Street Maryan: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:9817. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to speak to Part 1 of the Education Amendment Bill. First of all I have to say that most of the bill is made up of amendments introduced by Labour in September 2008 in the Education Amendment Bill (No 3). 
Although we did not support this bill at its first reading clearly the work that has been done in the Education and Science Committee by Labour members has meant that Government members have seen the light over a number of clauses and we are now in a position to support the bill as long as the amendments we have proposed remain intact. 
One clause that I wish to deal with in particular during this contribution which will be the first of several contributions I wish to make on this part is clause 36. This clause inserts new section 128A after section 128 of the principal Act the Education Act 1989. The new section deals with the “Matching of register information and information about payment of teacher salaries at payrolled schools”. 
This provision is not immediately as it sounds. Clearly an information-matching programme is contained in this clause. It allows for information matching to occur so that it is possible for the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education to ensure that registered teachers holding a current practising certificate are the people in fact who are employed in teaching positions. 
This takes me back quite a long way and with the indulgence of the Committee and the fact that I have 5 minutes in which to do it I would like to cite some relevant experience here. When I first started as a teacher in 1978 there was a process of registration but there were also extraordinary teacher shortages at that time. There had been a cycle of teacher shortages and I have to say they are a wee bit— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: What year was that? Which period are we talking about? 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: It was 1978. There had been some— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: You were a third-former? 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: I was a child prodigy; it is true—just a young thing. 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: It was the year Chris Hipkins was born. 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: I thank my colleagues for assisting me so ably. 
It was customary for schools to look for any warm body to put in front of a class. It was called the warm-body approach to staffing because prior to the 1970s I think—towards the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s—there had been considerable teacher shortages. Mr Peachey I am sure will remember those days. It was required only that a warm body be in front of children so that at least some order could be maintained in a classroom. It was a case of “never mind” in terms of the educational content or achievement that went on in the classroom at the time. Fortunately we have long passed those days. Since then we have had about four decades of pedagogy research and academic pursuit which have collectively improved the quality of education that is offered in our primary and secondary schools. 
The purpose of this information-matching programme is to allow the authorities to ensure that the people who are teaching in front of classes are properly registered and certificated teachers who hold current practising certificates. It allows that information to be kept managed and compared between the Ministry of Education and the New Zealand Teachers Council. We on this side of the Chamber are very much in favour of that and we very much support it because we do not need to return to those days of unqualified untrained teachers appearing in classrooms. 
The risk of having untrained and unqualified teachers in our classrooms is too great and we have learnt over the years that the need to put properly trained and qualified teachers in our classrooms is reflected in the quality of learning that students engage in. The information-matching programme allows the Ministry of Education to keep accurate registration information about teachers—who are entitled to registration-dependent allowances. So there are some things that attach to a teacher’s registration. 
This provision gives security for parents principals and other teaching staff who can be confident that their peers and colleagues around them have met the same registration requirements that they all hold current practising certificates and that they have not just been dragged in off the street to provide warm bodies to keep children more or less in order. Fortunately we have moved a long way past those days. 
This provision is also terribly important for another reason. From my secondary teaching experience I went on to work for the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) in a paid capacity having already worked for the association in an honorary capacity for some years. I was always very resentful of people who accused teachers of never deregistering their colleagues or of making it very difficult for teachers to be deregistered when I was certainly of the view that teachers should have been deregistered if they did not come up to scratch and that there should be no excuses. 
My job as a PPTA officer was to ensure that teachers had their rights observed. But it was also my job to ensure that if teachers were incompetent or worse than that more harmful than incompetent—in other words malevolent abusive or dangerous for children—they were expedited out of classrooms promptly. That was something that I adhered to as a union official and it was something that was important to me as a practising teacher. 
It is really important that people who are dismissed from schools for inappropriate or incompetent behaviour are not simply found going down the road to the next school where the principal then hires them. This information-matching programme will prevent that from happening. Therefore it is a good thing. It gives principals some security that they are not hiring somebody who has just been rejected but has not gone through an appropriate deregistration or decertification process or someone whose deregistration or decertification has not come to the attention of the next employing principal. So this information-matching programme is important for the maintenance of standards. 
It is not just national testing that provides standards in schools. Providing standards is also about ensuring that the professional competence and the appropriateness of the trained professionals in our classrooms is maintained through an adequate registration and certification programme. Clause 36 of this amendment bill attempts to address that issue and I think it will successfully address it because of the ability of the New Zealand Teachers Council which registers teachers and the Ministry of Education to swap information and make sure that everybody is on the same page in respect of teachers who may or may not hold current practising certificates. 
It is important that schools are not illegally employing teachers without practising certificates and it is important that the registration category of teachers can be determined so that their eligibility for allowances that are dependent on the registration type can be applied appropriately and accurately. This is an important measure.