Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:651;Page:563] 
Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill 
First Reading 
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I move  
That the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. 
 The Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill implements policy changes that this Government is committed to as part of our priority action plan for education. The National-led Government is absolutely committed to raising education standards. This bill delivers on that commitment by raising standards of achievement and attendance in compulsory education. The bill does two things to achieve that: it gives the Minister of Education the power to set national standards in literacy and numeracy and it strengthens truancy law. At the moment one in five New Zealand children leaves school without the qualifications he or she needs to succeed. 
Our Government wants all children and young people to have the basic skills they need in order to do well at school and to succeed in the workforce. The bill underpins that focus by giving the Minister of Education an explicit power to set national standards in literacy and numeracy. It adds national standards to the National Education Guidelines so that the Minister of Education may publish by notice in the  
Gazette 
 national standards in literacy and numeracy. The introduction of national standards in literacy and numeracy will provide an external benchmark against which to measure student progress. Making that explicit in the National Education Guidelines will sharpen our focus on the improvement of student achievement. 
I want to stress to all involved that this legislation gives the Minister of Education the power to set those standards; the legislation does not itself set the standards. In the new year the Ministry of Education will be leading a consultation round with the wider education sector. At that time the sector will be consulted about the design of the standards the benchmarks that will need to be in place in order for current assessment tools to be used against the standards and the form that reporting to parents to the community and to the Government will take. We have promised that consultation and we are keeping our promise. 
I will listen to the sector as we undertake that consultation. The process will allow the standards to be published late in 2009 and be ready for implementation in schools at the beginning of 2010. The bill also requires school boards to include in their school charters the boards’ priorities and targets for assessing students against national standards. Schools will report on those as part of their normal planning and reporting processes so as not to create more compliance costs. National standards will apply to all State schools in New Zealand and they will apply to students from years 1 to 8. They will provide a set of shared expectations about what students should be achieving as they move through primary and intermediate school. 
Many teachers already know how well their students are doing in their classes. Many teachers already use a range of assessment tools to identify where to focus attention and ensure better progress. Despite the availability of those tools the Education Review Office reported in March 2007 that 56 percent of schools recently reviewed were not using worthwhile achievement data. Our policy will ensure that all schools have that achievement data and the policy will also ensure that they use it to help their students. 
An important point is that parents do not always know how their children compare with others and neither teachers nor parents have a clear picture of how children are doing relative to their peers across the nation. An Education Review Office report published in 2007 found that 49 percent of primary schools were generally ineffective at reporting achievement information to parents and to their community. The aim of this policy is to ensure that parents get that information and that they get it in a form they can understand. The bill provides teachers and parents with certainty about whether a child is reading writing and doing maths at the expected national level. They will also know how many other children are meeting the standard. The standards will not affect those students who are exempt from enrolment in a State school—such as students who are home-schooled—and will not affect students enrolled in private schools as the National Education Guidelines do not apply to them. 
Truancy increased by 41 percent from 2002 under the previous Labour Government. On any given day under that same Government more than 30000 students were likely to be absent from school. Students who are absent from school miss out on class work and are at risk of falling behind. Persistent truants are at serious risk of leaving school without the literacy and numeracy skills they need. Urgent action is needed. Every parent who fails to ensure his or her child attends school commits an offence. If prosecuted parents are liable to a fine. At the moment the maximum fine for a first offence is $150. The maximum fine for a second offence is $400. This bill raises the maximum level of those fines. Parents will be fined up to $300 for a first offence and up to $3000 for a second or subsequent offence. Parents also commit an offence if they fail to enrol their child at school and the level of fine for that offence will rise from $1000 to a maximum of $3000. Although the maximum level of the fine will be $3000 judges will still have the discretion to consider a number of factors when deciding the level of the fine to impose. 
Some members may want the House to consider alternative measures to prosecution and fines. Let me assure members that prosecuting parents is a last-resort intervention used for persistent unjustified and parent-condoned truancy. Prosecution is for when other alternatives fail. 
As well as changing the law this Government will support schools to address issues of truancy. Our election policy outlined additional funding for schools to assist them to deal with truants. The bill allows the Secretary for Education to take prosecutions. The Secretary for Education may assist the school by taking the prosecution. The secretary may also take action if a school does not do so in cases where chronic parent-condoned truancy is identified. 
I ask that this House gives earnest consideration to supporting the two areas that I have outlined: the power to set national standards in literacy and the strengthening of truancy law. This is a priority area for education. It begins the task of raising the standards of achievement and attendance in our New Zealand schools. I commend this bill to the House. 
Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 As I listened to the lacklustre new Minister of Education I wondered how that Minister would fare if the new 90-day rule applied to Government Ministers. That member Anne Tolley is the same new Minister of Education who was replayed on television last night telling teachers in the election campaign that the 90-day trial period does not apply to schools. We were told in the House yesterday that—what was it we were told I ask Mr Cosgrove—yes it does apply to schools with under 20 employees. That is about 800 schools and virtually every early childhood education centre in the country. 
Mrs Tolley the new Minister of Education has I venture to say already very little credibility in the job—just like the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. I have to say that when I looked at the legislation I wondered what it was for. It was supposed to be the great crusade for literacy. The bill acknowledges that the testing regimes—the assessment regimes—that will be used in New Zealand schools are already happening. The member may not know what NAGs are but most of the rest of us especially those of us who have been teachers know they are National Administration Guidelines. Point (ii)(b) of National Administration Guideline 1 which all schools are required to follow states that schools must give priority to student achievement in literacy and numeracy. National Administration Guidelines 1 and 2 state that schools must develop a programme of teaching literacy and numeracy in their schools and must set up assessment processes and that those processes must be explained and shown to students parents and the community. The schools are required to do those things and they are checked every 3 years when the Education Review Office visits the schools. 
What is the purpose of the bill? Is it a sort of fig leaf to cover up National’s election slogans that talked about the failure of New Zealand schools? Actually as I have said many times recently in the House New Zealand schools are extraordinarily successful. Indeed our students figure among the most successful in the world. I kept thinking about what the purpose of the bill was. I read it a second time and it became clear that this is actually an insidious and very dangerous bill. It is a Trojan Horse for right-wing policies in education. 
First of all it removes the ability for the Ministry of Education to use regulation to set up national standards. If the Minister publishes them in the  
Gazette 
 of course they cannot go to Parliament’s Regulations Review Committee. They cannot be examined to see how valid they are. This bill is about getting national standards by a dictatorial approach to education. It is about the standards not being scrutinised. Actually of course that is the process we are engaged in now. This bill is being rammed through. There is no ability for any of the stakeholder groups in education—the School Trustees Association the New Zealand Educational Institute the Post Primary Teachers Association the Principals Federation or the parents and the students themselves—to have an input into the bill because it is being rammed through in urgency. 
Secondly—and this is why the bill is very dangerous—it introduces the idea of national standards. I think that every member of this House who is interested in education will know that where national standards have been imposed—in places like the UK for example or recently in the United States under the Bush regime’s “No Child Left Behind” policy—they have been an absolute and utter failure. I know that some of my colleagues will be talking more this evening and tomorrow about the experiences of other countries and other education systems where national standards have been imposed. Of course teachers then teach to the test. They do not look at lifting students’ literacy and numeracy. Mrs Tolley has already totally discredited herself in her meetings with school principals. A principal rang me today to say that in his experience as a principal she must be the most inexperienced the most unsuitable person to be appointed as the Minister of Education. I would like to talk about what is happening in our schools. Is Mrs Tolley knowledgable at all about the programmes that are going on in schools? asTTle was mentioned. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Plays cricket! 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: That is true; she probably thinks it is a cricketer. There is the reading recovery programme in which New Zealand has been a world leader. There is Project Probe and there are the literacy and numeracy progressions which are part of a developing pilot programme going on in every New Zealand school. Those are successful programmes. Indeed as I said before the bill itself acknowledges them. So why is the Government implementing these national standards? 
I remind the House again that the bill is about a different agenda in education. It is about saying that we will have competition between schools. One of the hallmarks of New Zealand education has been the collaborative and collegial approach both within our schools and between schools. One of the programmes that I as Minister of Education was very proud of was the Extending High Standards in Schools programme whereby secondary and primary schools collaborated to share best practice. They were not competing but cooperating together to get the best learning outcomes for their students. We were also doing fantastic work in networking for specific areas such as information and communications technology. That was building on a long tradition in New Zealand education of schools working together. Between 1990 and 1999 the National Government introduced bulk funding. Schools became extraordinarily competitive. I know there are some members of this House who were proponents of bulk funding but I have to say that the vast bulk of the education sector was very opposed to it. 
Our school system—a world-class cutting-edge education system—is about collaboration innovation and looking for ways in which we can lift students’ learning outcomes. This bill does nothing to achieve those goals. In fact it is anti those goals. The bill is about competition league tables and comparing schools. We already know that the greatest teaching challenges for New Zealand education are in our low-decile schools with lower socio-economic groups and with Maori and Pacific students. The success of those students is the future of our country. Some 21 percent of young New Zealanders have Maori heritage. It is in their interests and our country’s interest to lift those students’ learning to the best of their potential. 
What will this bill do? It will create league tables comparing schools. It will compound the perception of winner schools and loser schools. Low-decile schools will have the worst outcomes because of this bill. High-decile schools will be the most successful. The Government has already indicated to the House that it will be “flexible” about enrolment zones. We know that is code for weakening them further. We saw what happened when zoning was removed; we saw the growth of perceived winner schools and we saw the decline of the neighbourhood school which was perceived as not successful. We do not want that to happen again. 
I do not have a lot of time left in this part of my contribution so I would like to just touch on the truancy issue. Truancy is an issue that mostly affects students who opt to truant. We want to get those students engaged. A very very small number of parents actively collaborate in making their children stay away from school. The parents of most truants are in fact desperate to get their kids back into school. In principle I am not opposed to an increase in penalties for parents who actively collaborate with and assist their children to truant. What I am concerned about is that good parents will be punished for the behaviour of their bad kids. So Labour will be introducing at least one amendment which clarifies that this legislation applies only to parents who actively collaborate to ensure that their children truant. We do not want good parents punished for the behaviour of their bad kids. Everyone in this House who is a parent knows that parents cannot always be responsible for what our children do. We want the best for them but we cannot always be responsible for what they do. We do not want good parents being punished. 
So I say to the House that this legislation will not receive the support of the Labour Party because we think it will do nothing to assist literacy and numeracy outcomes in our schools. In fact it will be a barrier to that ambition. 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I listened with some interest to Mr Chris Carter’s speech and I was thinking that I could have written it—it was so predictable. I suspect that for the Labour members who will follow I could do exactly the same sort of thing. That will be the tragedy of this debate. 
