Hipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1030. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am very happy to take a call on the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) in this Committee stage on Part 1. I want to turn particularly to the submissions on clause 38 of the bill particularly new section 382(1)(i). That particularly relates to the new functions of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ) in carrying out audits of teacher registrations on an annual basis. It requires the council to audit 10 percent of all of the practising certificates issued in any given year. It is a 3-year cycle so roughly one-third of the teaching profession will renew their practising certificates each year. That means that 10 percent of that third will go through an audit process.We received through the Education and Science Committee quite a range of submissions about this. Overwhelmingly submitters felt that this was overly heavy-handed. First of all I want to acknowledge that I understand what the Government is trying to achieve here. It is basically looking at some comments that have been made particularly by the Education Review Office and others. Judith Aitken for example a former Chief Review Officer of the Education Review Office and a member of the review committee noticed that there is huge national inconsistency and some weaknesses in teacher-appraisal processes. This has come through in a lot of research that has been done around New Zealand and that is very legitimate. So I think what the Government is trying to standardise here is a greater performance appraisal system or feedback and appraisal system for the teaching profession.But the real challenge is to make if you like best practice common practice without making it standard practice. If the Government makes it standard practice then it would actually no longer be best practice because it will turn into a form-filling exercise where teachers basically spend a lot of their time assembling portfolios that are based on compliance rather than on good educational outcomes. So what we want to do is encourage every school in the country to be adopting best-practice systems when it comes to the appraisal of their teaching staff without turning it into a compliance exercise. The real risk of this 10 percent audit function is that it will actually undermine the purpose of the bill which is to raise the status of teaching and raise the quality of teaching in classrooms.I want to point out here too that this is paper-based. So this is a group of people potentially sitting in Wellington looking at the portfolio of paper that has been presented to them. This will not result in one additional person sitting in a teacher’s classroom and saying: “These are the things you’re doing well and these are the things that you could improve on.” It is not actually going to result in a tangible increase in teaching practice and that should be our goal. If the goal is to raise student achievement then tangible increases in teaching practice is what an appraisal system should be all about. A paper-based review in Wellington based on a form-filling exercise which is what this could well become is not going to achieve that.We have had some very compelling submissions from the profession itself and from many others saying that what is intended here is not going to work. We are talking here about potentially auditing 10000 teacher appraisals. How can that be done through a central administration by EDUCANZ in a quality and meaningful way? It would be an enormous administrative exercise and someone is going to have to pay for that. Who is going to pay? Ultimately the teachers themselves will pay because it will be their registration fees that cover that cost.Is that the job of the registration? No it is not. This is actually a function of their employer. The employer making sure that they get quality appraisal should be covering the cost of that not teachers in the form of the cost of their practising certificates. So I think that although I understand the objective behind this particular clause—I understand why the Government is trying to raise the standard of teacher appraisal throughout the country—I think that the mechanism it is using to try to do that is very very flawed.I want to just reflect here on some of the comments from some of the teachers who submitted to the select committee. They were very concerned that the evidence that they would have to produce to renew their practising certificates—in order to justify the renewal of their practising certificates and to meet this 10 percent audit requirement—would actually divert them away from their teaching job which of course is what they are there to do and what they are passionate about. So best-practice teacher appraisal is actually based on in-classroom observation which is best done within the school rather than by—