Robertson Grant: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Robertson Grant: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:649] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 I am very pleased to take a call on these clauses. I think members have already heard me talk about my concern that we have not sent this bill to a select committee and have not had the opportunity for some focus on the bill’s detail. In particular I have been focusing on the regulatory impact statement. I want to quote another part of the regulatory impact statement: “Requiring schools to assess students against national standards will help to focus teachers on skills that every child should be mastering in reading writing and mathematics.” That leads me to believe that perhaps we should be calling this bill the “Patronising Teachers and Parents Bill”. To say that teachers will focus on reading writing and mathematics only if they have national standards is patronising. Perhaps that goes to show why this Government is putting through this bill under urgency—they simply do not want to hear about it from teachers and parents. 
There are other names that we could give this bill. As I am a fan of the movies we could call it the “Back to the Future Bill”. What we are doing here is moving back to a time when we sought to put students in boxes and we are saying to teachers and children that one size fits all in education and that is all that is needed. We are saying that we can have national standards and that we do not need the flexibility currently in the system so we are going back to the future with this bill. We are going back to the future by making sure that students have to fit in rather than by looking at their needs and by working with teachers and encouraging them to develop different kinds of programmes and assessments. Yes the National Government wants to take us back to the future. 
I could carry the movie theme on and perhaps call the bill the “Meet the Feebles Bill” because National has launched on a feeble crusade today. The bill is a 1½-page crusade on literacy and numeracy. It is a pitiful effort from the member. It replicates what is already done and done well inside our schools now by teachers and parents who should be trusted listened to and brought in to talk about these issues and how to improve them. That is what we should be doing instead of taking the approach of ramming the bill through now. 
There are other things we could call this bill. We could call it the “National Plays Politics Bill”. That is what it is. It is about bumper sticker slogans that were put out through the election campaign and that have now come to this House. They represent nothing in the way of really lifting standards in education. We know that across this country—and Mr Peachey knows it—schools have been developing excellent work in this area. We need to be talking to them and working with them not imposing additional compliance on them. We should be ensuring that teachers who are already stressed out and busy are not now being told to do more reporting in a different way when in many cases they are already adequately communicating with their parents. We do not need to be putting this legislation in place now. It is simply playing politics so that National can say it is doing something. We have the National Administration Guidelines that allow—in fact require—schools to do this. So it is quite clear that the Minister does not trust parents and does not want to listen to them. We can therefore call this bill the “Don’t Trust Parents and Teachers Bill”. 
We can also look at the bill and say that the compliance costs that have been put on schools have not even been assessed: “The Ministry of Education is unable to calculate the compliance costs of setting national standards at this time”. That is a result of ramming through this bill under urgency at the end of the year—at a time when schools have not had a chance even to think about what this means. 
I have also spoken to schools in my electorate over the last few days. To a person those who responded to me asked: “Why is this being done in this way? Why is this Government putting this bill through when we have not heard an adequate explanation from the Minister?” A teacher said to me: “Why would we follow George Bush?”. America has just rejected George Bush so why would we choose at this time to follow George Bush and his No Child Left Behind policy? It is a ridiculous policy. It has failed in America and has led to inequalities and that is where this process is heading. 
National standards will require national testing. That is the real agenda of this National Government. That is what it has come here to pass. The crusade has begun with the Trojan Horse as my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway said. So perhaps we could call the bill the “Education Standards (Trojan Horse) Bill” because that is what this Minister has brought to this House today. We know internationally that this approach does not work; it puts students and children into boxes. It does not allow them to learn in the way that is most appropriate for them but that should be the vision of education that we have in this country. We have a system we can be proud of and a system staffed by dedicated professionals. We know from throughout this debate that teachers make the difference not standards.