I observe that Mr Carter did not indicate to the House whether the Labour Party will be supporting the bill or voting against it. If Labour members are going to vote against it let me say what they are going to vote against. No child growing up in New Zealand at the moment who does not learn to read to write and to do maths has a place in the social and economic structure of a modern country. No child who is going to school and who is not being taught to read to write and to do maths and no child who because of his or her particular learning styles that do not fit in with established ideologies and methodologies does not learn to read to write and to do maths has a future in a country like New Zealand. That is what this bill the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is all about. Finally at long last a Government is making an effort to deal to a problem that has undermined the New Zealand schooling system for far too long. We know and the Opposition knows that too many of our children are failing at school. 
You know one of the things that the National Certificate of Educational Achievement finally told us is that the percentage of our children who are not reaching minimum standards is far too high. The Opposition members who are going to take calls later need to be very very careful that they do not advance the argument that really says “Let’s continue to deny a fifth of our children the chance to learn. Let’s continue to deny them the expectation that they can and will learn.” It is absolutely beyond me how any member elected to this Parliament would want anything but to make every effort to ensure that more of our children learn. It is simple. It is not about ideology. It is not about methodology. It is not about the old arguments that relate to decile rating family background ethnic background or all that sort of stuff. It is not about all the old reasons that have been advanced to justify why some children are not learning. It is about a standard and an expectation that many more of our children than currently reach that standard can reach it and should reach it. 
It would be very wise for the members opposite to remember one thing: our national qualification system which I guarantee they all support—and when in Government they defended it and worked hard to develop and improve it—is a standards-based system. This bill is bringing the notion of an education system based on standards as to what children need to know and be able to do down into the primary sector so that there is a natural continuum in the way that children are learning how they have to learn and what they have to learn and so that we can be sure they are reaching those standards. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: That’s happened already. 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: I do not want to hear from the Opposition a whole pile of stuff about what is happening in America or what is happening in Britain. I do not want to hear badly quoted research. I know a lot of those researchers; I have spoken on platforms with some of them. The Opposition members should be very very careful about what they claim is happening in the United Kingdom and the United States in particular. 
I repeat that the most important thing about this legislation is that for the first time it will establish an expectation of what we expect and need our children to do. It is a statement of faith and confidence in the next generation of New Zealanders. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I am speaking in opposition to this legislation and I am doing that not because I think that the Minister has evil intents but because I think she is confused and probably does not understand what she is doing. She certainly has not— 
Hon Bill English 
: So patronising. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well she certainly has not read the National Administration Guidelines. I will read some of them to her because clearly her literacy skills are not at the point of reading them well herself: “Each Board through the principal and staff is required to: (i) … (b) giving priority to student achievement in literacy and numeracy especially in years 1-4 … (ii) though a range of assessment practices gather information that is sufficiently comprehensive to enable the progress and achievement of students to be evaluated; giving priority first to: (a) student achievement in literacy and numeracy”. It is a requirement: “(iii) on the basis of good quality assessment information [to] identify students and groups of students; (a) who are not achieving; (b) who are at the risk of not achieving;”. National Administration Guideline 2 states that it is a requirement to: “(iii) report to students and their parents on the achievement of individual students”. 
The point I am making is that there is already a requirement to do this and the Education Review Office is getting better at making sure that schools are meeting that requirement. This bill is unnecessary. 
If we move to a standards system then it is likely that the progressive achievement test will be the one selected. In my view that would not be a good thing. It is probably the test that is most widely used. It is a test run by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research but it is now generally regarded as being a bit old-fashioned and not up with the play or up with the modern world. We have instead had for 8 years now I think a development at Auckland University. The asTTle system under Professor John Hattie is one that is internationally regarded and used widely through New Zealand. It is working very very well at the moment. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: You had better explain it to them. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I do not want to go into the detail on the asTTle system other than to say that it is mainly computer-based and that it does not give just a raw score but indicates where a particular student’s strengths are and where the student’s weaknesses are across a range of topics. As well as that it can work across a class and show the strengths and weaknesses of a particular teacher and therefore the need for professional development in that classroom in a way that the progressive achievement test being promoted by the National Government has no chance of doing at all. The progressive achievement test gives a raw score and it is essentially useless. What will happen is that we will have a lot more time focused on assessment which means less time for teaching and learning. What do kids go to school for? They go to school to learn; they do not go to school to be assessed. 
I will comment on the UK system. I know quite a lot about it; I looked at it when I was in Opposition before I was the Minister of Education. I spent a couple of our summers getting quite cold looking at the British political and education system. The point I got to was that the British have what is effectively a decile-based system of requirements for schools to meet particular levels of literacy and numeracy. If the schools do not meet them they are punished over a period of years and if they get it wrong substantially then they are disestablished. 
For example a school that is given a requirement that 85 percent of its students are to be assessed at a particular level or higher focuses on the group of students between about 70 percent and 90 percent to make sure that this group gets the school over its 85 percent because that is seen as being successful for the school. What happens if a pupil is in the bottom 10 percent? That pupil is essentially ignored. What happens if a pupil is in the top 70 percent? For a large period of the year that pupil is essentially ignored. What happens is that there is a lot of focus on that assessment but it is on only a very narrow range of kids rather than on kids from across the board. 
I will tell members a little about Wainuiomata and what has happened there in my electorate and in the town where I live over the last 4 or 5 years since we have had change there. We have moved in schools that are all either decile 3 or decile 4 towards literacy and numeracy results that are above the national average in New Zealand—sitting up around the results of a decile 6 school on average—as a result of intensive work and some very good assessment using the asTTle system. The schools have done it voluntarily and they share the information from school to school. 
One of the reasons the system works brilliantly in Wainuiomata is that schools share information vertically with the intermediate school and the secondary school and they share it with each other with schools next door in a cooperative way rather than in the competitive way that will inevitably result from the national testing and the league tables that will flow from this. I can tell the Minister that if schools are required to keep this information then it will be available under the Official Information Act and league tables will be appearing in newspapers all over the place. 
I also acknowledge Hekia Parata for the work that her family has done up on the East Coast in this area. Again enormous progress has been made in groups of schools there where there has been a special focus on teaching and learning and incidentally on assessment. It has been led by the teaching and the assessment is incidental to it. 
Hon Member 
: Are you supporting it? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: No I am not supporting the bill at all. What I am saying is that it gives undue focus and it gives one system and there are quite a few systems in New Zealand that work very well. There is already a requirement to use one of them; it is in the national assessment guidelines. The Minister should read her own guidelines and then she will understand. 
I will go back to the Maori and Pacific Island students in Wainuiomata and tell the members of the House that throughout the valley this group of kids quite often on average progresses at twice the rate of the national average for that age group. Quite often the average gets 2 years instead of 1 year and that is very special and it is something I am very proud of. But the reason it happens is that people work in a cooperative collaborative way and do not have things imposed on them. 
I will do a little mea culpa here. A couple of years before I became the Minister of Education I contemplated policy of this type. I contemplated it I spoke about it I had an enormous amount of dialogue about it around the country and at the point of becoming the Minister of Education I was at the point where I knew that it would not be effective. That is why the previous Labour Government put enormous resources into teaching and learning and into the development of the asTTle system. 
I tell the Minister that the asTTle system is not ready to be introduced even in 2010 as a compulsory national testing system. It is not there it is not ready and it will not work for that. The only choice the Minister will have if she is really to have national standards will be to have national testing. I think all of us understand that—I think all of us other than the Minister understand that. If we are to have national standards then there can be only one system in New Zealand and that will be the progressive achievement test system. That will mean that we are working our way back to a system that was seen over a period of time as being very very good then good and then actually pretty average when compared with the rest of the world and it is now seen as being somewhat behind the times. Part of the problem with this approach is that we can have someone who is waving a flag for standards but she is actually causing those standards to regress as a result of the work that she has done. 
The last point I would make is that if I were the Minister of Education I would love to have the powers in this bill. There is excessive ministerial power in this bill in my view. Not having to properly gazette and not having to put things into regulation and have them subject to review or proper scrutiny is very bad and no Minister including myself should have that power. 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 This bill proposes to test children more and to fine their parents more if they miss class. Changes to testing in particular have been made on the basis that this testing will give us more information. This would be a good thing if it were information that is lacking but that is not the case; we actually have a great deal of information about the children who are not succeeding in our education system. We know that many of them— 
Allan Peachey 
: What are we doing about it? 
METIRIA TUREI 
: Testing them I say to Mr Peachey will not alleviate their poverty will it? Testing them will not insulate their homes so that they no longer get asthma I say to Mr Peachey. We know that many of these children are living in poverty and we know that they are more likely to be Maori than Pakeha. Whomever we might hope is looking after them is sometimes not there to take care of them in the way we would like and there is often a good reason for that. It is not a case of the parents just being neglectful; the parents are working several minimum wage jobs in order to pay market rents and to buy groceries to feed their families. 
These are parents who might well wish that they could be there when their kids get home from school but it is simply impossible for them to be in two places at one time. And of course if the rent is not paid or the power gets cut then they will have failed to provide the safe and secure shelter that parents all desire for their children. [ 
Interruption 
] People on low wages I say to Ms Tolley and Mr Peachey have to make decisions that people on high wages like the members do not have to make. 
People who are very rich can easily afford to have a parent stay at home either full time or part time to provide the framework around school-age children to make the healthy lunches and to supervise the homework and often—and it might be the case for some in this House—they can employ someone to do that very work. Some really rich people do that—and that is fine. Good for them! But not everyone has that choice and people generally make the best decisions that they can with the resources they have available. 
So what has National done to help make it easier for those families who are living in this kind of hardship—those whose children are living in the poverty that is actually the cause of the long tail of underachievement? 
Hon Member 
: What have the Greens done? 
METIRIA TUREI 
: Well National just voted to make them pay more tax which I am sure will be very helpful to those families and those children. National voted to make them pay more tax so that it could give more tax cuts to the very rich. National has also consistently voted against raising the minimum wage even as prices increase and even as families face increasing hardship. 
Moana Mackey 
: What about the 90-day bill? 
METIRIA TUREI 
: The 90-day bill is another example. National members consistently voted against Working for Families and they resiled from that position only because they thought there were votes in it. Now they have come to this House and proposed that the answer to dealing with underachievement is to test kids more to find out which of these children are doing so badly and to fine their parents—take more money out of their pockets—when they fail to get their kids to attend enough classes. It is out of touch. It is insane. 
