Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:9821. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 He mihi nui ki te Whare Paremata. I say thanks very much to the previous speakers. Sometimes I find that I learn more about a bill after the select committee process but it is all good learning. It is important for the Green Party to speak up on all stages of the Education Amendment Bill because we are voting against it. The bill did not have a large number of submitters but there were people with very serious interests in some of the important specific issues that have been raised about Part 1. The select committee process was useful in the sense that some improvements were made to the bill and general consensus was formed on issues such as information matching for teachers and the changes to the vetting of people associated with home care and working on school premises. 
Following on from previous speakers the select committee consideration reminded me of experiences in the bad old days. In some schools that I was connected with it took 12-year-old girls using a tape-recorder in a classroom to prove to boards school committees and the education department that there were abusive teachers saying abusive things. We managed to get rid of some teachers like that from our school but we did not have the knowledge or confidence then that information matching would mean that the behaviour of those teachers would not continue in another school. So it is good to see that we have come a long way on that issue and that there is progress. It is appalling that in those days some of our children had to take a tape-recorder into the classroom in order to be believed; people did not believe that some of the abuse towards children in schools in this country was possible. We welcome those aspects of the bill and have no problem with them. 
Because the Green Party is the only party voting against the bill we need to reiterate that we did find some parts inoffensive and some parts very useful. But we and some of the submitters were not persuaded by what are called “minor changes” to the Education Act. The Quality Public Education Coalition and the Green Party are concerned about the clauses in the bill that relate to school governance. There was never any real explanation of the clauses relating to combining school boards and relating to body corporate control in the governance section of the bill. Other parties have spoken as if that language is just convenient phrasing that reflects the status quo and that creates choice for communities rather than being a potentially serious opportunity to change the governance from public institutions to potentially privately controlled structures. 
Just as the Green Party stands against free trade and for fair trade and just as we stand against unsustainable growth and for genuine progress indicators we stand for public ownership and governance of the public school system. It is not to say that we have no critique of that system; we strongly critique the system for its inability to meet the needs of many young people whose voices we hear. We consider that tangata whenua tamariki and rangatahi in particular have not been nurtured to their full potential by an education system that has embedded problems with monocultural ignorance and a strong Pakeha learning framework and bias that is currently seen as so normal that it is barely recognised particularly in some high schools. However this legislation does nothing to improve that situation and could also have serious and long-term unintended consequences. 
We could debate whether the term “body corporate” will have major effects but the Green Party stands with the submitters from the Quality Public Education Coalition who were concerned that the legislation was legitimising corporate control in public schools. The practical example they raised with me when we discussed the legislation was what happens when schools are considered to be failing. Under this legislation the board of trustees can be taken over by a statutory manager which may be necessary at times. But if that manager is a body corporate the risk of private control becomes more explicitly provided for than in the Education Act to date. Why would we open a door to a different governance model that moves governance further from the local community? What if a school was considered to be failing because it worked with a different cultural bias from the current framework and it was taken over by an “efficient” private management group that had no experience of the educational needs of children from that community? It was argued at the select committee by just about everybody else except me that as long as some individual was made accountable everything would be OK because accountability is about knowing who is responsible but not necessarily knowing the impact of the kind of model of responsibility that we may be facilitating in this legislation. That is where the Greens and other submitters beg to differ from the Government. 
We also agree with the Quality Public Education Coalition that combining school boards risks the autonomy of communities. A combined board might sound efficient but it risks the takeover of a unique community in that parents who are not directly involved are making key decisions about a school in their district. The governance of a combined board could dilute the purpose of the board of trustees in allowing more distant interests and priorities—let alone more corporate ones—to dominate. Today at the Education and Science Committee my colleague Sue Kedgley presented the school foods petition. One issue she highlighted was the way vested interests can dictate the food our children buy in schools now that this Government has abolished the healthy food guidelines written by the previous Government. Contractors can make more money from widely promoted junk food than they can from healthy food choices. Shall we expand that to contracting all education services? Who will benefit from that? 
I return to the issue of unintended consequences which can bedevil legislation. Imagine the nightmare scenario if we ended up with an accelerating progression towards an ACT Party utopia in education? Individual parents would seek so-called choice in a chaotic and privatised education system where survival of the fittest—the schools at the top of the league table—had taken over. The rich would choose beautiful well-resourced schools behind guarded walls and the poor would end up in the draughty hall down the road. Oh my God that is starting to happen already. The language of this legislation may further facilitate the degradation of the public education system towards schools as businesses some of which will inevitably fail. But what the heck! That is the market and children who suffer educational inequity can just pull themselves up by their future-focused undeserving bootstraps. I say no thank you. We will stand our ground and we will vote against the bill. Kia ora.