Clendon David: Education (Board of Trustee Freedom) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Clendon David: Education (Board of Trustee Freedom) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:665;Page:13022] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora koutou. Before beginning I must acknowledge my colleague Catherine Delahunty who might otherwise have delivered this speech and whose thoughts have gone into the preparation of it. 
The purpose of the Education (Board of Trustee Freedom) Amendment Bill clearly is to enable boards of trustees to manage their own affairs by having full control over the employment of teachers in their schools. This is highly reminiscent of the 19th century. It would undo consistency and equity and it would create chaos in our education system. It somewhat reflects and causes some recollection of a children’s series called  
Little House on the Prairie 
 where schools were totally controlled by the fathers on the school board the pay and conditions were set by those boards and all people lived happily ever after in their small communities. However we know of course that that is not how it works. 
The reason the education system has developed with the Crown negotiating with the profession and setting a standardised equitable and incremental wage structure based on qualifications and professional progress is that it is better for the communities it is better for the children and it is better for the teachers. A fair society is better for everyone and we need to protect the values of equity in the face of such unthinking and blind commitment to the free-market model. It raises the question of why we are wasting time on this bill. It is probably because these old ideas have a deep emotional appeal to a narrow group of ideologues who believe that we are only individuals rather than individuals within communities and individuals enriched by our strong social and cooperative instincts. This approach does not include an understanding of collective equity or empathy. The logic of the Crown negotiating consistent pay rates for all teachers appears somewhat sophisticated to the designers of this bill. Why is it difficult to grasp that each school board of trustees would be placed in a highly invidious position if it were obliged to set the pay rates for the teachers at its school? 
One questions the genesis of this bill. A number of my colleagues stay in close touch with boards of trustees and teaching staff and with parents and students at schools. Nowhere are we hearing a call for a measure of this sort to be undertaken. Boards of trustees have their hands full dealing with complex finances not to mention being caught in the battle between the Minister of Education the principals and the teachers over national standards. The boards are not looking for the burden of setting pay rates which would exacerbate the difficulties they already have in trying to divide up the limited funds to maintain buildings and evaluating that need against the need to fund special-needs support or in balancing the purchase of classroom equipment with providing support staff in the classes. The very last thing the boards of trustees which are made up of parents and volunteers want or need is the additional stress of endeavouring to add teachers’ wages into the competition for tight resources. That would be a very poor recipe for good local school or community relationships. 
The world is made and not least of all in education and maintained through respectful relationships—our sense of what is fair. It is maintained not by individuals scrapping against each other but through structures that create at least some kind of balance and equity. Schools exist as communities within the education system and teachers and principals move between schools. It is not every school alone; it is a network of communities trying to cooperate despite the best efforts of the free-market model. They do not particularly want or need to waste energy in justifying a consistent and collegial approach so the Greens will simply refer to this bill as being retrogressive in the extreme. 
Twenty years ago the Lange Labour Government introduced Tomorrow’s Schools. The marketing of Tomorrow’s Schools was based around parental involvement and control of schools. Having 7 or 8 years’ personal experience on a board of trustees which spanned the time of the transition from Tomorrow’s Schools I know that some schools did very well out of the increased flexibility. The Greens also know that the least well off most vulnerable and poorest communities struggled because they did not have lawyers they did not have accountants they did not have a stable school community and therefore this new model did not meet their needs in the way that it ought to have done. 
The passing of this bill will take us a considerable step away from progressive community engagement at schools. It will be a step towards complete bedlam and mayhem and the Greens will have no part in it. Kia ora.