We know that kids with health problems sometimes do not do well in school. That is obvious. Often they will miss a lot of classes. Sometimes they cannot hear well enough to learn because they have something like glue ear or they might have asthma which keeps them at home and away from school. Sometimes they are malnourished on a combination of caffeine and sugary junk that is often bought from the schools themselves. 
We know that poor health is a factor in underachievement and we know what the solutions are. It is not rocket science but it takes money. We have too many cold damp houses which impact on the health of our population. Whether people choose not to live in a cold damp house or to insulate the houses they have generally depends on how much money they have. The Green Party fought long and hard to get a billion-dollar fund the Green Homes Fund through the negotiations on the emissions trading scheme and that would have paid to pretty much ensure that every home in this country—every low-income home—was warm dry and healthy. 
The benefits are absolutely clear. For every dollar spent on insulating cold houses there is close to a $2 benefit in energy and health savings which means less time off work less time off school and a better quality of life and health for the children for whom these are serious issues. Keeping kids healthy enough to get to school and to learn at school is critical to giving every single New Zealand child a fair chance at education and success. But of course National axed the fund. So National has made sure that homes will stay cold and damp and that as a result children will continue to suffer from glue ear asthma and eczema. National’s choice is to keep these children in poverty. 
National has vigorously opposed all moves to get junk food out of school tuck shops despite knowing that what children eat impacts on their ability to learn. National does not care about children’s nutrition and the impacts of nutrition on kids’ learning. It does not care about teachers having to deal with children who are so hyped on school junk food they cannot concentrate and keep getting into trouble. 
Then of course there are the teachers. We need more of them—of that we can be absolutely sure. We need to value them much more highly than we do. Lowering student-teacher ratios means teachers can spend more time with children who need extra time and support. More teachers also means that those who need specialist attention for whatever reason will get the needs-based support they are entitled to. But Treasury in its briefing to the incoming Minister has advised the Government to “Shift spending in compulsory education from investment with low returns (such as lower student-teacher ratios) to high returns (such as approved accountability for student achievement and development of teaching practice).” I am pretty sure I just read that Treasury said that improving student-teacher ratios has low returns. 
I presume Treasury must mean short-term economic returns because I guess giving every child enough one-on-one teacher time takes a while to pay off. It is hard to measure. It might in some cases even reduce the crime rate or it might in some other cases enable a child to excel in what he or she is good at leading to scientific breakthroughs that save millions of lives. That has happened in this country in the past. So I call on the Minister of Education to reject the advice of Treasury about the low return of lower student-teacher ratios. Teachers are not a low-quality investment. They are the lifeblood of our education system and our kids need more of their time not less. 
This bill will tell us that some kids are not doing so well. We will find out that we have failing children failing teachers failing schools and failing communities. How helpful is that? What the next response from the Government might be is one of my concerns. Of course it leads to a league table of failures—a league table of the “bestest and worstest” primary schools—a long list of all the schools and communities that will fail this National test of wealth and privilege because that is what it is. 
What next after that? If we look at the international examples—and we will talk about those more in the coming debate—we see that we get vouchers so that those poor sad rich families can move their unhappy poor sad rich children from those underprivileged underfunded schools leaving those poorer families and those poorer communities to continue with underfunded poorly resourced schools. What might come after that? If we look at the international examples we find that private investors will go in and buy up those underfunded degraded schools for a song so that National can continue its policy of overfunding private schools with desperately needed public education money. 
It is very interesting to see that these educational testing standards will not apply to private schools but only to State schools even though private schools get lots and lots of public money—nearly double the money the Labour Government ever put in. National will increase it. So despite the fact that there will be public money investment they will not have to suffer the same kinds of educational tests and standards as State schools will. Make no mistake: National’s agenda is to privatise schools. That is alive and well and this bill is a first step towards that agenda. 
We will spend a lot of money finding out that underfunding schools and underfunding communities creates a long tail of poverty that causes underachievement. We already know that. Everybody in South Auckland already knows that. We have a lack of action a lack of vision a complete dismal failure by this National Government to put the resources into the schools and communities where it is needed. Instead National will privatise and put money into private schools. 
Hon HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise to speak to the first reading of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. Anybody who listened to the contribution from the Green member would be about ready to leave the country I would think because it sounds like there is nothing positive at all about this bill. In fact what we have with this change of Government a National-ACT Government with support from the Maori Party and United Future is the start of a new era. With that comes not more talk about failing children failing teachers and failing systems but an opportunity to turn things round for our children in this country and to give them the opportunities they have not had in the last long 9 years under a Labour-led Government. 
We have the opportunity to do something positive in education and provide opportunities for those children from lower socio-economic homes and for those children who are not doing well in the current system—and there is very good reason for that. We heard talk from the Green member about damp houses the minimum wage nutrition the 90-day bill—I think for a moment there she forgot she was actually meant to be talking about education. Solutions do not revolve around more of the same failing system that has let down far too many of our children in New Zealand. 
The purpose of the bill which is worth looking specifically at is “to raise standards of achievement and attendance in the compulsory education sector.” and that is a laudable aim. I congratulate the National Government on that initiative. The bill sets out two major changes to our education system. The first is in relation to school enrolment and attendance. Penalties for non-attendance will be beefed up to help rectify the awful record of New Zealand’s habitual truants. Parents will become increasingly liable for the actions of the children in their care. Parents will be made aware that regular truancy will not be tolerated. That is nothing but a good thing. Our kids have no hope of learning and getting ahead if they are not even showing up for classes. 
Secondly and most important this bill will introduce national standards in literacy and numeracy. These standards will go a long way towards addressing New Zealand’s declining educational standards which have seen us plummet down international rankings. In the last 2 days we have seen articles in the newspaper with headlines such as “Primary kids get poor reports for maths science”. What about this one: “Kiwi kids behind Kazakhstan”? If that is where our children are achieving it is a jolly good thing for this country and our children that we have had a change of Government. It has not come a moment too soon. 
Instead of these changes and instead of recognising that there is a problem in our schools what has been the response of the Labour Party? What has been its response? Mr Carter has been standing up; Mr Mallard has just been reeling out the tired old lines that we have heard for the last 9 years that have achieved—what? Our kids achieving behind children in Kazakhstan. In their 9 years of power what was their solution? Well here is one of them. Setting up an expensive website Team-Up: Helping our kids learn to extol the importance not of anything to do with learning but of the importance of calcium in children’s learning might be good for their teeth and their bones but I do not think it has much impact on their ability to learn. As admirable as may be a goal to have adequate calcium levels in one’s diet it lacks a certain amount of reality and credibility. Thank goodness we have had a change of Government. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: Say nothing of “Wassup!” badges! 
Hon HEATHER ROY 
: That is right. Standards will help with national consistency—something that was sadly lacking under the last Labour Government—so that we have some comparisons we know which schools are performing well and we know which schools need some assistance because they are not reaching the levels of achievement and excellence that they should be. 
But I give just a word of warning—and this is coming from a purely ACT perspective I guess—that assessment alone is not enough. Hand in hand with this legislation must go work particularly on the curriculum. It has become burdensome and overly hefty in the lives of teachers who have to implement all sorts of things that bear no relevance to what our education system should include. As an Associate Minister of Education under this National-led Government I along with ACT will be advocating that we take a big picture look at education. Core amongst that is the introduction of school choice something that ACT has long talked about and campaigned hard on during this election campaign. We should never lose sight of what our goal is. Education is the key to our long-term prosperity. We need our next generation to have the skills and creativity to thrive in the 21st century—not in the 19th century. 
Times have moved on and we must move with them. Right now we are failing our kids. It is time for that to be turned round. We have great opportunities now to strive for excellence not just for kids who manage to do well no matter what but for children who are disadvantaged in terms of their upbringing or in terms of their abilities to learn and for children who are gifted and are currently falling through the gaps in a system that is letting down far too many of our young children. New Zealand’s future depends on a proper education system that allows everybody to achieve to their full potential. I welcome this initiative and ACT proudly supports this bill as a starting measure. 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker tena tatau e huihui mai nei i te ahiahi po ki konei i tenei wa. 
[ 
Greetings to you Mr Deputy Speaker and to us gathered here this evening at this time 
.]  
I echo the Maori Party’s support for the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. Given that I have spent my whole life in the education system and watched the mainstream schools destroy the hope of many of my people for their children it is pretty hard to listen to some of the talk that is coming back from members on the other side of the House. I tell Mr Mallard that during his watch Maori children were not in forms 3A 4A 4B and 4C but were in forms 4M 4N 4O and 4P. Nothing has changed except that there are now different names for it. One in four Maori come out of school with little or no qualifications at all. This is real; this is life. These are my people whom I live with. 
Sue Moroney 
: There’s been a significant change in that and you should acknowledge that. 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: The member can say whatever she likes about that but this is the reality. That is why half of the Maori boys come out of school with a lack of incentive to take hold of the world and with little qualifications at all. 
The reason for that has been exposed by Te Kotahitanga which shows that teachers are aiming too low for Maori children. That is why we should put the standards up there and teach the standards and if the children do not reach those standards we should fix the teachers up. Quite honestly— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No no that’s not what Te Kotahitanga is. 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: Is that right? I tell Mr Mallard that in 1960 the Hunn report exposed a big gap between Maori and Pakeha achievement in schools. In 1970 we tried to introduce a programme called Taha Maori. That did not work because it was not owned by the people and it was not geared towards achieving within the school system. 
In the 1980s came kaupapa Maori education. Kaupapa Maori education showed a new way of teaching. It was user-friendly to Maori because it used Maori cultural customs—daily natural Maori customs—and it also used the Maori language. Unfortunately successive Governments have not supported it to the extent that they should have done in terms of the training of teachers. No matter how many submissions we made to various education ministry officials teachers were not trained in speaking Maori and in kaupapa Maori in order to carry on that kaupapa. Sufficient training was not given to parents. Half of the kura kaupapa Maori are struggling today and need support for the parents who run the boards and also for recruiting teachers who know what they are doing to work in kaupapa Maori. 
In the early 2000s two major reports were produced—and I think one was produced while Mr Mallard was the Minister—one from the Ministry of Education and one from Te Puni Kokiri. Both reports showed that the gaps that existed in 1960 were still there in the early 2000s. We had babysat Maori in education for 40 years and there was still no closing of the gaps. Then we had a programme called closing the gaps and suddenly that programme disappeared. 
