Curran ClareHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thanks Madam Deputy Speaker. It's always a pleasure to take a call and talk from the position of an evidence base which actually is a place of strength. This bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) probably isn't going to make the front page of the paper. You never know—it might get Judith Collins baking. Judith Collins and I used to have baking competitions when we sat on the former Commerce Committee. But I tell you what it is about: it is about protecting the integrity of our education system—I mean clearly something that the Opposition doesn't get and certainly doesn't care about.There's a lot of important policy work being done on this side of the House in education and what this bill is doing is attempting to right some wrongs. It's actually about protecting the integrity of this thing we call the education system" which I would hope all New Zealanders really give a stuff about because it's actually something that we can feel really proud of. But oh no apparently the ability for parents to send their children to school before they're five years old is more important and dismantling our education system systematically which is what they did over the nine years that they were in Government is actually more important—certainly not listening to evidence: the evidence of experts as my colleague Jan Tinetti has just spelled out. I'm proud actually to associate myself with a colleague who sat on the 2015 advisory group on early learning which found and had an evidence base to say that going to school before you are five is too young.At the same time they were dismantling that they were also undermining and eroding our early childhood education sector and again were turning that into—I note they've all gone very quiet—a glorified babysitting service while they were introducing national standards in charter schools which was essentially a privatisation by stealth of our world-class education system. What this bill does is dismantle some of those things. What Nikki Kaye described as "ideology" and "State control" is actually ensuring that Government policy and Government intent is taken some note of in our education system and the way that it's being run and that our children should not be attending school before they're five years old. I described it as "protecting the integrity of our education system" but I think it also shows some real philosophical differences between that side of the House and this side of the House when it comes to the way that education is delivered.I was reading the National Party's minority view and the thing that really stood out for me—because I mean other people have spelt out the key parts of this bill—is where they talk about student safety and the new criteria for registration of private schools: that a school "is a physically and emotionally safe place for students". Well gee it's actually a bit hard to argue against that don't you think? And they didn't do a very good job in their minority report of arguing against it even though they did argue against it. They said "While we support any reasonable and logical legislation that improves student safety there is a lack of detail around this aspect of the bill"—so therefore it's OK not to have a requirement for registration of private schools to be physically and emotionally safe places for students because apparently there's some detail that's missing around what that actually means! I found that to be extraordinary.Then there were the communities of online learning which I think Nikki Kaye in her contribution revealed as being essentially an alternative means of providing schooling to children who didn't fit in and which submitters—and I note that there weren't that many submitters on this bill. There seemed to be pretty strong—not unanimous; I agree with that—objection to the communities of online learning being set up as an alternative essentially without the work that should have been done. I'll just refer to NZEI Te Riu Roa's submission which said that the Government should definitely consider any online learning as part of a broader discussion about a longer-term vision for education. Then they gave a whole lot of detail around what that should look like and that there had not been anywhere near the amount of work that needed to be done to establish what the previous Government set up as the communities of online learning—and thank goodness this side of the House has made the decision to say "No we don't want to do that because it's ill-thought-out it's an alternative to the education system that we should feel proud of and it's actually not going to deliver the outcomes that we need in our education system which is world class and which we should feel proud of." This side of the House is standing up for that.Ultimately unfortunately the ideology that has been claimed by the Opposition is actually just exactly what they had proposed and they put in place and what this bill does is undo that. I commend it to the House."