Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Kia ora Mr Chair. Kia ora koutou katoa ngā mihi nui. It is an interesting bill this one. The Green Party has issues with a number of sections of it: the joint principals proposal the after-school care ideas the school hours flexibility the tertiary institutions being allowed to run charter schools and teachers' training. These are all interesting issues that we robustly discussed at the Education and Science Committee and if we had come away with some very good arguments as to why these changes were needed I think that we would have been prepared to listen to those arguments. We did get some good changes at the select committee particularly around the home-care numbers but they did not go far enough to allay our concerns in the Green Party so that we could support some of these provisions. So starting with the joint principals proposal—again supporting my colleague Chris Hipkins' comments there are two layers to this. There is the philosophical and ideological reason why you might have joint principals and then there is the practical application of the law. On both counts we have concerns. We are not sure who has demanded this. We do not understand who is calling for joint principals. We did not have submitters calling for it. But when it comes to the practical application I have to agree with Chris Hipkins that we could not get an explanation as to how it was going to work with the issue of dual employment by more than one board. That is just common sense. These kinds of questions about employment needed to be answered. We just needed to know how it was going to work. There are a couple of rural areas where you might see it as being a good idea but when boards are in conflict or have very different ideas about the employment of a principal we need to know how it is going to work and we did not get an answer so it was impossible to clarify that issue. On the broader question of the role of the principal I think this is really important because this Government has made it very clear that it sees the principal and the teacher as the key to the child's success. We can debate that. We could have many debates about whether poverty has an impact on people's lives and how much imagination it takes to realise that if you are not feeding kids they are probably not learning. But in terms of the educational leader of the school if that person is divided between a number of sites they will be a different type of leader but it may not be the educational leader of that school. It may be that they are an entrepreneurial coordinator of a range of schools. But given that we are assisting the Government to bring in the policies around the communities of learning which are supposedly the mechanisms that are going to bring schools together I do not understand why we would have joint principals. I do not see the necessity for that. There is a clear opportunity for schools to collaborate through the communities of learning. There was a lot of debate about it but it is a system that is yet to be evaluated that is just starting. But why joint principals for many of our schools? Like many of the people on the select committee I visit school after school after school and meet with principals. They tell me that being a part of their very local community having very strong hands-on relationships with their families having very strong relationships with other educational professionals in their area because of the needs of their very particular student population and having very strong educational leadership of their teachers—some of whom need a lot more support than others—is their role. If that is divided amongst a number of schools it will become a weaker role. It might be more efficient" but it will not be the educational leader of that community. Then you have the schools where there are huge social problems that the school is working to address. I have been to a number of schools—I am thinking of one in particular where the principal was like the captain of a ship that could any day hit the rocks but was very clearly staying in the stream because of that professional leader. So joint leadership puts at risk the delicate fabric that some of these schools manage in order to survive. So that is one issue. We do not support that. Then there is the issue of school hours flexibility. There are claims in the bill that this will happen only if there is consultation. We had quite a debate about the nature of consultation. "Consultation" is a fascinating word. As I have probably said before my father says "Consultation"—or he said; he is gone now—"is a cross between a con and an insult". Consultation often is because it is one way in which certain interests can be listened to but some voices who are not at the table—as we often talk about in this House—are not heard. So I was not confident after reading the clauses of the bill around the consultation for changing school hours that everybody would be heard—that all their needs would be heard and that is what concerns me. I am a grandmother who collects a child every Monday from school every Monday that I can and I read the school notices. I realise that it is my privilege to understand the education system and understand the issue around flexible hours. For me and for others flexible working hours for schools is actually quite disturbing. Many of us have these lives that are delicately balanced around 3 o'clock. We are balanced around 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock. My daughter's job is balanced around those hours my life is balanced around them the family's life is balanced around them and our child is balanced around them. In order to change those hours there has to be a really really good reason and we did not hear it. There is already flexibility in the law around before and after noon but to make it wide open puts at risk some of those very frustrating experiences for teachers and for parents. I do believe in innovation and change; I do think we should be open to it but I do not think that changing the school hours particularly for families that are running all over the place with more than one child—I just cannot see the benefit of it. Quite honestly—I do not want to be Auckland-centric but try to get across Auckland at 3 o'clock. Imagine if you have got to pick up kids at 2 o'clock 3 o'clock and 4 o'clock. It would just be a nightmare and there is no point in creating nightmares and there is no point in experimenting just for the sake of it. We need to experiment when there is clear educational value. So we are not going to support that—I call it—"faux-flexibility" because parents do not have that kind of flexibility. I do not see the point of it. The other issues that concern us—for example tertiary institutions running charter schools. Again it comes to the heart of the matter of what education is about. Is education something for children at primary school level and secondary school level? Is that the kind of education that universities offer? Universities offer a sophisticated lecture model based on individual research. They are not always best placed to understand what primary school teachers do which is not subject-based; it is child-based. Including secondary schools as well I would say—I hope—that they have a different way of teaching from universities. Being an expert in a subject at tertiary level does not make you a schoolteacher and so we have grave concerns that the charter school model being opened to the tertiary institutions which will be doing it because the Crown will give them lots of money to do it is actually an incursion into an educational space where they are not competent. We reject that as an idea. We do not believe that tertiary institutions are competent to run the schools that are basically for children whose learning journey is about collaborative interaction about starting off with relationships-based learning. That is not what university study is all about unfortunately. I wish it was. I am a participatory educator and I would love to see universities—I was totally bored at university. I found it very very narrow in its educational methodology. I would love to see that but I do not see it yet and I do not think we should sacrifice our primary and secondary school kids to a model that is not about their stage of learning. As we all would agree here everybody is at a different stage. They all learn differently. People do not learn—when they are 5 years old they have a different learning journey than when they are 25 35 or 45. We really put these things at our peril. The other big issue I want to talk about in the remaining seconds—but there will be more chances I hope—is the home-care business in early childhood. The Minister talked today about the participation rate which she is saying is nearly 98 percent—it has nearly reached the goal. The problem that we have is that participation is not quality and I have raised this issue at a number of select committee meetings and will continue to raise it—98 percent participation sounds great but where is the guarantee of quality? If you listen to the professionals they will tell you that the early childhood sector cannot guarantee quality right across and there is very—I have asked the Secretary of Education—"