Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Mōrena koutou katoa. It is a great opportunity to talk about education and we will be putting up quite a few Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) because it is also an opportunity missed in this bill. The opportunity was there to have a national conversation but it did not happen. But we want to be pretty clear and pretty focused today about what is actually in the bill and how it should be changed.I do have some questions on the initial theme around the principle issues around educational priorities and I have got some very very serious concerns as has been mentioned already that we were presented with by the Ombudsman and the Children's Commissioner and the United Nations' UNICEF organisation about this bill on this core part—on this core theme—not having any child voice there. That is seen as backward and deleterious by the Education and Science Committee. It does not look good that we did not talk with children. In the Victorian era children had no say over their education but this is the 21st century and there are well-established sophisticated meaningful quality opportunities to develop relationships with children and young people on education. I myself have been involved in those which this bill with its importance—we believe it is important; very important—did not do. My question to the Minister in the chair Hekia Parata would be: when there were issues raised why did we not stop and do something about them? The second question is around the National Education and Learning Priorities (NELPs)—there are a lot of things we would like to talk about today but we will just start with them being based on something that allows students and parents to test the intent of them and indeed the intent of the rest of the Act. I have an SOP about clause 4 that talks about the United Nations conventions and the New Zealand Disability Strategy because most other countries if they are reviewing their fundamental piece of education legislation will talk about this and other countries have introduced a child rights approach based on the conventions that that country has signed up to.I guess I would like to know why the Government was not prepared to at least put UNCROC the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into the bill and why the Government was not prepared to at least put in the New Zealand Disability Strategy which is a test and given what we went through with the inquiry there are a huge number of issues around disability and how it has been implemented to empower children with learning differences in schools. I would like to know why there is no mention in this part of the legislation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and why there is no mention of UNDRIP the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples because our children are in all of these categories. CEDAW the Convention On The Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women—the importance of gender in the education system. This country goes through these laborious international processes so that national domestic law can be informed by our overarching commitment and education—one of the most important sectors in terms of laying out what we expect for our children and the future of the country—should have included those.We will be talking more about other aspects of the learning priorities but I just want to start by saying that this is an opportunity lost and it was noted by submitters that we have failed to enshrine child rights. We have failed to enshrine them. This amendment of the Education Act was the perfect opportunity to do that.We have other issues around the National Education and Learning Priorities. They are framed very much in terms of what will be instilled into the child. That is interesting framing—the idea that we are there to instil things into children. I think that it is probably well intentioned in that we want our children to share values that are important and there are some good values in the National Education and Learning Priorities that I do not disagree with but the way it is framed is that it is very much about the individual child. The education system is a collective experience of socialisation and learning and the more we focus on the individual child being instilled without looking at the collective context of education the more we go down a dead end. I feel as if if we had had the national conversation this is what would have come through because parents students teachers teachers' organisations and professionals are very much aware of the social aspect of education rather than the commodification the idea that it is a consumer product that each child needs to either be instilled with or be satisfied with as a customer.We also believe that the National Education and Learning Priorities could have some things added to them and one of them which I am also suggesting in SOP 301 is around the concept of equity the concept that education systems that really succeed have a clear national learning priority of a system not of a child—actually a system that is committed to the equity of all children creating equity. The Finns who are often lauded for good reason—the goal of their education system their national priority is equity.When equity is your goal rather than achievement however that is defined the result is that the resources and the approaches are very much focused on making sure that every child gets what they need—not to be equal but to be equitable because children have different needs. So in the end the individual child's learning outcomes succeed better with equity as a goal than when it is about performance measures. That is just a profound opportunity lost as well in this bill—that equity does not get a look in. Yet the greatest challenge we face at the moment not only in the education system but across our whole social framework is inequality. This is why in the National Educational and Learning Priorities we would be very keen to see equity.I have also put forward an SOP around adult and community education (ACE)—around adult and community learning—as a national education and learning priority. The ACE sector has said to us many times—I have sat on 8 years of panels where it has said to us: If you are amending the Education Act can you please put in something around the importance of lifelong learning?". At the moment this is about early childhood through the compulsory sector and the tertiary sector but lifelong learning goes well beyond that. It would be well placed within the National Education and Learning Priorities. It takes it out of a small vision into a broader vision because lifelong learning is actually the human experience. But it is not mentioned here.That is why equity and adult and community education—intergenerational learning—is really really important. It can take so many forms outside the formal learning structure but we do not mention it in the Act—it is not referred to in this theme. The ACE community has really asked us to step up on this so many times. That is why in the NELPs—the National Education and Learning Priorities—it would be easy to just add this in. It is not going to hurt anybody and it is not going to undermine any of the other objectives the Government might have but it will give the sector which works often with second-time learners for whom the system did not work the status and the value and the recognition and the opportunity to say that informal learning is incredibly important.We have another SOP in this section which I am aware will be controversial and probably unpopular but I am really proud of it. It is the Greens' policy that if we wish to instil—as the NELPs say—the importance of learning and valuing Te Reo we actually need Te Reo to be there. It is not colours and numbers in your school and a few waiata—and I will talk about this later—we need Te Reo Māori to be a core part of the curriculum. It is time.I applaud the Minister of Education for putting it in the National Education and Learning Priorities—both Te Tiriti and Te Reo—but we need to make sure that that is actually possible. Just to talk about it with no additional mechanism to actually move this whole debate to where it needs to be is another opportunity missed. Some young people from my rohe some of the few who actually attended the select committee Te Mata Rangatira—a wonderful group of rangatahi—came and they said: "We just want to learn Te Reo. We want to learn it at school. Our parents missed out and we want to learn this as part of our core curriculum.""