We want to have the standards set so that Maori can be taught like every other child to reach those standards. If they are not achieving them then we should ask why and we should do something about it. That is why we support this bill. Let us not carry on hiding things. Let us not teach Maori children and ignore their names. The issue is about knowing their names and it is about respecting the words “tangata whenua”. [ 
Interruption 
] No matter how much the member yells he could not change the negative results while he was the Minister. He should not try to get out of that; he has to know that. It is now time that we moved. We need to take hold of kaupapa Maori and give it the lift that it needs. It is time that we looked at how teachers are teaching Maori and did something about it in Te Kotahitanga. We should front up—that is what the issue is all about. 
We support the implementation of these standards. We support teachers being trained to teach them and if they do not get it— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: The member supported second-class teachers. 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: We support success and we support teaching people: recognising Maori as pupils and not teaching down to them. The programmes showed that people were not even calling Maori students by their real names. Students were getting upset because teachers were sitting on tables breaking Maori customs and rules. Teachers did not even know the names of students’ parents. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: And which Minister funded it more and more because it was good? 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: I am trying to explain to the House why the Te Kotahitanga programme is successful. 
Sue Moroney 
: Who started it? 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: That is the whole point is it not? It is Russell Bishop’s programme and we all support that programme. But we should listen to what it tells us. That is what I am trying to say. We should listen to it and have our teachers trained to teach up to Maori not teach down to them. Then it will be a success. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 I thank the Hon Pita Sharples for his speech. He was absolutely right. His speech made clear the problem that the Labour Party has with the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. 
I am gobsmacked that Labour is voting against this bill. I look forward to parading up and down the country over the next 3 years and telling people that the Hon Phil Goff is opposed to education standards that he believes in low expectations and that he does not care about the bottom 30 percent of kids who are not reaching those expectations or those standards. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Oh rubbish! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Labour members cannot make up their minds. On the one hand they are saying that this is absolutely terrible and it will ruin everything; then their next speaker gets up and says that this is already happening. It is one or the other. Will it wreck the teaching of literacy and numeracy in our schools? Or is it as Trevor Mallard has said already happening? Actually unusually Mr Mallard is somewhere closer to the truth than Chris Carter. It is not unusual that Chris Carter is a long way from the truth. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Be careful. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Chris Carter should have been careful. That is why he was the least credible Minister of Education that Labour has had in a long time. Trevor Mallard was much more credible. Actually in this sector Trevor Mallard built up—picking up what Nick Smith started—a body of sensible policy about literacy and numeracy standards. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Nick Smith had no policy. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: He did actually. 
The next logical step is that every child gets the benefit of expectations and standards and of reporting to parents. About 40 percent of kids probably get it now. At a stretch it might be 60 percent. But as we should be used to by now it is the kids who need it the most who are not getting it. The schools that really should be doing it cannot be bothered. The only reason Labour did not follow the logic of its own policy to this point is that it did not want to upset anyone. Labour thought its relationship with the unions was more important than raising expectations for kids for whom education is the way out of the circumstances they are in. Labour put the interest group before the children. Until Labour starts apologising to the country for that the public will not take it seriously. 
When Labour votes against this bill tonight all that will do—in case it is not aware—is prove to so many parents why they voted against Labour and for National. It will confirm that Labour cares more about the system a fragment of union opinion and its mates than it does about the kids. If Labour is following the advice of Chris Carter to vote against the bill then it is doing the wrong thing. Those young new progressive MPs need to know what a dead-end they are being led to. [ 
Interruption 
] Well three groups matter more than the teacher unions: the first is the teachers and actually a lot of them voted for us this time; then there are the parents and an overwhelming majority of them voted for us this time; and then there are the kids and Labour thinks it can ignore the kids because kids cannot vote. 
We support this bill. We believe that it is the next logical step in New Zealand’s progress with literacy and numeracy standards. We find it hard to understand that the Labour Party is so arrogant and contemptuous about anyone else who has an opinion about education that it is making the biggest single political mistake it will make in the next 12 months by voting against this bill. 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 Once upon a time during the election campaign for National education was the most important thing in the country. That is what Mr Key said. I noticed that by the time he made his Speech from the Throne it had slipped well down the rankings—well down the rankings. By then the economy was everything going for growth was everything. Education had slipped well down the agenda. 
The Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is another example of how far down the agenda of the new arrogant National Government education has slipped. It has already slipped down because this bill is meaningless. It is a meaningless bill. It talks about national standards that actually are already in place and that schools already teach to. The standards are there already in the National Administration Guidelines—those things called NAGs. They already exist. So this bill is meaningless. But it is worse than meaningless; it is— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: So why are you voting against it then? 
SUE MORONEY 
: I will tell Mrs Tolley; I will tell her right now. It is not only meaningless but potentially dangerous. That Minister has already misled the education sector by telling its members they would be excluded from the 90-day probationary period bill. That is what she told them; it is on video it has been on TV and everyone has seen it. She told them that. I ask Mrs Tolley whether that is correct. Did she tell them? [ 
Interruption 
] She is saying no. She was seen on TV saying that but she has come down to the House and denied that she told the education sector that its members would be excluded from the 90-day probationary period bill. She voted for that bill. She voted for the 90-day probationary period bill. An amendment was put to exclude teachers from it. How did Anne Tolley vote? How did she vote on that amendment? Anne Tolley voted against the amendment to exclude teachers from the 90-day probationary period bill. So she cannot be trusted. She cannot be trusted and the education sector already knows that. 
Why then would the education sector trust that Minister to decide what the national standards are without any right of redress? That is the potentially dangerous thing about this bill. This bill gives that new Minister who has already misled the education sector once—and we are only 2 days into the new Parliament—absolute carte blanche to decide what the national standards are. This bill says that the Minister can decide them for herself and she need only gazette them. There is no select committee process no regulations review process. That is far too much power in the hands of the Minister who has already misled the education sector once. 
I have had to defend that Minister already. The education sector has been asking me what her qualifications are to be the Minister of Education. I have had to defend her already. I have said that she probably does know something about the education sector; she may not know what a vice-chancellor is or what one does but she probably did go to school—she probably did; I have had to convince some of the education sector of that. That is the Minister whom the National Government is asking the country to trust to decide what the national standards are. 
We know that this bill is being rushed through the House. 
Hon Member 
: No it isn’t. 
SUE MORONEY 
: It is being rushed through the House. How much faster could it go through the House? I ask Mrs Tolley whether it is the case that this bill will go through all stages under urgency. Is that the case—yes or no? I believe that the answer is yes. That means that neither the public nor the education sector—no one—will have the opportunity to comment on what this bill does or does not do. I think that is wrong. If education is very important and I certainly believe our children are important then we should be taking our time over this bill. We should make sure that we get it right. My children are worth it. I do not know whether the Minister thinks that my children are worth it but I believe they are. I believe that every parent in this country believes that our children are important enough to warrant our looking at this process properly. 
Members opposite should ask for public submissions find out what the teachers have to say about this bill and find out what the parents think of it. Why is the National Government so frightened to hear what the country thinks about national standards? I would like to know what parents would like to see in the national standards because I do not trust Anne Tolley to decide what our national standards are. Goodness knows what she will come up with! These are the 100 days of action of course so National has to look busy and the bill has to look like it is urgent. I would much rather have a bit of democracy and I would much rather that this new Government actually put our children first. If National members really believe that education is the key to our future then why do we not take our time over this bill to get it right? Why not listen to what people want and get other people’s views—not just the Minister’s—on what should be in the national standards? There is a lot of nervousness around the education sector about this Minister and what she believes and what she does not believe so I think the sector would want to have quite a large amount of input. 
If we are not careful we could go down the slippery slope on this issue. Systems called national standards have already been put in place in areas like the United Kingdom. I know that some people do not want us to talk about evidence-based research. Well I think evidence-based research is important because these are our children we are talking about. 
Allan Peachey 
: Oh we’ve mentioned the word “children”! 
SUE MORONEY 
: I say to Mr Peachey that we should look at the evidence. 
Allan Peachey 
: You finally mentioned the word “children”. 
SUE MORONEY 
: Mr Peachey has finally woken up. I am sorry Mr Peachey but about 3 minutes ago I talked extensively about how important this issue was for our children. Our children are our most important resource and we must get it right for them. So we must look to the evidence. I want to talk about some of the research. Dr Pita Sharples talked earlier about Te Kotahitanga. I want to put right a few misconceptions because I think he misrepresented somewhat what Te Kotahitanga is about. It is a very very good programme that was started by the Labour Government. It started in Hamilton actually. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: It was started by Professor Russell Bishop. 
SUE MORONEY 
: It was started by Professor Russell Bishop whom I visited the other day. He is about to publish a book. In it he talks about the evidence-based research on national testing and national standards. He points out that a large body of research identifies that systems that promote accountability and/or provide incentives at the expense of capacity building are systems that do not result in successful educational reform. 
Let us think about capacity building. National has told us that its whole capacity building for literacy and numeracy amounts to $18 million. That happens to be half the amount by which National is prepared to increase the funding for private schools. That is the extent of this Government’s commitment to capacity building when it comes to literacy and numeracy. So we have to be very very careful about this issue. All of the educationalists tell us that if we are going to go into the national standards area we must do it very very carefully. What is the National Government doing? It is rushing a bill through Parliament and it is not having any process by which those national standards are set. No one else gets to have input into them; the Minister decides. I certainly do not trust that Minister and what she might come up with. She has already misled the sector once in her very early days of being a Minister. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: She should know what a vice-chancellor is too. 
SUE MORONEY 
: That is right; she does need to understand what a vice-chancellor is. 
I come to the other end of the spectrum when it comes to education. Yes the compulsory education sector is very important but I believe that the fundamental area where this issue starts from is early childhood education. Increasing participation in early childhood education is an area that the Minister should be looking at and the recent Unicef report pointed us in that direction. It is not just about increased participation. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: Who was the Government? 
SUE MORONEY 
: Well let us talk about what the Labour Government did to increase participation in early childhood education. I thank the Minister for the question. Labour provided 20 hours’ free education—20 hours’ free early childhood education which increased participation. 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 The speaker on the other side of the Chamber who has just sat down Sue Moroney spoke for 10 minutes and she will be remembered only for saying that education was potentially dangerous. I would have to say that this is a general reflection on the achievements of the Labour Government over the last 9 years. It has escaped Labour’s notice that at the moment we have inherited some major problems. We have nearly a million working-age adults who do not have the literacy and numeracy to be able to partake in a first-class economy and on that basis Labour wants to destine the coming generations into that same situation. 
