Hipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 29 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10509. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very excited about taking part in this particular debate today on the Education Amendment Bill. I am particularly pleased that Anne Tolley is in the Chamber for this debate today because we know that charter schools are actually Anne Tolley’s baby.Anne Tolley was working on charter schools before the last election. I am looking forward to the contribution that she has got to make in this debate because I would like Anne Tolley to stand up and tell the Committee and tell the people of New Zealand why it was that she was working on charter schools before the last election but miraculously they did not make it anywhere near the National Party’s manifesto. Why was it that charter schools were such a good idea before the election that the National Party did a significant amount of work on them but it never told the New Zealand public about them? Why is it that National blames the cup of tea deal with John Banks for charter schools when in fact it was Anne Tolley’s idea all along? Even before John Banks was back in Parliament this is what the National Party wanted to do.We know very clearly from this debate on charter schools that National does not make decisions based on what is best for education. That should be the very first question. When the Government is considering changes to the education system the first question it should ask is “Is this going to help students? Is this going to improve educational opportunities?” and charter schools fail. They do not do that.We should be focused on ensuring that every school in New Zealand is a great school and that every New Zealander no matter what their age has the opportunities through education to achieve their full potential. That means that from early childhood education through schooling through tertiary education and through second-chance learning every New Zealander no matter how old they are no matter where they live no matter their background should have the opportunity through education to achieve their potential in life. Charter schools do not do that. Charter schools are about increasing competition on the failed assumption that more competition is going to lead to better educational outcomes and yet we know from evidence here in New Zealand and from overseas that increasing competition does not improve outcomes. In fact thereare countless examples to show where educational attainment is decreased as a result of competition.Even Treasury argued in the initial stages of this debate that there was nowhere around the world where education systems with highly competitive elements—I am paraphrasing here because I have not got the exact quote in front of me—improved student achievement outcomes. We know they do not. Even Treasury concluded that. It concluded—this was Treasury so we are talking about people whose first objective is not necessarily the social good of the country. Even Treasury—Grant Robertson: Don’t talk about David Clark.CHRIS HIPKINS: —I am sure Dr Clark is going to have a few things to say about that—argued that collaboration is more important to education. In fact if we are talking about improving student achievement then a collaborative education system is the place where we should start.It is ironic that the Government talks about flexibility in the education system and is introducing charter schools to give schools more flexibility at a time when it is imposing ever-greater compliance burdens on our existing State schools and restricting their ability to deliver the world-leading curriculum that we have. When people come to New Zealand from around the world they look at our curriculum and say: “This is absolutely fantastic.” So why is it that the Government is undermining that by imposing all sorts of compliance requirements on schools—like national standards for example—that undermine the very principles that our curriculum is based upon?The real challenge that we should be addressing is how we allow every New Zealand school to be a great school and how we support every teacher in every classroom to be an absolutely outstanding teacher. All of the research from New Zealand and internationally shows us that quality teaching is the biggest in-school influencer of student achievement. We could talk for hours about the out-of-school influences and there are many and I acknowledge all of those. But within the school quality teaching is the critical factor.The Teachers Council review which the Minister of Education herself released just last week highlighted the importance of quality teaching and made some very interesting observations about how we might be able to do better. The review of the Teachers Council was arguing in fact that we should raise the threshold for quality teaching rather than lower it and that in fact we should be striving for a teaching profession that is more qualified and that is harder to get into rather than deregulating the teaching profession in the way that the charter schools legislation does. It is fundamentally wrong.We have got research in New Zealand that demonstrates very clearly to us how we can lift student achievement through quality teaching. Te Kotahitanga is an outstanding programme. It is an expensive programme but it focuses on teacher professional development on how we can do things differently and on how we can do things better. So what was National’s response to that? Well it cut it. It cut it so that it could give $19 million to charter schools. It took one of the best programmes that we have—admittedly one of the most expensive but one of the programmes that have a proven track record of success—and it cut it so that it could put money into a charter schools experiment.That is National’s approach to education: take something that is working take something that is successful and rip the guts out of it so that it can have an experiment somewhere else. That is wrong—that is absolutely wrong. As for teacher professional development the $19 million that is going into charter schools could buy a lot of teacher professional development. National is cutting the budget for teacher professional development and has consistently cut it since it became the Government.There are real concerns around the requirements—or the lack of requirements—in this bill for those working in charter schools to be registered and qualified in teaching. People can be qualified in many great things and they can be very talented in their individual field but that does not mean they have the skills to pass on that knowledge to someone else. Teaching is an art in and of itself—Hon Tau Henare: Who says?CHRIS HIPKINS: “Who says?” Tau Henare says. Well I am just grateful that I am not relying on Tau Henare to teach anything. Actually there is one thing that Tau Henare has taught me about being in this Parliament and it is that sometimes it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. That is the one thing that Tau Henare has taught me in this Parliament. It is a lesson that has been well learnt on his part I am sure.Quality teaching matters. There is nothing in this legislation that would stop a teacher who is suspended from teaching in a public school from going to teach in a charter school while that hearing is taking place. There is nothing in this legislation that stops that from happening. That is not going to be good for student achievement. That is not going to be good for student safety and for educational attainment. This is wrong.The evidence from overseas shows that it is wrong. Let us look at the research from Stanford University which found that in fact of all of the charter schools it looked at only 17 percent of the outcomes for students were better 37 percent of the outcomes for students were worse and for 46 percent of students there was no difference at all. So how is it that this Government is arguing that charter schools which have failed so dismally around the rest of the world are going to be good for New Zealand?We have got a very very good education system in New Zealand. You would not know that from listening to this National Government where John Key talks about how the education system is failing students and he sticks a label on everything. He sticks a label on all those teachers and says that they are failing students when actually I do not know of one single teacher who goes to their school in the morning thinking: “Whose lives can I ruin today?”. Every teacher we have in our schools goes there to make life better for students and to contribute to student achievement and yet this Government is all too willing to label teachers and to pick on teachers when if we want to improve student achievement we have got to celebrate quality teaching we have got to invest in teachers and we have got to provide them with opportunities to up their skills and to improve their practice. This Government goes in the opposite direction and says: “No what we should actually do is just do away with the idea that a teacher needs to be qualified at all and let anybody into a classroom.” That is absolutely wrong.There are other aspects of this legislation that are wrong which we will discuss as we go along. It is wrong that a charter school should be able to make a profit—to take money that should be for education and provide it as dividends to its shareholders. It is wrong that charter schools will not be subject to the Official Information Act and will not have the same level of scrutiny. Even the Ombudsman was strongly opposed to that and I absolutely agree with that. It is wrong that charter schools will not have to teach New Zealand’s world-leading curriculum.It is wrong that the students in Christchurch who have already been through so much will be used as guinea pigs in this charter schools experiment. We know already that the Government has got its eyes and its sights set on establishing charter schools in Christchurch at a time when it is arbitrarily by stealth closing and merging existing State schools. There is no day when we have seen the evidence of that more than today when the Minister is unilaterally making her announcements about the future of those schools.