Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10609. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): I really appreciate this opportunity having spent the last hour on my back coughing when I would have liked to be critiquing. However now is my one chance; I am going to have a go. I recognise that where we have got to is the commencement and title clauses of the Education Amendment Bill and I am really really disappointed to be standing here at all on this particular issue but it is par for the course. I do not think that children will get used to it and I think that is the point. It is not actually about the business agenda; it is actually about our kids.Let us have a look at the title. I would agree with some of my colleagues that there should be a change of title. The Education Amendment Bill is a meaningless and innocuous title for something that is really the “Charter for Disasters Bill”. I would like to call it the “Charters for Disasters Bill” or “Accountability is Just a Secret Bill” because that is really what it is all about. It is about a disaster for education and it is about secrecy in terms of contracting which may be perfectly acceptable for some businesses but actually has no bearing on education for our kids. The title is misleading and disingenuous which is not usual in Parliament but this one in particular does not tell the public what is happening here which is probably one of the most profound shifts in the history of education legislation away from what it says in Part 1 of the Education Act 1989: “free primary and secondary education”.“Free” is such an interesting word and “free” is what the schools in Britain are called. That is their title: free schools. In America they are called charter schools. When we are talking about the title of this bill both those words need to be considered because Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1980s introduced charters for every single school. What we did not do is introduce secrecy privatisation unregistered teachers no boards of trustees any hours that the school chooses to set a contract that is only with the Government a sponsor who has no educational background and so on. That is what “charter” meant to the citizens of this country. It was not perfect—Tomorrow’s Schools has its critics and there are things we need to do for it—but rather than chucking that outwhat is happening is an undermining through this really odd initiative that has failed elsewhere. At the very best all the research can be called mixed in terms of its results.Let us a spade a spade in the title of the bill. I think it would be a refreshing change. I think that perhaps we should call the bill the “Throw Away the Rule Book Bill” because the rule book around what works for an equitable quality public education system is being undermined by this. What I would also like to call the bill is the “Privatisation (Trojan Horse) Education Amendment Bill” because it is actually a Trojan Horse for a fascinating speech that Heather Roy made some time ago which I wrote a blog about called “Bad News from Bunnythorpe”. She made it in Bunnythorpe which is an interesting place to announce the end of quality public education but it sums up the way of life in this country in some ways in that disastrous educational policy was whispered in an obscure small town called Bunnythorpe. I am sure it is a very good place but did it need Heather Roy announcing that vouchers and privatisation were the solution to education? That was prior to the election then we had the cup of tea then we had the coalition agreement and now we have disastrous legislation that will undermine something that is very very important to people in this country which is the concept of a local school being good enough for all children.I am not saying—no one is—that we cannot innovate and improve the quality of the public education system that we have; of course we can. I do not think anybody wants to deny that there are real issues from poverty from disadvantage and from the growing gap between the richest and the poorest families attending schools and that there is the need for a much greater level of cultural responsiveness in the diversity of Aotearoa. That has always been needed. But we do have special character sections in our education legislation. We do have a whole range of mechanisms such as kura kaupapa that need resourcing.If we are going to talk about the title of the bill we should really be honest and say that this bill is not about any of the stated goals that we hold dear around free primary and secondary education; it is about facilitating business. So the bill could perhaps be called the “Business Facilitation in Education Bill”. I have had a look at some of the international groups that have expressed an interest in setting up charters and they are franchises. It is basically an opportunity for international educational franchises to take over.Another opportunity is there for unqualified teachers. This is what we heard at the select committee and this is why the title is mild and misleading. What we heard was that if you have failed to keep your registration—sorry not you Mr Chair—if there has been a failure to keep your registration up to date or you have committed some kind of misdemeanour that the Teachers Council is concerned about do not worry; that person will be able to go and teach in a charter school. We are going to have this bizarre scenario where half the teachers in a school—or fewer because there is no requirement for a particular number to be registered—will be registered and the others will not. We will not know why the parents will not know why and that is the Government’s idea of accountability in education. That is the Government’s idea of safety for our children. It is extremely odd and totally inconsistent that it is building this into the Education Amendment Bill as it is titled.I am very concerned about these titles. I think that as well as reflecting that unregistered teachers are being allowed access through this bill the title could also be the “Good at Lecturing? You Can Easily Be a Teacher Bill” because what I heard at the select committee from some people—not the submitters but other members of the committee—is that they did not understand the huge difference between lecturing in quantum physics at a university and facilitating children’s learning in a primary school. And so the idea from some people was that you could just hijack some lecturers from auniversity who have a degree throw them into a charter school and then everything will be fine. Of course 6-year-olds will really enjoy being lectured because lecturing is learning to some people—just shows you what they do not know about learning.The most offensive thing about this Education Amendment Bill and its title is that it does not expose the fact that children’s learning is not well served by privatisation and competition. I would much prefer that we call it just the “Competition Bill”. The league table is the way to go. The sports team model for education which says that we should all be in league tables and that we should all compete because people learn best by competing is worse than a fallacy. It is incredibly destructive. There is plenty of evidence of that all over the world when you read into the evidence about the creation of these so-called free so-called charter so-called helpful for education schools. I am also very concerned about the idea that perhaps a person could finish their university degree in their subject be considered an expert and then be hijacked into a school where they had 6 weeks’ training. Charter schools will be well positioned to take those people but it will not work for kids.So we have a bill that is called the Education Amendment Bill and is supposedly about free primary and secondary education but it creates risk. It creates risk for parents trying to decide what will be sustainable because if the schools fall over—and they often do in other parts of the world—then your child has been mucked around. People are vulnerable about what is going to be best for their kids’ education. They need to know. Christchurch yesterday is a case in point. There is huge vulnerability. There is not a need for lab rat experimentation. Therefore the title of this bill really needs to change. It really needs to be—I think my favourite is the Trojan Horse one actually. I think the Trojan Horse one is my favourite because yes it is educational—it sort of inspires history. We think about what happened in Troy when the wooden horse was rolled through and everybody was smiling thinking the siege was over—but the siege was not over. The siege was just beginning. That is what we see in the title of this bill: an innocuous title when the siege of Troy after years of battle has just begun. Out of the wooden horse will come the warriors of privatisation who will break it open and create an amazingly well-resourced experiment which no doubt the Government in its first few years will refuse to allow to fail whatever the definition of success is.I certainly do not think that competition will work for these kids. The experience overseas in terms of this bill is that charter schools counsel out students who fail because it is a contract and if you fail to meet the contract it is over—it is over. That is what is so destructive from the students’ point of view. I am sure the experiment will not fail in the first few years because it will be heavily resourced but we could have done a whole lot better with that $19 million we wasted in the Budget on this. We could have done a whole lot better with our ethos around education. We could have stuck to the title of section 3 of the Education Act “Right to free primary and secondary education”. We should add some words. If the Green Party was going to amend the Education Act we would add words around creating a quality local culturally responsive and equitable public system for the benefit of all students. We would not play games with the future of our children.