The parents of our children today want their children to have a brighter future and that is why on 8 November the parents voted a John Key - led Government in because they wanted a brighter future. They could see when they observed the other side of the Chamber here that Labour was devoid of vision and devoid of any aspiration. Labour dug a big hole through New Zealand and it wanted to keep New Zealanders in it. So we want to see our sons and daughters aspire and on that basis I think the Minister of Education Anne Tolley is to be commended for bringing this bill into the House. She is a wonderful Minister who has done a lot of work over the last year. She has pulled together the visions the aspirations and the experience that is on this side of the House. 
When I hear Heather Roy Pita Sharples Allan Peachey and Anne Tolley speak I see that the combined wisdom on this side of the House is overwhelming. I am so pleased that I represent Kaikoura as a parent and a grandparent. I come from a background where my mum and dad never went to school and on that basis I made a bit of a promise to myself that when I had children I would sit them on my knee read to them go to school with them and be part of them. 
One thing that has really been a privilege for me in the last 3 years has been to sit on the Education and Science Committee. I learnt there that nearly 50 percent of schools do not report adequately to the parents. One of the designs of this bill is that teachers and schools report to mums and dads in understandable language. That is incredible. 
I support this bill wholeheartedly. I would like to speak for a lot longer on it but I have been allotted only 3 minutes. I think that time is appropriate because the wisdom that has been expressed on this side of the Chamber has been overwhelming. But I can say shame shame shame on the Labour Party for even considering voting against this bill especially those two members over there who are former Ministers. Shame on the Labour Party. I support this bill and I commend it to the House. 
KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) 
: 
 Tena tatou katoa e te Whare. As I said the other day in my maiden speech I come here after a 20-year career in education. Eight years ago I was appointed the principal of Kaitaia Intermediate School which is a low-decile school in the far north of New Zealand with 80 percent Maori students. At the time our assessment showed that 4 percent of our students were meeting the benchmark in writing. Over the course of the next 7 years—and I resigned at the end of last year—we were able to demonstrate that over 80 percent of our students were meeting the benchmark. As I said in my maiden speech gains for students can happen in a very short length of time. Obviously I am really excited to be part of anything and to be able to speak to anything that is based around education and achievement because as I said the other day it is my passion. 
However I am severely disappointed in a number of aspects of this bill—in particular the lack of consultation and the inability for the sector to have input into it. If there had been an opportunity for the sector to have had input into the bill through the select committee process we would have gained greater support from the sector but unfortunately that is a bell that cannot be unrung. 
There is a massive gap in this bill and the biggest part I saw is that it does not focus on the fact that what makes kids learn is not systems zones vouchers tests and all those other things; it is teachers. Every student in every class in every school across the country is entitled to an excellent teacher so there is a massive gap there. Whenever I stand to talk about education in the House I will always be pushing the point that it is excellent teachers that make kids learn. I remember a conversation I had with the member from Tamaki—I think it was last year or the year before—when he said that in his capacity as principal of Rangitoto College he would fly to England in order to recruit great teachers. I think it is commendable that principals would go to such lengths to recruit excellent teachers. If we are going to make a difference at all and raise achievement we need excellent teachers in front of our kids. 
So what does an excellent teacher look like? In my opinion there are three broad skills that an excellent teacher must have. The first skill is that they must engage in and use research-based best-practice teaching. We have heard examples today about that. Te Kotahitanga is one example. Another example is Professor John Hattie’s work with formative assessment. For those people who are not aware of what formative assessment is I tell them that it is simply that teachers first of all need to know their subjects. They need to be able to tell their students exactly where they are achieving and they need to be able to articulate to each child just the very next small step that child needs in order to progress. If that happens every day then over the course of a year there will be huge gains in achievement. Excellent teachers who engage in research-based best practice will raise achievement. I think that the Government needs to focus on teachers. 
The second point that I make is that— 
Hon Member 
: Standards! 
KELVIN DAVIS 
: A standard does not teach a child; a teacher does. This is what I was talking about with Te Kotahitanga. That has proved that a teacher who has excellent relationships not just with the student but with the student’s whanau will increase achievement. 
The third point is that the curriculum needs to be relevant to students. There is no point having a boring curriculum or a curriculum that is focused on just trying to meet a narrow standard and the teacher teaching just to an assessment or a test. That narrow curriculum will not engage students; it will just turn them off. Although standards are superficially attractive they do not teach kids. The thing that I have spoken about in relation to the education sector is that with the achievement objectives already in the curriculum we have standards already. If members are not aware of the achievement objectives in the curriculum I tell them that when a child enters school at year 0 or 1 that child should be working at level 1. By the time the pupil leaves—in an ideal world—in year 13 that pupil should be working at level 8. Each of those levels has a range of achievement objectives that are already spelt out for students to achieve. 
The point is that there is nothing new in this bill that is not already available for teachers to use. Because there is nothing new in this bill I cannot understand or get my head around why we have to rush this through in urgency. I do not understand what will be any different for kids on 5 February 2009 when they turn up to school because nothing will change. There is nothing new in it whatsoever. 
I have spoken about formative assessment which is really really important; it is the key. In fact Professor Hattie says that dollops of feedback are what is most important and that feedback is the factor that has the greatest effect in raising achievement. Feedback to kids is basically telling them where they are. The next step is feed-forward where as I have said they tell kids the next thing they need to learn. We have to focus on the skill of a teacher—that is what is most important in terms of raising achievement. Just setting up standards and assessment for the sake of assessment will not do anything. I said there is nothing that has not been done before. 
I took the liberty of getting Kaitaia Intermediate School to email me the format of the school report we have had for the last 5 years because we talk in plain English and tell parents exactly where their kids are achieving. In the report I have here the school makes the statement that year 7 pupils should be reading at curriculum level 3 or 4. That is the standard based against the New Zealand curriculum so the school is telling parents exactly where their child should be achieving. The second thing that is said here is: “She”—I will not use the child’s name—“is reading in curriculum level 4P”. That is telling the parents where the child is achieving against the standard where the child should be. The third thing it says is that this is above the New Zealand expectation. The parent knows that their child is achieving above what is expected of New Zealand kids. The fourth thing in this report is that the school tells the parent what the child has learnt. The fifth thing is that the report tells the parent what needs to happen next and spells out the things that the child needs to learn next. It says that in order to improve “this child and I”—meaning the teacher—“will concentrate on the following learning outcomes:”. This is a mid-year report but in the end-of-year reports the sixth thing it says is that: “This is the progress the child has made in the 6 months since the last report.” 
So we are telling parents what the standard is where the child is achieving whether the child is above or below the New Zealand expectation what the child has learnt what needs to happen next and the progress made since the last report. This has been going on at Kaitaia Intermediate School for the last 5 years so I cannot understand why all of a sudden it is a new buzz to be telling parents that they need to hear these things. It is stuff that is already happening and that is why I cannot understand this bill. To me it is just a rehash the same old same old. Because it is not happening in every school all that needs to happen is for resources to go into organisations such as advisory services which have experts going to schools to make sure this sort of thing happens. 
HEKIA PARATA (National) 
: 
 Tena koe tena koutou huri noa i te Whare i tenei po. I rise to support the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill and I absolutely commend this bill to the House and to every member who purports to be in support of high-level education for all our students. This is outstanding legislation because it integrates all the players involved in the learning outcomes that students experience. Yes teachers are important; in fact they are critical and research supports that. But they are not the only part of the education system that needs to be involved. Parents need to have an opportunity to be involved. Parents need to understand how well their child is doing in an absolute sense as well as relative to children who are the same age as them in their school and across the country. 
The previous speaker Kelvin Davis has just given an outstanding example of a school that would respond extremely well to the system we are talking about. Regrettably according to the Education Review Office report of 2007 fewer than half the schools were reporting the kinds of achievements we are looking for. 
So yes we do need a systematic approach because we need to target which children require what kind of learning investment so they can get the support and the resources they need to achieve the best possible educational outcomes. Through this system teachers will understand better. I am astonished at what I keep hearing from that side of the House as if teaching and learning were the only formula to learning outcomes. Assessment is part of teaching and learning. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: It’s what you do with it. 
HEKIA PARATA 
: That is exactly the question. Unless teachers understand what the learning experience of the child is by assessment they are basically guessing at what they should do next in order to assist that student. We want to take guessing out of the game. We want to give every child in New Zealand the opportunity to be successful. Like the previous member in my maiden speech the other day I talked about the pursuit of quality citizenship and the importance of education in that pursuit. 
This bill ties together all the elements that will make it possible for students to be successful. It helps teachers to focus on what teaching and learning they should be doing; it helps parents to understand how well their child is doing; it helps schools at a school-wide level to understand where they need to be targeting their resources; and it helps the Government to understand where investments need to be made across the country in order to lift the level of achievement for all New Zealanders rather than just talk about it. As Dr Sharples was trying to point out fundamentally Te Kotahitanga respects the student. It attempts to call students by their names rather than saying “Rakaitemania have you got a nickname?” because they are not capable of addressing that fundamental respect to a Maori child who has a name that has come from his or her ancestors and is worthy of respect by the teacher who we have all agreed is so critical in their learning path. 
I absolutely support this. I acknowledge that the Minister is showing leadership here. Why is it in urgency? Because this side of the House believes that educational quality and success by students is an urgent matter. We are showing leadership in bringing it before the House now. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. 
Ayes 66 
New Zealand National 57; ACT New Zealand 4; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 46 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 3. 
Bill read a first time. 
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 68 Noes 46. 
Second Reading 
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I move  
That the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. 
 As I stated at the first reading this bill implements policy changes that this Government has committed to as part of our priority action plan for education. The bill delivers on that commitment by raising the standards of achievement and attendance in compulsory education. 
I start by first of all thanking all the speakers who have contributed from this side of the House in support of the first reading of this bill. Also I particularly want to congratulate Kelvin Davis on his very thoughtful and pertinent contribution. I could not disagree with anything that he said and I congratulate him on the work he has done with his teachers and his community for the children who have been under his care and guardianship. I think he has done an outstanding job. I ask him why he is so afraid of ensuring that every school throughout New Zealand is doing the sorts of things that he was doing for his community and his children. Why is he so afraid of that? How could he possibly vote against this bill when all it seeks to do is set in place the framework that will ensure that that happens so that all New Zealand children have the opportunity to be taught by teachers who respect them who care about their aspirations and who are prepared to work to those top standards that this bill enables the Minister to set. Why on earth could he not vote for a bill that would enable every child to get that sort of education? 
The previous Government ignored reality and the Minister ignored his own Education Review Office which reported that fewer than half of the schools in New Zealand were doing an excellent job like that. More than half the schools were failing to ensure that the children who were under their care had that quality of teaching— 
Hon Chris Carter 
: Where are the resources? Are you going to put in more resources? How much? 
