Hipkins ChrisEDUCATION LEGISLATION BILLIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to Education Act 1989CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I welcome the opportunity to debate the Education Legislation Bill and before I get into the specifics I want to indicate to the Committee that I intend to take my full allocation of calls on Parts 1 and 2. I want to raise a technical matter and that is with the way the bill is drafted—before we get into the specifics. It is a concern I have got with the way this omnibus bill which has wide-ranging changes has been put together. It amends seven different Acts but it is drafted in only two parts. That actually significantly limits the amount of scrutiny that the Committee is able to give to the bill because we are restricted in the number of speeches that we have on each part. Traditionally when omnibus bills have been put together that amend multiple Acts each Act that has been amended has been contained within its own part allowing it to be properly scrutinised. I want to indicate to the Committee and then to the House as a whole when the opportunity arises that this development of drafting a bill in this way is very concerning because it violates the norms of the way bills should be put together. It does mean that we will be able to have less scrutiny. But anyway with that in mind I intend to make the most of the opportunity that we do have to scrutinise it. The first point that I want to raise—and I would really like some further clarification on this from the Minister in the chair the Hon Hekia Parata—is around the issue of principals managing more than one school. There are clauses in Part 1 of the legislation that allow a principal to manage more than one school but despite some pretty close scrutiny at the Education and Science Committee there are still some pretty big issues around how this will work. I want to say at this point that I am very supportive of things that increase collaboration between schools but I have got some concerns that this might not necessarily be the best way to achieve that. We already know that previous legislation allowing the Minister to have one board of trustees overseeing more than one school has been very seldom if ever used so the first question is: where is the demand for these provisions that allow a principal to manage more than one school coming from? That is the first question. The second question is around how that will actually work because the officials who presented at the select committee were not really able to explain how in practice the Government envisaged this being implemented. If a principal is overseeing more than one school—so they are managing more than one school—what does that do for their relationship with the boards of trustees of those schools? Each school if it still has a separate board of trustees would have a different relationship with that principal. Where would the accountabilities in that relationship lie? Would they be employed by one board of trustees and have a primary relationship with one of the schools' board of trustees? If so where would that leave the other school board of trustees because that potentially changes the nature of things quite significantly. If there is only one board of trustees managing multiple schools it is not an issue because it could employ one principal now. Under this new change which allows different boards of trustees to employ a single principal where do the accountabilities lie and what would happen for example if the principal had a souring relationship with one school but still had a positive relationship with another school? Who would ultimately be responsible for that employment relationship? The ministry officials' answer to that was that the schools will go into that voluntarily so they are not going to be forced to have one principal managing more than one school. That is all very well and people can set out with good intentions fully supportive of that but the question is what happens when it goes wrong if it goes wrong? There really are not good answers—certainly not from the officials who attended the select committee—around what would actually happen if the relationship turned sour. Could the relationship be dissolved so that the principal ended up at only one school not at another school; if so what would actually happen to the employment relationship because that is a substantive change in their employment relationship and would they effectively be redundant? Would one school board be able to pull out of the arrangement; if so where does that leave the employment of the principal? Those are actually really substantial things because if the Parliament is going to allow this to happen I think we need to know how this is going to work and what it is going to do for the relationship between the principal and the board because what we are seeing at the moment is a dismantling of the principle of having self-governing schools. That has been dismantled over a long period of time not just under this Government but under previous Governments. I do not think that we have really got a clear understanding of where that is going to leave school boards of trustees in terms of their relationship with the principals that they have. School principals have managerial roles—there is no question about that. They manage the facilities and they report to boards of trustees and so on. But they actually perform a really critical role as curriculum leaders within the school and I am yet to be convinced that a principal could do that part of the job effectively across more than one school at the same time because different schools have different cultures different approaches to the way they manage the curriculum and different approaches to all sorts of different things and what works really well in one school is not necessarily going to work really well in another. We see this debate where we have arguments that a successful school in say a high-decile area should be able to take over a school in a lower-decile area that is not successful but what that debate ignores is that the things that are working well in that high-decile school are not necessarily going to work well in a low-decile school or in a different area where the culture and the pressures from the parent community might be different. How would a principal as a curriculum leader for multiple different schools reconcile that pressure? I am looking forward to an explanation from the Government as to how it sees that happening. The second point that I want to raise in this first contribution to the debate on Part 1 is around school hours and the provisions within the legislation for schools to set different opening hours. At the moment the opening hours are fairly standard: roughly between the hours of 9 to 3 with a little bit either side of 9 to 3. That means that things like extracurricular activities are easy to coordinate—things like school sports. It also means that school transport is easy to facilitate and it means that for parents who have kids at different levels of schooling and potentially attending different schools the logistics of juggling that are a little bit easier. But what will happen when the power to set their school hours is delegated to every school in the country if they then start to set different school hours? So if you take the case of one family who might have three different kids—one at intermediate school one at primary school and one at secondary school—and if all of those schools have got different hours that they are open that is a logistical nightmare for those parents. It is also a logistical nightmare for that local community in terms of sharing school transport.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Kia ora anō tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. Tēnā koutou te whānau o Te Whare Pāremata. Kia ora anō tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. When we broke for the dinner break Chris Hipkins had 2 minutes 25 seconds left. I suggest he does not waste it.CHRIS HIPKINS: I will certainly not be wasting it and thank you for that. When we broke before the dinner break I had been talking about the provisions in the bill that allow a principal to manage more than one school and I put a number of questions to the Minister. I moved on then to discussing school hours and the ability for different schools to set different hours and the logistical challenges that that could create around school transport extra-curricular activities and the logistical challenges that could create for parents. I certainly would like to hear the Minister's comment on that. The issue with this bill of course is there is so much in it that it is difficult to cut it down to the allocated speaking time. I do have some concerns about the expansion of home-based early childhood education services to allow them to provide out-of-school care for school-age children and the potential challenges that creates and the potential risks that creates. The home-based early childhood education system sector has been one of the fastest-growing areas of early childhood education and yet it is the area of the early childhood education system that we know the least about the performance of. We do not have good robust data comparing how kids in home-based early childhood education progress with their education relative to kids who are in kindergartens or early childhood centres. I think that until we have better information about home-based early childhood care I think further expanding that sector is something that we need to tread very carefully around. I would like to hear more about why the Government stopped the review of home-based early childhood education services because there are certainly some quality concerns in at least some of those services that exist at the moment. I think to some extent they undermine the reputation of the other services that can be doing a very good job. So I would like to hear more about that and how the Government thinks that that can operate. The new categories of teaching position and the changes that relate to charter schools are very controversial and I look forward to dealing with those two issues in future calls. I have got a number of Supplementary Order Papers on the Table that deal with those issues. I am looking forward to the ability to debate those in due course including Supplementary Order Paper 218 which I have on the Table that provides for elections for representatives on the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand which is the professional registration body for teachers in New Zealand. I am looking forward to being able to fully explain that later on in the debate and to outline what those changes are going to achieve.