Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 14 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:9875. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou i te Whare Pāremata. The Education Amendment Bill is ridiculous and it is also quite sick. It takes some of our most vulnerable students and is going to try to use them as lab rats for a profit-making experiment which has failed all over the world and which at best nearly equals the achievement results of the State schools in a number of countries including the United States. But this was never about evidence; it was always about ideology. We have a school system based on board of trustee charters. It allows for self-determination in communities and autonomy to a huge degree in schools already. The bill deliberately undermines it in order to sell a privatisation tool that nobody not one person ever mentioned during my experience on numerous education election platforms. At many meetings with the National Party and even with some of the relatively interesting ACT candidates no one said that we are going to bring in charter schools and we desperately need these. No one in the audience got up and said: “Please privatise the education system. That is what we need.” But we need to recognise that this bill is not the result of short-term thinking. It is clear that Treasury and the National Cabinet have been keen on this failed model for quite some time. The ACT-National coalition agreement was a good opportunity for them to force it on to the country.So let us think about who is supposed to benefit. I went to a meeting and met a Samoan parent. She works three part-time jobs and her husband works two. She said to me: “My children are not doing very well at school. It is because neither of us is ever home at the same time to help them with their homework. If you want our children to succeed please lift the minimum wage.” That is what she said and she was not making excuses. But she said: “We have many good Pasifika parents and teachers who know that if we lifted the minimum wage we might actually be able to put the time into the kids that they deserve and support them in the education. But right now poverty is getting in the way of our kids’ learning.” It is an unpalatable message but nevertheless very true.But the bill itself mandates the unwanted and unethical model and facilitates for-profit funded State schools with no requirement for some very interesting things—for a start registered teachers. A number of my colleagues have spoken about the fact that teaching is a profession. I myself have done a lot of tutoring. I know the difference between teaching and tutoring. There is great scope for tutors and experts to come into the school system. I find the Government speakers have a bizarre idea as if the schools were locked-down institutions where nobody without a certificate is allowed to walk through the door. That is not how the education system works. They do show their ignorance in this bill as well as their ideological commitment to a failed model. We need to look behind this in order to understand what is really going on because why would we set up for-profit State-funded schools with no requirement for registered teachers and unaccountable sponsors?Anyone can be a sponsor—anybody at all. They do not need an educational background. They do not need to have any experience or academic qualification. Anyone who wants to do this can be a sponsor. And then there is a secret contract that only the Ministry of Education knows about that it will set with the sponsor and that will be results based because of course results—meaning numbers—are the only thing that counts to people who do not understand how children’s learning actually works. We have had that demonstrated in the national standards debacle as well. People who are running this have no idea. Therefore we have no registered teachers no Official Information Act no board of trustees no commitment to The New Zealand Curriculum no fixed hours to protect families’ and teachers’ time and very limited powers in respect of the Ombudsman.The overwhelming number of submitters opposed this bill including parents of children with learning disabilities who are 5 percent of the tail. They expressed deep concern about what will happen to their children in this model—the one in five that John Banks is supposedly so concerned about as he suggests untrained staff with no accountability. The one in five is very interesting.Professor John O’Neill brought the Massey University study to the Education and Science Committee. What we found out was that we have innovation already but what is going to happen now is that education is going to be about privatisation for the benefit of the global franchises.