Hon ANNE TOLLEY 
: Yes we have. The former Minister asks me whether we are putting in the resources. In our policy we have said that there is an extra $18 million a year going in to support the teachers once they have identified the children who are not meeting those standards. 
One of the speakers from the other side stood up and said that the introduction of national standards is potentially dangerous. We had the old secret agenda out again. Apparently it is potentially dangerous to set standards for children. We heard from Dr Pita Sharples what has happened to Maori children in this country year after year under that Labour Government. What is so wrong with lifting the sights of those children and setting the standards so that all children have an opportunity to get an excellent education? Why is the Labour Party so afraid of making sure that all children have the opportunity that a good education can give them and why is the Labour Party so afraid of making sure that parents know what their children are doing where their children excel and where they need some extra help? What is wrong with a parent knowing that? 
I tell this House tonight that I have been deluged with emails from people since this bill was mooted. I have been deluged with parents saying: “We cannot get that information about our children from our schools. We want to know what we can do to help our children and our schools will not tell us. Thank you Mrs Tolley.” They are saying: “Thank you for taking the opportunity under this new Government to be part of the education of our children.” They are grateful because they want the best for their children and they want the opportunity to take part in that. 
I again ask the members of the previous Labour Government why they are so afraid of a bill that lifts aspirations for children and includes parents in the educational process. Why is that potentially dangerous for New Zealand children? I think a Labour Opposition that is intent on keeping too many children and particularly Maori children uneducated illiterate and innumerate is potentially dangerous for this country. Those members will not accept that there is a need for standards in this country. We are committed to a policy of national standards but we are also committed to working with the sector to— 
Hon Chris Carter 
: Why don’t you care what the sector has got to say? 
Hon ANNE TOLLEY 
: I have been talking with the sector for months about the consultation process that we will go through. 
This bill does nothing more than enable the Minister to set the standards. It does not set the standards; it enables the Minister to set the standards. We have stated that we will go out to people in the sector and consult them about how those standards are set and what they should look like. The literacy progressions are already out there. I have talked to the sector about the literacy progressions and they are not scary. They set out expectations of what children could and should be learning right throughout their schooling. That is the sort of thing that we are talking about with the sector because at the moment there are a whole lot of guidelines out there. There is the Literacy Professional Development Project the targeted achievement for Pasifika programme and a whole range of different benchmarks out there. Well this National Government is saying no. We will have one set of national standards that everybody understands that can lift every child and give every child the opportunity to get a good education. 
I do not understand how a former Labour Government could vote against that. I do not understand how the member Kelvin Davis who was a principal who knows how this works and who has proved what we can do with children with constant assessment and by putting support in around individual children involving the parents and telling them what they can do and where their children are could vote against this bill. It does nothing more than allow the Minister to set some standards that are agreed with the sector. I do not understand how he can vote against it. 
The second part of this bill is about truancy and we have not heard much about that tonight. We believe that it is important to send a strong message that if children are not at school then they cannot learn. A member opposite asked what will happen when the children turn up to school on 4 February. Well I will tell the member what will happen. If they turn up to school they will have an opportunity to learn. They will not be truant and therefore the truancy part of this bill will not apply to them. But there are children out there who are kept at home by their parents to keep their parents company. There are children out there who are kept at home to look after siblings. There are children out there who are deliberately kept away from school by their parents. Those children are being denied the opportunity of an education and National is going to make sure we send a strong message that that is not acceptable. 
Every child has the right to go to school and get an education because we know that a good education will lift children out of the poverty that the Green member Metiria Turei spoke so eloquently about. The only opportunity children will get is a good education and it is unfair if their parents are deliberately keeping them from school so we will put the fines up for truancy. Let me say this—I want to finish on this. If members think that $3000 is too big a fine I say that in this country we have a maximum fine of $3000 for failing to register a dog. I say that it is more important to send one’s child to school. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: Before I call the next speaker let me just caution members—firstly about interjections. Members know that they should be rare and reasonable. At times it got close to a barrage of interjections and I do not believe that is appropriate. Rare and reasonable interjections are fine. 
The second thing I ask members to desist from is engaging in barrages that go backwards and forwards across the Chamber. They were quite apart from the exchanges with the member who was on her feet. I was reluctant to interrupt her speech but members need to desist from doing that as well. 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 This bill is nothing more than a desperate attempt by the new National Government to cover up the fact that it has no new ideas on how to address underachievement in our schools. Those members have no new ideas about how to deal with literacy and numeracy problems. They have no new ideas about how to keep kids in our classrooms. This bill will do absolutely nothing to address those issues. It is completely unnecessary and it even states that it is unnecessary in the explanatory note of the bill. 
This bill will narrowly focus the education system on teaching kids a very very narrow range of knowledge. The teachers will teach to the test rather than teaching to the curriculum. It will grow the gap between the achievement rates of students at rich schools and the students at poor schools. This bill is completely unnecessary. 
Let me read from page 4 of the explanatory note which states: “The Minister of Education can set national standards through the existing provisions of the Education Act … either by way of the national education guidelines or by regulations. Regulating for this power could achieve the same policy objective as legislating”. So we are off to a ripper of a start with our red tape reduction! Instead of creating regulations we are going to create unnecessary legislation. The ACT Party is clearly doing well on its red tape reduction. We have already seen bills rammed through the House with pathetic regulatory impact statements. 
This bill will give parents no new information. It will give parents no more information than they can already get from teachers if the teachers have the opportunity to talk to them. I draw the attention of the House to the National Education Guidelines; the ones that the Minister seems completely unaware of. Paragraph (iii) of national administration guideline No. 2 states that each board of trustees with the principal and teaching staff is required to “report to students and their parents on the achievement of individual students and to the school’s community on the achievement of students as a whole and of groups”. So why do we need this bill? 
The requirement in the national administration guidelines specifically identifies a number of areas and it specifically requires schools to report on students who are not achieving or who are at risk of not achieving so the bill is totally unnecessary. It does not increase in any way resources going to the schools or to the teachers. It does nothing to help them. There is absolutely no evidence that setting national standards and forcing primary schools to set exams which is what this bill will effectively do— 
Hon Members 
: Oh rubbish! 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: I would encourage members to read the general policy statement at the front of the bill which states: “The changes will require State schools to assess students and to report the progress of students against the national standards.”. So this bill is very little more than national testing for primary schoolkids. 
The evidence from overseas suggests that national testing does nothing to lift student achievement. In fact it has a number of detrimental impacts. It encourages teachers to teach to the test—to train pupils to pass the test rather than to gain any understanding of what they are learning. It means that kids do not develop any higher order thinking skills. And if we want to see any evidence of the impact that has we need only to look at the benches opposite us. A research review in the UK found that national testing leads pupils to regard learning in terms of passing tests rather than in terms of gaining any understanding of what they have actually learnt. 
I would draw the House’s attention to another publication from overseas—a Demos publication called “Beyond Measure: why educational assessment is failing the test”—which concluded that the assessment system measures recall of knowledge rather than the depth of understanding and that it tests only a narrow section of the curriculum. The report goes on to state: “the notion of measuring a cohort of learners as a whole is absurd. We know children mature at different rates. What we need is assessment by demand.” This bill does nothing to increase the support for teachers to do assessment by demand. It does absolutely nothing. 
What about the students? What does this bill mean for students? A survey of parents in England where a similar system is being put in place found that one in 10—one in 10—7-year-old kids was reduced to tears and lost sleep because they were worried about sitting tests. The same survey found that two-thirds of 11-year-olds showed signs of stress in preparing for the tests with 9 percent suffering from anxiety attacks. And that is what this Government wants to do! In Oldham an 11-year-old was hospitalised for stress because of those tests. How is stressing out primary schoolkids going to do anything to raise standards in our schools? 
 Another report from the UK highlighted the negative consequences of national testing on teachers including overload and stress. It found that national testing distracted from teachers’ daily classroom performance and contributed to a number of teachers leaving the profession altogether because national testing does not tell good teachers anything they do not know already. As some of my colleagues have outlined there are far better tools that could be used instead. 
I noticed that Nick Smith has been commenting on it today. He said “I openly concede that the information can be used destructively.” It was Nick Smith who said that. One way it can be used destructively is to develop school league tables. The Minister was quoted in the  
Dominion Post 
 this morning as saying that that would not happen: “Education Minister Anne Tolley denied the results could be used to compile league tables saying the full data obtained would be available only to the Government.” I do not see anything in this bill that repeals the Official Information Act. I see nothing in the bill that repeals the Official Information Act and would stop people from getting hold of the data and using it to compile exactly that. 
We know from past experience that once the data is there people will get hold of it. In fact the National Party used to advocate for that data to be released publicly to create league tables. Bill English spent months and months arguing for National Certificate of Educational Achievement league tables to be created using the same kinds of data in secondary schools. This will drive a massive wedge between the rich schools and the poor schools. It will create an incentive for the good teachers to leave the poorer schools and move to the rich schools or leave altogether. 
We know that once the Government has this information it will use it to introduce performance pay for teachers. We know that is what the Government wants to do. It wants to introduce performance pay for teachers. It will put them on 90 days’ probation and it will give teachers the shove at the first available opportunity. [ 
Interruption 
] Oh the 90-day period does not affect teachers. Anne Tolley stood up and said that the 90-day period would not affect teachers and that they will not be covered and they will not be sacked. Well I have news for Government members because the bill that they passed does exactly that. So how long will it be before we are back in this House debating performance pay for teachers? 
This bill shows that the Government has no new ideas on how to raise student achievement. In fact the teaching profession knows that and does not want it. Ninety percent of primary school principals surveyed said they did not want it. They are opposed to the National Party policy. Eighty-seven percent of primary school teachers opposed it. Seventy-five percent of high school teachers opposed it. Sixty-nine percent of school boards of trustees opposed the National Party policy. They did not want it. Who wanted it? [ 
Interruption 
] Why does the member not stand up and take the next call and tell us who wanted it? In fact those people surveyed do not want the bill rammed through under urgency either. I quote from the Auckland Secondary School Principals Association: “It’s a matter of trust … When bills are rushed and the sector is not consulted it will create a wedge and a sense of suspicion with the Government.” 
Nobody wants this bill rammed through. The New Zealand Educational Institute said that it does not want it because it believes that openness is critical to ensure that any decision on teaching and learning is educationally sound and will lead to increased student achievement. Yet despite all of the blather from members opposite we have not heard at all about how this bill will increase student achievement. We have heard nothing from them about how this will increase student achievement. The New Zealand Principals Federation said: “National testing is such an old-fashioned idea … National testing is quite simply a backward step.” This bill introduces national testing by any other name. 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 The young member for Rimutaka Chris Hipkins should fire his speech-writer because that speech will come back to haunt him in his time in this House and on the streets of his electorate. 
