Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2648] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to point out to the Committee that the reason the amendments to the boards’ reporting are actually in the Education Amendment Bill at all is that the intention of the bill was to remove the requirement for boards to have an AGM. The AGM has become a bit of a farce with boards so we said that was fair enough. Those structural operational requirements around boards were made back in 1989. Times have changed so we said we could look at that. But the one thing we insisted upon was that boards had to report to parents. That is why the reporting part of the legislation was in there. At no time was there any mention at all—it was not even raised—that there should be a highly complex issue around reporting against standards. That was never brought up at all so we never even started to get our heads around that particular issue. 
Of course our concern with regard to the amendment is that we simply do not have the time to address that particular capacity—it is a very complex issue. The former Minister of Education will know that when the New Zealand First - National Government got together it found that the previous National Government had a national testing programme all ready to go. New Zealand First opposed the programme because it thought it was simplistic and would not give the information that would be required to move our system forward. The programme was canned we put out a green paper on assessment and I travelled to Toronto and England and looked at their systems. Some of the recommendations that were made ended up being implemented as the asTTle type of thing because we strongly believed that parents need information about the progress of their children that is based around norms—national norms. 
But that does not mean national testing; it means providing some sort of tools that are in fact standardised such as asTTle or the progressive achievement tests. That is already in the legislation—it was in the Act of 1989. As a principal I always operated under legislation that required me to report regularly on the progress of students. Some of the deficiencies in that reporting were around the deficiencies in the tools that schools had to operate with. But they did not come around by comparing one school with another. Once we start to get into those sorts of comparisons we start to get into real fish-hooks. Therefore the asTTle stuff which was an upgrade and a modernisation of the progressive achievement test stuff took into account the way that the national curriculum structure was built. Rather than the norm being based around the standard distribution curve it was around levels that Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith had put into place. So it gave a measure against the particular levels that were there. 
We believe very strongly in that and we believe there is a real need for a debate. But certainly this Committee at this particular moment does not have the capacity to go through all the complexities of that particular debate—whether or not the issue goes back to the Education and Science Committee. In some respects I believe the Opposition is actually catching a bus that has gone by rather than having utilised the opportunity to bring up those particular issues when the legislation was in the select committee. Nevertheless we believe very strongly that the issue being raised is a very important one and needs to be fully debated in the environment of a select committee rather than in the environment of the Committee at this particular stage. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.