Hipkins Chris: Financial Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Financial Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16279. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very pleased to take a call on the financial review of the Ministry of Education. First of all I want to begin by addressing my comments to all of those teachers up and down the country who are continuing to experience the poor effects of theNovopay payroll system. A year and a half afterNovopay was implemented we still have a system that is not paying people what they are owed. It is still a system in which school principals and administrators are having to spend hours and hours and hours every pay cycle sorting out problems or finding ways around problems. I think that is completely unacceptable. The Government put Steven Joyce in charge ofNovopay a year ago to fix it and he has failed to do so. Instead what we have seen is a gloss of paint slapped over the top of it and Steven Joyce saying we have dealt with all of the problems and things are getting better. They are not getting better. Schools are still consumed byNovopay problems and the Government is simply turning a deaf ear to those problems. That is not good enough. It is time forNovopay to be scrapped so that schools can get on with the job of teaching and learning and not be constantly distracted by having to deal with payroll issues.Teachers work incredibly hard. We value the work of teachers. We value the work of school support staff—that is everyone from the teacher aides through to cleaners caretakers school administrators librarians. They all work very hard for the benefit of our education system. They deserve to be paid what they are owed. They deserve to be able to rely on the fact that their pay packet will be in their bank account each fortnight. At the moment they cannot have that reassurance. It is a year and a half now sinceNovopay was implemented. It is still not working. That is simply not good enough. It is time for the Government to actually step up and say that ifNovopay cannot deliver—and clearly it cannot—it is time to pull the pin on it and put in place a system that works because this has gone on for long enough.Moving on I want to talk about a couple of other issues that were raised during the financial review process. The first is the introduction of partnership schools because of course more information has become apparent since the financial review into theMinistry of Education took place. It has now become apparent for example that partnership schools are receiving up to five times the average funding of State schools. That is clearly wrong. The Government of course is trying to load the deck in favour of partnership schools succeeding but if every other school in the country was given a level of funding equivalent to what is being given to partnership schools I am sure that they would be doing a lot better as well.This is a Government committed to creating a two-tier education system: a small minority who will do very well out of it and the vast bulk of the rest who will simply deal with whatever is left over at the end of it. That is not good enough. Our focus has to be on making sure that every school in New Zealand is a great school and that every teacher is a great teacher. I do not think we should be creating a two-tier teaching profession and I do not think that we should be creating a two-tier schooling system and unfortunately many of the policies of this Government go in exactly that direction. We should be focused on making sure that every child in New Zealand has the opportunity to reach their full potential and that means we have to recognise the enormous work that is done by the dedicated and committed group of teachers that we have in our classrooms already.I want to say that I am awaiting with interest the outcome of the recent announcements around the expert teacher positions. There are sector working groups working on that. I have made it very clear that we will wait and see what comes out of that working group process because if there is broad buy in and support for some of those roles from within the sector then we will support those as well. I have got real reservations about some of those roles that have been announced but we will await the outcome of that process before we make any further announcements on that.What is very clear however is that the lack of trust that exists within the education system at the moment will be one of the biggest impediments to any change being successful. People simply do not trust that the current Government is going to implement this new system in a way that will be respectable of the teaching profession—that will genuinely embrace the nature of a strongly collegial and collaborative teaching profession an autonomous teaching profession. People do not trust that the Government is actually going to deliver on those things so although they may think that there are elements of the proposals that they also agree with they are very very reluctant to sign up to this package because they simply do not have trust in the current Government to deliver on it. That is true right across the board in education and that has got to be addressed.