I take a moment to acknowledge my former colleague Mr Davis. I know Mr Davis to have been a school principal of the highest integrity. I had the great privilege of spending time with him in the far north visiting the school that he led and talking to him at great length about the nature of school leadership and how children learn. I can affirm as correct everything he said about the success of that school. I would like to say to that member that in this place it can be very very difficult for members to retain their integrity in respect of issues like education but the price they pay for doing so is one that is well worth paying. I would express the hope that within the member’s caucus the wisdom and the experience—and the common views that we share—will be heard. 
I will address issues raised by the former Minister of Education Mr Mallard. I spent years thinking that the reason the former Prime Minister dumped him as Minister of Education must have been that he jackbooted his way across the country kicking communities and schools. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Prime Minister recognised that his thinking in education was so backward-looking that even she could not retain him in that position and he demonstrated that backward-thinking tonight to perfection. What did he want to talk about? He talked about progressive achievement tests and national averages. 
In this debate when we are talking about setting national standards for literacy and numeracy it is important that we understand very very clearly some differences. There is assessing a child against a standard which is what we do now through the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. We tell children “Here is what you need to be able to do and as many of you as can do that get the standard and as many of you who cannot do it do not get the standard.” Members who want to keep talking about national averages are more concerned with statistical movements than whether children actually know anything or not. I would have thought that the former Minister would have understood that but in effect what he said reminds this House of just how far we have to go to make people in this House and in the education sector understand the significance of standards. I am sure the previous Minister of Education knows exactly what I am saying—and now I am referring to Mr Chris Carter obviously not to Mr Mallard. 
This is about children who through no fault of their own are not learning to read write or do mathematics to the minimum level required for them to find a contributing positive place in a society and in an economy. Right through the debate today in my view there has been insufficient acknowledgment of that fact. 
I listened with great care to the Green view on all of this. 
Metiria Turei 
: No you did not. You didn’t listen to it at all! 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: Well I shouted a little bit and I am sorry about that. There are still parliamentarians representing parties in this House who do not understand that the single most significant driver to get children out of poverty is the quality of education they receive—and the previous Minister of Maori Affairs sitting opposite will understand that in terms of the constituency that he represented—and who are still prepared to tolerate unchallenged all of these social and economic excuses that adults make and that children do not need them to make. 
The statement in this bill about national standards is the statement of the National Government supported by our colleagues that the language around children’s learning and success must change. I am very very troubled and I suspect that my former colleague Mr Davis is equally troubled by the very seriously diminished view of schoolteachers that has been taken by some of the members opposite who have spoken particularly the young member from Rimutaka. All of this talk about teachers teaching to the test and all the rest of it is frankly offensive. People like me have spent 32 years teaching under a secondary school system where we taught youngsters to pass examinations. During the 16-odd years that I headed schools I knew that the performance of the school that I led would be ranked on the front pages of the newspaper in my community without fail. I had to manage that. That is how it is. 
If we listen very very closely to the arguments members opposite are putting up against national standards we find that one of the critical things they are saying is in effect that we must keep this stuff from parents. 
Hon Members 
: No no. 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: Opposition members need to go away and look at just how accessible truthful information about the performance of schools is to parents. One of the great things about having national standards is that there will be a clear standard and parents will know whether they are sending their children to a school where children learn. Members should just remember that this is not about teachers it is not about educational theory and it is not about left-wing researchers overseas. It is about our children and their future. 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to speak in the second reading of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. The bill sets out to do two things: it allows the Minister of Education to set national standards for literacy and numeracy and it requires I notice State schools to assess and report students’ performance against those standards. It also requires that fines be imposed on those who refuse to enrol their children at school; there is an extra matter relating to that as well. So the overall purpose of the bill is to raise standards of achievement and attendance in the compulsory education sector. 
During the election campaign the public was promised a crusade for literacy and numeracy. Those are strong sentiments and that is a strong image to project—that there will be a crusade. I will talk a bit more about it in a minute but first I want to say that a crusade is a vigorous concerted action to promote or eliminate something. It is vigorous it is concerted and it is considered making it more widely acceptable. In this case the crusade is to eliminate poor achievement in schools and to eliminate truancy. If this bill is the crusade then it fails on a number of grounds and I shall touch on those in my comments. 
For the bill to have a good chance to succeed a good chance of being a crusade the problem should have been carefully analysed. For a crusade to be well developed advice should be taken from those with the best information. One should have gone about getting advice from a wide range of sources. And the crusade should include quite a detailed comprehensive plan which should be laid out so that one can see it quite easily. Each aspect of the plan of attack of a crusade should be clearly identified and again put before us. It should have been designed with some care then systematically implemented. The crusade that the electorate was promised to eliminate something as important as poor achievement and truancy still has some way to go. I think that if this bill is the crusade then it has faltered. It is not likely to achieve the high goals that we have been promised or the high goals that are identified in this bill. 
It is also important to understand the assumption on which this particular crusade is based and I have tried to understand it. I think it goes something like this. There are students in our schools who do not achieve in numeracy and literacy. Well there is enough research to show that; we cannot argue with it. They do not achieve because—and this is the second part of the logic of this particular bill—we do not have numeracy and literacy standards. Well OK that is the logic being followed. The third stage is to set those standards assess every child against those standards and report the results to parents and—voila—our children’s achievement will improve. 
With the greatest of respect and with all the honesty I can muster I have to ask: is that it? Is that the crusade? Is that what will get us there? Is that what the electorate was promised? Is this bill strong enough to do it? I shall develop my arguments around that in a minute but if this bill is all that it takes then I wonder whether we have understood the very basics of how to construct a question analyse it and consider the other factors I have identified. I have to ask whether this bill is the best we can come up with. One can honestly ask whether it is poorly designed policy given that the very people who will be required to implement it—and this is a serious test of a policy—do not agree with it. If they do not agree with it then as members opposite will know—because they have run organisations and done pretty demanding things—all kinds of impediments will be put in the way to confound it. 
Let us look then at the major assumption that schools do not teach to achieve particular standards at the moment. The explanatory note of the bill is quite helpful. It tells us that in— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: It’s not an assumption. There’s an Education Review Office report that says it. 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: Well I am going to quote it. If the Minister listens she will hear the argument in a minute. In 2007 14 percent of students left school without achieving the numeracy and literacy credits they needed to attain level 1 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. That gives us some idea of the percentage of school students we are talking about. It may be a little more than that—I think National’s figures in the election campaign were 20 percent. It also means that the system we currently have that the Government wants to change is working well for 80 percent of school-leavers. If the system is good for the overwhelming majority of students why is such radical surgery needed at this stage? 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: They’re not assumptions. 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: The Minister will soon follow the argument; it is a carefully constructed one. 
As any business person knows one must first identify the problem then look at all the alternative solutions select the best one—the Minister will soon get it—implement it and review it. I have serious doubts that that actually happened in this case. I have identified what such a process would reveal. Instead the Government is ramming through under urgency a set of proposals that at least in the view of quite of few people is not likely to achieve the very things the Minister wants to achieve and might even make matters worse. It might be that the small amount of dollars that is being put aside is gobbled up in just implementing these very proposals. There are plenty of examples of that in social policy in public policy and certainly in education policy. 
The Minister might like to listen to this. I spoke to several teachers today and this is what they told me. These are honest brokers; they are the people who will implement the Minister’s particular programmes. They said they were already reporting to parents and those reports are based on concrete evidence from the classroom from the records they keep and from early numeracy and literacy testing. They are doing what they are required to. The teachers I spoke to today told me— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: The Education Review Office says they are not all doing that. 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: Well maybe that is what needs to be fixed. I tell the Minister that one does not use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. One understands what the problem is looks at the options and picks the best one. I know that that is difficult for the Minister but there is science behind it and if she uses the science she will be a better Minister and she will make better decisions. It is not difficult. There are people around to help her to do it. 
The teachers tell us that testing will impose further burdens on them. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Oh! 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: Maybe the member opposite should speak to some teachers. Maybe some members opposite have; maybe they have spoken to the teachers who teach their children. They should talk to them about what happens. The teachers tell me that they are interested in producing effective children rather than supporting a system that actually prevents them from doing the very things they want to do. The teachers also told me today that this type of testing can set children up for failure. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: This isn’t national testing. 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: The Minister should at least listen to what the teachers are saying. She has not consulted them; I am sorry but she has not. If she really believes that she should send the bill to a select committee and at least let us contest it. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: Read the bill. 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: I have read the bill. 
The Minister will want to know about the next point I want to make. If this idea is the best thing around then why is so much research against it and why are so many people who know more about this subject than I and the Minister do not happy? Ninety percent of primary school principals surveyed opposed National’s policy 90 percent of high school principals surveyed opposed this policy 87 percent of primary school teachers surveyed opposed this particular policy— 
Hon Member 
: Who did the survey? 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: The Minister might like to look at the survey and the methodology—not at who carried it out. That is quite important. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: But look at the question they asked. What about our policy? 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: The Minister knows that the New Zealand Council for Educational Research is a reputable organisation with good methods. If the Minister would like to question them she should make a statement about that. Thank you. 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I have been quite interested in the genesis of this policy which comes from national standards. It has been very interesting listening to especially Allan Peachey talk about it in the context of the US and the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act which was part of the Bush administration’s major educational reforms. I will talk about those especially in the context of the policy and how it impacts on disparities in education. I will talk particularly about the gaps between what in the US would be described as black and white populations and about the way in which such reforms might impact here on Maori and Pakeha populations and the difference in educational achievement between the two. 
Normally of course in a second reading speech we would be talking about the submitters who had come to the select committee to tell us about their experiences with regard to the legislation and their views of it. Just as an aside I have always enjoyed that part of the select committee process. It is the most valuable and probably the single most democratic process that this Parliament has—the opportunity for direct engagement by the public with MPs where people can tell us about their experiences and about the way they think the legislation will affect them. I find that process extremely valuable and I think it is disgraceful that legislation of such import as this Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill has not gone to the public. We have not had families the Secondary Principals Association teachers unionists the Post Primary Teachers Association or even school students tell us how they think this bill will impact on them. They are the ones of course who are affected by it. But I guess we might expect more of this from National—the secret rapid passage of legislation and policy that is actually based on ideology and I will go through that now. 
