Douglas Roger: Education (Board of Trustee Freedom) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Douglas Roger: Education (Board of Trustee Freedom) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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Hon Sir ROGER DOUGLAS (ACT) 
: 
 I move  
That the Education (Board of Trustee Freedom) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. 
 The purpose of this bill is to give boards of trustees much greater freedom in the way they manage school affairs. Currently schools are free to decide how they spend operational grants as the Ministry of Education acknowledges that they know the best uses for the money. But when it comes to teachers’ salaries schools have little say in that they cannot trade off between salaries and other forms of spending. This bill would implement a system similar to the one National introduced in the 1990s the fully funded option alternatively known as bulk funding. I will talk briefly about that experience. 
The Ministry of Education in the late 1990s undertook to determine how the schools that had opted for full funding had fared. The ministry found an overwhelming positive: 94 percent of respondent schools felt that they had been mostly advantaged by bulk funding and 80 percent confirmed that their school would prefer to continue with bulk funding. The ministry found also that the common claim that was then made—that bulk funding helped the wealthy schools but not the poor schools—was totally incorrect. After all the previous model of bulk funding was optional and 36 percent of bulk-funded schools came from the ones in low-decile areas in deciles 1 to 3. 
I ask why so many low-decile schools would opt in if the scheme in fact harmed them. What did the schools use the money for? Over 80 percent of bulk-funded schools used the money to hire extra teaching staff. This shows that schools used the increased flexibility in order to increase teacher quantity and quality. Why should schools be prohibited from doing that? 
As soon as this bill was drawn numerous attacks were made on it. Probably the worst came from the Labour Party. Trevor Mallard stated that the bill was unnecessary because schools could already increase salaries by moving around their management units. Well first if the Labour Party likes flexibility I ask what the problem is in extending it. Secondly management units are a terrible way of rewarding good teachers for performance. It is absurd that the only way to pay good teachers more is to put them into a managerial role and have them spend more time out of the classroom in order to receive higher wages. I ask why Labour would support a policy that sees the best teachers not teaching. 
How would this bill place us internationally? Well the Australian Labor Government has just announced a policy to give schools much greater control over their budgets. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has argued that it is unfair to create league tables of schools while tying their hands over improving their relative position by preventing them from managing their own staff. In other words this National Government is to the left of the Australian Labor Government. 
How would a principled National Party vote? Those members say that they support freedom of choice; that is what they say. I ask why schools should not have the choice to pay teachers more to reward good teachers and to hire more staff rather than build a new gym if that is their choice. Of course schools should have that choice. National members say that they support having rewards for achievement. Well I ask why quality teachers should not be paid more than sub-par teachers. Why should we not try to attract some of the best and brightest into the teaching profession? 
Of course there is no chance that National members will vote for this bill. After all National members have spent the past 2 years in Government desperately trying to prove that they stand for nothing and that they just want to be popular; they just want to be popular. They will happily sacrifice good policy at the altar of the Prime Minister’s popularity. They will happily vote down a bill that was once their policy. They will happily pretend that they do not believe in this bill because they want to govern for governing’s sake. They simply do not care about the quality of the policies. They do not care about the children. They care only about the possibility that they might lose a vote or two. Children do not vote; teachers do. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Oh it’s not like that. 
Hon Sir ROGER DOUGLAS 
: Yes it is I say to my friend. It is like that. Children spend around 15000 hours of their lives in the classroom. What they get out of it matters for the rest of their lives and it impacts on how well New Zealand fares. Good teachers are the most important factor in whether children benefit from school. Teachers determine whether children get a quality education not the curriculum not the class size not funding and not computers or the Internet. Those are all secondary to having quality teachers. This bill is all about allowing schools to employ and retain quality teachers. During the work of the working party on school choice one thing became clear and that was the desire of head teachers to have more control over staffing issues. This included training. From decile 1 to decile 10 head teachers wanted to be able to train their own teachers. They wanted more pay flexibility. This bill would allow that to happen. 
The centralisation of policy that has occurred in education over the last 40 or 50 years was aimed in part at driving out poor teachers through Government fiat. It has failed miserably. Decisions on how and what to teach and on the deployment of resources were taken away from head teachers in schools and are now made in Wellington with disastrous results. The fact is that 30 percent of children leave school with inadequate outcomes in mathematics reading and writing skills. Any other business in New Zealand that failed 30 percent of its clients just simply would not survive. The fact is that the rules and regulation that are basic to centralisation disempower teachers. The result is that they drive out good teachers and they protect poor ones. 
New Zealand has ended up with an education system that simply cannot work and in an overall sense it fails between 25 percent and 40 percent of all students. The system is propped up by many good schools which continue to exist despite the system rather than because of it. We have in New Zealand a centralised system of planning and direction Soviet Union - style. It is a system that systematically shuts out the power of incentives and choice to raise standards. My bill helps but it does not solve the problem. The Ministry of Education which created and runs this education monopoly is also a monopoly provider of advice to Ministers on policy and on how the system might change. The result is that we have a closed system that locks in declining performance.