Turner Judy: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Turner Judy: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2637] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the Committee stage of this bill. First of all I would like to comment on the amendments proposed by Bill English and the Maori Party. United Future has some real sympathies with some of the areas they cover although there are shades of grey within one or two of them particularly in one that Bill English is putting up. Our concern is about process and as United Future is not represented on the Education and Science Committee I made some inquiries about what the committee had covered. This Education Amendment Bill is a bit of an omnibus bill. It covers a whole lot of different things tidies up a whole lot of areas and brings in some new initiatives that are of themselves a bit disconnected. I can see what has happened here. Because of the diverse nature of the bill the temptation has been for other parties to use the Committee of the whole House as an opportunity to slap on a whole lot of their own ideas and policies. I can understand that temptation but it is very bad process. 
Some of the things being suggested were never canvassed at the select committee. Submitters never had the chance to address them or to comment on them. Here late in the process we are trying to bring about changes to things that were never discussed in the select committee. Nor were submitters able to make submissions on them. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Do you agree with them? 
JUDY TURNER 
: Well I could tease those things out. But let me explain. I got an early draft of Mr English’s ideas on this and because United Future has some real sympathies around making sure we teach to standards and that standards are available in schools I rang some key leaders within the education sector who have some serious reservations about what is being proposed and who as key stakeholders in this matter would certainly appreciate the chance to discuss with the select committee what is being proposed. They feel that this process is completely side-stepping that opportunity for them. 
One of the things that always concerns me on this matter when we hear it discussed is the assumption that teachers are teaching without any standards and with no sense at all of where children are at. When I was at primary school just before the mid-year and end-of-year writing of reports children went through a series of literacy tests with the principal or the teacher of the class in order to assess word recognition skills. Some of those are still used as indicators. This testing occurred once or twice a year to measure children against some standards and the outcome determined what was written on one’s report. A few years later after I had gone through high school and teachers college I was a primary school teacher myself and found that the situation had changed dramatically. Some radical things had happened with the teaching of literacy in Zealand. We were world leaders in that regard. We were teaching children individually with running records that were updated virtually on a daily basis. In fact it was an extremely onerous part of the teaching process. Most of us were grabbing kids before school to try to fit in this very very rigorous assessment of how children were learning what their instructional level was and what their reading level was. Any parent or guardian who walked in off the street to ask where his or her child was at would have been told very accurately in any given week of the year exactly what level he or she was performing at. 
Also in the area of numeracy a whole lot of rather neat approaches were being taken including pre-testing children at the beginning of a particular area of learning to determine which maths group they would be put into assessing what their learning needs were testing at the end of each unit to see how they had progressed and determining whether they had understood what was being taught. We were teaching to a very rigorous set of evaluations that had been put in place. I have been a trained primary school teacher for nearly 30 years and those evaluations were in place for the whole time I was in education. I find it almost offensive at times when people imply that teachers teach in some sort of haphazard way and with no idea of where the children are at or where they are taking them. So we are very supportive of the fact that there are some very clear standards available in the primary sector and in the secondary sector as well.