Parmar ParmjeetDr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I'm taking this call to oppose this bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) in its second reading. But before I go into the detail of this bill I want to as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee thank all the submitters. We received 18 submissions. There were 16 unique submissions because two submitters submitted twice so in total there were 18 submissions. So I want to thank them for their contribution and the time that they put into this legislation.As we know there are four main objectives in this legislation and the name of this bill is the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) because there was another education bill before this. One of the provisions one of the objectives in this legislation is related to that previous education amendment bill and that has to do with the changes to the Education Council. So we were given the impression by the Government that the Government wants to change the structure of the Education Council because they want to make the Education Council independent of Government. But then in this legislation what we saw is that the Education Council is required to work within the context of the Government policy. There was a big discussion in the select committee process on the words regard to Government policy" that the Education Council will be required to give regard to the Government policy. This point actually was picked up by one of the submitters and I want to thank them for picking that up and then we got to elaborate on this to understand what this actually means.So this term has already caused confusion to people especially in the education sector. We received submissions on both sides but a couple of submissions that were against this provision made their view very very clear and one of them was from the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association. They were really clear and said that this will mean that the Minister will be able to intervene in the Education Council's work and operation. That was the impression that was given to everybody and that is one of the reasons why I oppose this legislation because we don't want Government to have the ability to intervene in the Education Council's work.The second submitter the New Zealand Institute of Education said that this provision will undermine the Education Council's independence—exactly the point that we are making and we don't want this Government to have the ability to undermine the Education Council's ability to perform independently because that is the impression we were given in the first round when the structure of the Education Council will change that it's going to be completely independent. So these points were made very very clear in the select committee process and they should be taken into consideration.The second objective of this bill is to repeal provisions for communities of online learning. So the provisions for communities of online learning were put in place by the previous National Government because we are futuristic we can see what is needed and we want to provide choice. So what we have seen is that this Government actually doesn't believe in providing choice to people. They just want everybody to turn up to classrooms and have you know physically teachers teaching them. Why do they want that? Yes of course we want to know why they want that and one of the reasons we know is that if there are more teachers then they can have more union members. If there is more virtual learning they won't have that many union members and that is the only reason they want to repeal this provision.One of the submitters very clearly said that this was about providing access to rural communities to education—Hon Members: Delivering for the unions.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: Delivering for unions yes and this is about providing opportunity to all that cannot come to a classroom to learn. Even in classrooms teachers let students go online and do their learning depending on the kind of project that they're doing. Yep—universities they put their lectures online so that students if they want to go back and see those lectures again they can do that. But this Government is saying "No online learning is not a good thing". We just heard from the Minister the Hon Jenny Salesa. She said some students may not have iPads but this is about providing that choice. So that doesn't mean that you take away this choice and we haven't heard from this Government what is going to be put in place instead of this provision that was put in place by the previous National Government. So everybody wants to go online we want to see more people being able to work online more people able to study online but this Government actually believes that no study should be done online and everybody should be coming to a classroom.Third a provision in this bill is about cohort entry. Yes we know that before children could start school as they turned five and we changed this to say that if children are to reach their fifth birthday and there are only eight weeks left and it's the start of the school term they should be able to start school. But this Government is so adamant saying that children should not be able to start school before they are five and we're just talking about eight weeks before their fifth birthday. We heard from a submitter who said that this is going to put children behind and children actually at that age are so eager to start school but this Government doesn't want them to start school at that age. They want them to wait and it could be up to six weeks after their fifth birthday which could create some financial implications for some parents as one of the submitters said because then they will have to make these additional day-care arrangements for these children. But does the Government care? They don't.The final point that I want to make—Andrew Bayly: Uncaring Government eh?Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: —uncaring Government exactly—is about private schools' registration criteria and of course nobody wants to see any kind of harm happening to any student in any kind of school but here we haven't seen the basis of this and the approach that has been taken by this Government; we do not understand why this approach has been taken. So we are quite disappointed to see that this Government is not moving forward not making the education sector move forward but is actually bringing the education sector backwards. So we oppose this bill."