Hipkins Chris: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19091. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am looking forward to speaking on Vote Education tonight. It is one of the most important votes in this year’s Budget as it is in any Budget because it is where we think about the future and we think about the legacy that we will leave for future generations of New Zealanders. I have to say that in that regard this current Government’s priorities in education have been woefully inadequate and completely wrong.The education portfolio starts in early childhood education. In fact if we want to ensure that every young New Zealander gets the best chance in life through education that starts with a quality early childhood education. That means investing in quality: investing in making sure that we have really good teachers in early childhood education really good centres and that all of those centres are well supported. This Government has not been doing that. If there is one area that is the clearest example of how Government funding is not keeping up with increased demand is not keeping up with the cost pressures that centres are facing it is early childhood education.Tim Macindoe: Rubbish.CHRIS HIPKINS: Government funding simply is not keeping up. Every early childhood centre will tell Tim Macindoe who has got his head in the sand that on a per child basis early childhood education funding is declining under this Government. It is declining under this Government and those members have their heads buried in the sand. They simply do not want to know.Parents are having to pay more for early childhood education. Of course the Government did away with the “free” in free early childhood education so it is not surprising that parents are having to pay more. The Government has failed to keep up with the targets to increase the number of qualified staff in early childhood education. Its idea of expanding provision is to go along to Kidicorp and basically say that the Government will fund it twice for building the same early childhood centres. This is a Government that is failing to meet the needs of the future in early childhood education.In schooling we know what the challenges are. Quality teaching—we should be backing quality teaching and professional development for teachers. We need a high-trust aspirational model for the way we do that. This Government has no trust in teachers. It says to parents that teachers cannot be trusted. We have got a power-grab from the Minister of Education who wants to wrench away control of the entire teaching profession and put it under her thumb by not even giving teachers any say over how their own profession is regulated. This is a Government that thinks that bigger class sizes are the solution to underachievement in the education system. This is a Government that thinks that charter schools—importing a failed charter school model from overseas—are the answer to underachievement in our education system. We know that that is simply not the case. We know that that is not the case. This is a Government of course that thinks that spending up to five times more money on a handful of students going to charter schools is a good use of public money when every other school in the country is struggling for resources.We know that they are struggling for resources because donations by parents to New Zealand’s public schools are now about to top $100 million a year. That is a 30 percent increase in the 5 years that National has been in Government—a 30 percent increase. The reality is that that is because the overall education budget when it is adjusted for population growth and for inflation has gone backwards in four out of the 6 years that National has been in office. The money has gone backwards. National has been taking money out of education.Yes the overall amount of money has gone up but that is because the number of people in the education system has gone up and because like everything the costs go up. It is called inflation and it seems to me that this Government struggles with that. To say that it is spending more money on education than ever before is ridiculous because there are actually more people in the education system than ever before because the population has grown so it stands to reason that more money will be going into the system. But on a per student basis it is going backwards. On a per student basis the funding is going backwards in the education system. It is simply not keeping up with inflation and with the growing population. Instead we are seeing the Government trying to carve up the education system through privatisation through the introduction of charter schools and public-private partnerships.In the meantime it is ignoring the needs of the future. It is failing to help the education system and to support the education system to adapt to the needs of the 21st century. Instead it is continuing to refine the education system that we needed in the last century. We actually need something different now. As Alvin Toffler said the new illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn unlearn and relearn. Actually that is what schools are focused on. They are focused on giving kids the knowledge and the competencies that they are going to need to survive in the 21st century and yet so much Government policy is getting in the way of that.The narrowing of the focus of the curriculum has been one of the worst things that this Government has done in education—narrowing the focus of the curriculum away from a rich diverse education down to something that simply is not going to cut it. When I go and talk to employers I ask what they want people to leave school with—what the competencies are that they are looking for. They talk about creativity. They talk about collaboration. They talk about problem solving. And yet all of those things are being distracted from by this Government’s very narrow focus—the very narrow focus of this current Government. And of course what have we seen? A litany of failures in this Government’s education policy: school closures in Christchurch closing special education schools around the country Novopay and Hekia Parata’s bizarre plan to increase class sizes supposedly to improve the quality of education.There is a better way. There is a better way in all of these areas. Positive progressive change in education is what I think New Zealanders are looking for and I think that is what they are going to get when they vote for a Labour Government—a Labour-led Government—at this year’s election. We will put the focus on quality teaching but not in the way this National Government wants to which is to divide the teaching profession and tell the teaching profession that the Government knows best and try to tell every teacher in the country that it knows better how they should be doing their jobs. We will not do it that way; we are actually going to place some trust in teachers. We are actually going to say to teachers that we think it is fantastic that they have an aspirational code of ethics for their profession rather than a punitive code of conduct like this Government wants. We are going to say to teachers that actually we trust them to have a say over how their profession is regulated and governed. We are going to give teachers a say in how the Teachers Council is composed unlike under this National Government where Hekia Parata wants to hand-pick every single member of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand because she will not trust teachers to have a say over their own profession.We are going to say to parents that we recognise the economic pressures that they are under and we recognise the fact that funding has not kept up with the cost of educating kids. We will do something about that unlike this Government which is saying in the words of Bill English that schools are awash with cash. We know that that is simply not the case—in fact funding is not keeping up under this Government. That is something that the incoming Labour Government will do something about as a matter of priority.We recognise that education in the 21st century is going to look significantly different from what it looked like in the 20th century. That means that schools are going to need access to new technology. Kids are going to need access to new technology. Although the current Government—and I will give it credit; this is an area where it has done some good things and we fully support the initiatives that it has put in place in this area but a lot more needs to be done and it will be done under a Labour Government. We will have some more announcements to make on that very very soon as you will see over the coming couple of days. Investment in education is an investment in the future of the country. It may sound like a cliché—it has been said so many times—but this Government does not seem to acknowledge that. It seems to think that the education system can continue to scrape by with less and less on a per student basis in real terms every year. It simply cannot. The funding is not keeping up with the cost of educating kids. The Government has got its head buried in the sand if it thinks it is. It simply is not.So the next Labour Government will invest in quality teaching. We will in collaboration with the teaching profession set very high standards for the profession. We will make sure that we attract the best and brightest into teaching because we know how valuable the work of teachers is. We will then place trust in them to get on with it and to do the job without all of the punitive measures and sanctions that this Government is putting in place. We will commit to the free public education system that New Zealanders have so long been proud of. We will put the “public” and the “free” back into the free public education that this Government is so determined to dismantle. We will make sure that schools are supported to deliver an education that is appropriate for the 21st century. We will ensure that kids get access to the technology that they need and that it is not a lottery of where they are born and how wealthy their parents are that determines whether they get access to that technology. Every student needs to have access to the technology they need to thrive in the 21st century and the incoming Labour Government will make sure that they get that.Education is so important. It is time for positive change and positive investment in education and that is exactly what New Zealand is going to get from an incoming Labour Government.