader teaching sector representing the concept of quality public education. The education council is described in the bill as being “to provide leadership to teachers and direction for the education profession:” as well as having a number of other new roles and responsibilities. Who gets these roles and how they are developed is a critical process and should not have been a politicised situation. It should have been an inclusive and depoliticised situation. I guess the new bill could not let the new education council be a teacher-led professional body because then all of the provisions of the Education Act that undermine accountability safety and transparency in the charter schools would have become an even greater contradiction.The Green Party sees no need to abandon the limited authority to teach as an important adjunct to the essential role of the registered teacher because that idea—the limited authority to teach—was always based on the idea that these were people who were studying towards an education qualification but also were contributing to classrooms. The bill sets up all kinds of structures which we do not disagree with to protect children to regulate teacher registration and to establish a code of conduct—note that it is not a code of ethics but a code of conduct—but it is extraordinary that these are not applied in other parts of the Education Act to the unregistered teaching staff in charter schools who will also be working with the same range of students and who are not covered by the education council rules. They will have police checks but so should all volunteers. They might be fabulous or they might be a risk but lowering standards seems to be an underlying contradiction alongside double standards.On the one hand teachers are meant to be professional leaders who get $350 million spent on their career pathways towards executive principal and on the other hand in the charter schools in the targeting of the so-called vulnerable students the staff do not have to be teachers and are not covered by the codes of conduct or accountability rules of the new education council. So it is all about tightening up the rules for teachers but totally relaxing them for others and that is a massive contradiction.All students deserve an education that is liberating innovative and inspiring and of course I agree that they are not all getting that now. I have visited the people working on charter schools—some who are clearly motivated by the best reasons and some who are just downright inappropriate in their ability to meet targets. The Green Party fails to see how the Vanguard Military School - style press-ups and military training punishment model is going to create the best modern learning environment. That is not the pedagogy of collaborative learning that we all believe in; it is the pedagogy of authoritarian control.It was very interesting when a professor from the University of Oregon talked in this Parliament not long ago about how the authoritarian model which appears to work in Asia to create great Programme for International Student Assessment standards but does not lead to innovative thinking is welcomed by Western societies that do not know how to manage kids without an authoritarian model. He said our biggest challenge was creativity. In fact the Chinese Government and the Singaporeans for example are recognising that it is not working and that paths that test standardised teaching and national standards for those countries are not creating innovative learners who can then lead a modern world.Hon Hekia Parata: Again not true.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: So it was really interesting to hear him speak. The Minister says it is not true but he was a fantastically creative person who has been employed by the Chinese Government for that very reason—for that very reason.The Green Party is very keen to work for solutions for genuine initiatives to become part of quality public education in Aotearoa that is culturally appropriate and innovative. That can happen but we do not need to privatise. We do not need for-profit State-funded unaccountable schools to do that.Much of this bill is detail—and stuff that I would like to read in more detail—around international students private training associations and teacher registration. Much of it may well be useful. We often find that these omnibus bills combine things that are good with things are that are actually abhorrent and then put us in a difficult position because we cannot support them. We will be looking for the greater good in the bill if it is there but the overall approach towards the tertiary governance issues and towards the education council is very disturbing. We find it difficult when our in-boxes are now being flooded by people who are very concerned about this bill and do not believe there are enough good things in it to justify it.It is difficult to imagine how less democracy and less teacher involvement in their own professional body will result in better decision-making. Steven Joyce talks about for example cutting students out being a choice—people can choose to cut students out. What he is failing to acknowledge is that democracy needs to be encouraged supported and acknowledged in law so people recognise the importance of those diverse voices rather the myth of efficiency. [Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order! I am sorry to interrupt the member. I have been contemplating for some time. There is a longstanding convention in the House—it goes back to the time of Sir Basil Arthur in 1984—Speaker’s ruling 63/1. When members are in close proximity to each other and there are constant interjections going on it actually has an effect on the microphones so I just ask the member the Hon Hekia Parata to please desist.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: An education amendment bill is an opportunity to strengthen democracy in education and unfortunately this bill fails to do that.