Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:661;Page:9651] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. The Green Party has taken an interest in the Education Amendment Bill and will be voting against it. We have no major problems with the parts of the bill that many people have discussed here in the House today. In particular we have no problem with the issues around the police vetting of home educators and home-care workers or with the issues around information matching for the Teachers Council. We do not take issue with those issues and we feel that they were well improved by the work of the Education and Science Committee. We are consistent supporters of legislation that rationalises things in a common-sense manner particularly around the issue of vetting tradespeople in relation to their work inside school communities. I would agree with those speakers who said this was a delicate matter and it is difficult to strike the right balance. But it is important these issues are addressed and this bill goes some way towards addressing them. The same applies to the issues of the registration and fair management of teachers. 
But we have some concerns about what have been called minor changes in the bill and what other people feel were non-issues. Perhaps our role in this Parliament like that of the Maori Party may sometimes be to raise issues that other people consider to be non-issues because we have a broader vision that requires us to look at the underlying ideological issues at what is missed out on in the so-called minor changes and at what is not being addressed in the so-called technical bills that are sometimes put through this House with a great deal of rhetoric about their ordinariness. We do not feel at all comfortable about the increasing trend that is signalled in this bill around the change of governance of schools by their boards of trustees. And we do not feel comfortable about an increasing trend towards public-private partnerships and corporate control over the governance and management of the public school system. We do not celebrate the future possibility of having a wonderfully flexible “Pepsi-Cola High School” or any other future manifestation of the privatisation of the public system or of school funding and management. 
We are well aware that some of the clauses relating to the combining of boards or to the appointment of a corporate body with an accountable individual manager which is what we were debating in the select committee would seem to be inoffensive. The parties apart from the Greens were debating the issue of requiring there to be an accountable person; that is what they were debating. But our challenge was around the concept of corporate management. We had a very lively debate on the meaning of those clauses in the select committee and the Green Party remains unconvinced by the claims of other parties that schools already have this kind of management and everything is fine. We are concerned about any further privatisation in that environment and we may have to stand firm and alone in our rejection of this bill. 
The regulatory impact statement claims that this bill is just a technical tidy-up. However it is interesting to see who attended the select committee. We had submissions from the former member of this House Liz Gordon from the Quality Public Education Coalition. She made submissions opposing the combining of boards of trustees and also on the issue of appointing a body corporate whether or not there is an individual who is made accountable for it. That organisation had concerns about that. Although we may stand alone in this House we are not alone in the community; educators are also stating their concerns about these underlying issues. 
We agree with some of the points made by the previous speakers for Labour about Labour’s original amendment and how it added clarity regarding the responsibilities of members of boards of trustees around issues such as enrolment. It is regrettable that those things are not in this bill—although that is not the primary reason why we are opposing it. Like the Quality Public Education Coalition we believe that it is important to look at boards of trustees in relation to their communities and we are also concerned that these corporate bodies whether they are accountable to an individual or not are not required to have a strong and proven educational background. Although I am sure some of them do have that they are not required to but presumably they are required to be efficient business managers. That is not actually what they should be; a school is not a business. 
There are two issues that we would pursue around the combining of boards and the management of schools. We think that the Tomorrow’s Schools policy needs to go through a review process but not in terms of the underlying issues that are in this bill. Tomorrow’s Schools was introduced supposedly to give communities more control. Tomorrow’s Schools in retrospect can also be seen to have been a clever way to impose costs and burdens on boards of trustees parents and teachers under the guise of greater community direction. Of course that works well for wealthy school boards with accountants lawyers and financial managers volunteering from the parent pool. But it imposes huge burdens and stresses on impoverished communities some communities in rural areas and communities where the English language—let alone English bureaucracy and fund-raising skills—are not dominant paradigms. I am speaking from experience here as a member of a school board of trustees. If we are to talk about combining school boards although it sounds very logical to pool skills we also as Liz Gordon pointed out at the select committee need to think about the integrity of the community and the access of local people to relationships—even though as I am saying Tomorrow’s Schools is not perfect. But just because Tomorrow’s Schools does need to be reviewed that does not mean we should bring in combined school boards and corporate managers. We do not believe in that and we would like to see Tomorrow’s Schools become much more about the participation of parents and communities without the unfair imposition of ideas like bulk funding and an increase in the social inequities that the current system has already started to open up. 
Although there were not a large number of submissions on this bill there was an underlying concern from some of the submitters about communities being able to exercise real control if boards of trustees were combined and there was concern about the resources that less wealthy communities have at their disposal. So like us some of the submitters were concerned about the body corporate model. I do not feel that the issue was resolved by the negotiations at the select committee about having an individual who is to be made accountable because individuals can bring with them the ideology of their communities or of their corporate bodies and that is where we are expressing strong concern. The public funding of schools and a commitment to schools being more than businesses are fundamental and that needs to be expressed in all the legislation relating to education that comes before this House. The commitment to schools being more than businesses and standing for education for its own sake remains an absolutely central part of the Green Party’s policy towards the education system. 
So despite the technical matters that we do support we stand to oppose this bill on that basis. We stand to support the people who have made submissions to the select committee asking us alone in this House to stand up for public education at all times and to recognise at all times that the corporatisation of education will not benefit our nation or our children. Kia ora.