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 introduced standards and testing in US schools along with a whole range of Draconian measures—which National has not yet implemented but we will wait and see. For example schools that fail to reach the target standards and tests have a graduated level of punishments inflicted against them. In some circumstances they might be required to transfer or provide for the transfer of students from their school to another school to replace teaching staff or to remove or to decrease management in their schools if they did not meet the standards. Schools that fail to meet the standards can even be required to turn over their school administration to private companies which would then be able to run their schools for them. 
This is the part of the No Child Left Behind legislation based on the standards and testing regime. Because that policy has been in place for some time there has been quite a lot of analysis of its impacts. In particular I just point members to two reports. One is “Exacerbating inequality: the failed promise of the No Child Left Behind Act” which was produced in a race and ethnicity education publication. There was another one “Testing and Social Stratification in American Education” and I will just look at some of that analysis. 
The research done on the policy found for example that urban schools—predominantly poor schools and predominantly black schools—suffered the most from the policy suffered the most in terms of punishment as a result of failing to meet the test and had therefore the graduated levels of punishment enacted against them. There was a real concern that the standardised testing was unreliable had major negative consequences and was highly politicised. I think it is worthwhile remembering that with the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill the Minister has the right to define these tests and standards so it is a politicised process or standards test whichever way the Minister wants to spin it. The fact is that it will be a politicised process here just as it is in the US. 
The testing and standards regime set a benchmark so that even the schools that were demonstrably improving over time were still considered to be failures and therefore they suffered the consequences. That then impinged on their ability to keep on improving over time. So those schools that were trying to do better were being punished for their success at trying to do better to the point where many of them failed completely. 
There was an obvious correlation between the test scores and income. This system did not remove the disparities between test scores of the poor or low-income families and more wealthier families. In particular—and I note this for the benefit of the Maori Party which is considering supporting this legislation—the research has proved that the testing and standardised regime resulted in fewer students of colour and fewer students with disabilities completing high school. The dropout rate for the students of colour and students who had some form of disadvantage if you like increased by 17 percent in just 2 years after this legislation was passed. 
Teachers were required in effect to teach to the test and there has been some discussion of that with regard to this bill. Even in coloured schools poorer schools and urban schools where there was an attempt to teach to a much higher level of achievement the teachers had to teach to the test to make sure that their kids would get through it. So instead of having a more expansive and intuitive form of learning and teaching between teachers and kids teachers were forced to teach those children how to write five-paragraph essays so that they would meet the requirements of the standardised test. This led to a downgrading in the achievement levels and the downgrading of the quality of teaching of those kids particularly those from the poorest and the most discriminated against communities. 
Many schools had to reduce the resources for non-tested subjects and divert those resources into the subjects that were being tested in order to help make sure that their kids would reach those standards. Children for whom the standards or that area of learning was not their strong point and was not where they had their talent were then discriminated against because the schools had to divert resources away from other areas. Those children lost out in the process because the test took over from what was best for those students. I remind members that this research has been done on this policy over many years and members will have access to it when I table these papers soon. 
The other consequence—and we have seen it here in New Zealand with some schools—is that academically weak students were forced out of school or were kept back in their classes until the school determined that they were more likely to pass. That has happened here. I think that was what happened in Cambridge and there have been other places where it has happened too. In fact it still happens in secondary schools where schools will not allow students to sit exams if they do not think they will meet the high standards the school sets in order to keep those schools high up on what is the New Zealand version of the league tables. The dropout rate for the students who needed the most help to succeed and to pass the tests increased as well. There was a higher dropout rate for the students who needed the most help and who were the most disadvantaged. 
I repeat for the benefit of the Maori Party that in relation to the situation in New Zealand we are talking about the poorest students from low-decile communities. They are predominately Maori and Pacific Island students and they often have special needs because lower-decile schools have a higher ratio of special needs children than high-decile schools. They will be the kids for whom the policy fails and the research proves it. This policy increases the difference and discrimination disparity between those communities. It focuses advantages and privileges on wealthier kids in wealthier schools and it discriminates against poorer kids Maori kids and poorer schools. The research has proved this point. 
National’s policy is ideological. That is why it has not taken it out to the public. It really does not want there to be any real scrutiny of this analysis at all because this kind of research which proves shows and demonstrates the failure of this policy in other jurisdictions would come to light in the public eye here. Parents would know about it. The teachers in schools would know about it. They would know that this policy is a failure and that it is an ideological approach not one based on proper evidence proper science and proper research about what works best for the children at the bottom end. This policy will push our Maori kids who are at the bottom. 
I find the Minister’s condescending sycophantic description about how fabulous National will be for Maori students absolutely sickening when the policies and the law it has passed in the last few days absolutely discriminates against them. This keeps them poor keeps them in jail keeps them out of work and keeps them out of school. 
Hon HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT Party to speak to the second reading of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. That was another interesting contribution from the Green member. It seems to have completely escaped her that the ACT Party and the National Party campaigned strongly on education and that was probably one of the main reasons the majority of people in this country voted for a change of Government. That fact seems to have escaped her completely. I am pleased the member mentioned No Child Left Behind because that is exactly what we should be aiming for in this country—no child left behind. In fact we should accept nothing less. 
The Opposition clearly feels very threatened by the thought of national standards in literacy and numeracy. All we have heard is attack attack attack about national standards but we have heard nothing about the first part of this bill which is also very important in relation to school enrolment and attendance. All that Opposition members are focusing on is national standards because they know that it is the right thing to do. Shame on them for standing up member after member and not supporting this initiative! Shame on them! Why are they doing it? Because they fear that it will show that we have an education system that is letting our children down. That is the problem for them—fear that it will show up the last 9 years as a complete failure for the education system in this country. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: What a pathetic joke! 
Hon HEATHER ROY 
: We have had a prescription in the last 9 years. They might joke about it but we have had a failed prescription for the last 9 years that has not worked. The current education system which is about to be radically changed is failing far too many of our children. Although it can be quite good for the academically able—those who will do pretty well no matter what—many children are not learning even the basics and are achieving poor qualifications or frequently no qualifications at all. We should not be happy or content to let this situation continue. Despite rising expenditure New Zealand’s education standards are falling and we have now been overtaken by other developed countries. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: What nonsense! 
Hon HEATHER ROY 
: Mr Carter should try reading the literature. The worst-performing schools are in the poorest areas and parents have limited choice as to the schools they send their children to. Too much is spent on the bloated bureaucracy when it could be spent on schools and on educating children at the front line. Teacher morale is low and many secondary schools suffer poor discipline. 
What we should be striving for is equality. Every single child in New Zealand regardless of family income should have the right to a quality education. No child should be left behind just because of where he or she lives or because of the parents’ financial position. Education is first last and always about children. It is not about the Government or bureaucrats. We need to increase the role of parents and decrease the role of Wellington. That is the commitment I see from the National Party and that is the commitment the ACT Party brings to the incoming Government. Parents have the right to send their children to the school of their choice. After all it is their money paid in their taxes and their children’s futures. 
Here is what ACT wants for all Kiwi kids in terms of education. It will be universal. All school students will get State funding. All schools will be held to account for the success of their students through an assessment system that is objective and transparent and that is what this legislation is about. That is why it is important that it is put in place as quickly as possible. There will be choice. Under ACT parents will be free to choose a school that best fits the needs of their children. It will not matter whether the school is public or private. ACT’s policy will allow diversity in education. It will encourage; it will not stymie hinder and put up road blocks. It will encourage different kinds of schools and new kinds of teaching. 
We will abolish the excessively bureaucratic system of classifying and funding schools according to their character and who owns them. That is not important. We want to see funding of all schools on the same formula and we will give them greater freedom to develop special characteristics. These are the discussions we should be having about education in this country. We should not be having discussions about who owns the school. We believe in diversity and we reject the one-size-fits-all approach to education as does every party on this side of the House. [ 
Interruption 
] Our critics these people over here should stand up and take a call. Our critics prefer State monopoly and State control to parental choice and diversity. 
Hon Pete Hodgson 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I apologise to the member for interrupting her speech. The reason I have done so is that she has made a series of policy statements using the word “our”—our position etc. I am not sure whether she is giving a position of the new National - ACT - United Future - Maori Party Government or whether she is giving the position of the ACT Party. Through you Mr Assistant Speaker I suggest that it would be helpful for order if she would tell us that for indeed if it is the former we are in some trouble. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: The point Mr Hodgson has raised is a pure debating point. He is destructively breaking up a very good speech from Heather Roy and I think you should discipline the member for disrupting a speech in that way. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I would say to the honourable member who has just made the point that if the Speaker disciplined every member who raised a point of order that was not a point of order there would be an awful lot of discipline in this House. The member though is correct. It was a political point. It is a debating matter. 
Hon HEATHER ROY 
: The member who made the point of order in the first instance clearly was not listening when I said: “Here’s what ACT wants to do for all Kiwi kids.” If he had listened a little more carefully he would have heard that from the start. But we have a Government now that is prepared to think that is prepared to look broadly for solutions to problems that exist—problems that have been caused by 9 years under the Opposition when it was in Government—and that is prepared to listen and think broadly about solutions to advantage the children in this country. Now the Opposition is rejecting striving for excellence rejecting expectations and rejecting having standards as a measuring tool so that parents know how their children are doing—as they ought to be able to expect. 
The Labour member Kelvin Davis actually made a very good contribution earlier I felt and several people on this side of the House have mentioned that. He talked about excellent teachers raising achievement and he is absolutely correct. He mentioned a whole number of initiatives that are very important—things that members will routinely hear from speakers on this of the House—and I would like to congratulate him on those comments. But I am sad he came to an absolutely bizarre conclusion after putting forward those very good points. I look forward to the member making some useful contributions on education but the conclusions he came to bore absolutely no relationship to the comment that he had made. 
I would say to the member that it is not a situation of “either/or”; we should be striving for excellent teachers to raise education standards and achievement at the same time as encouraging excellence in teaching. The two are not mutually exclusive; it is not “either/or” it is “both/and” I say to Mr Davis. I want to keep hearing that sort of initiative from his side of the House because that is the sort of thing that can further education and achievement in this country. 
The Hon Bill English’s first reading speech made some very good comments about expectations and this is what this bill is all about: it is about having the right sorts of expectations for our children in education. When we expect excellence when we expect every child to achieve to the best of his or her ability we will actually have excellent teachers excellent standards excellent schools and excellent education in this country. So how do we meet these expectations? ACT believes they can be met with school choice. I say to Mr Hodgson that the ACT Party is supporting the National Party—just in case in two sentences’ time he has forgotten I said the word “ACT” and worries about where this initiative might be coming from. ACT believes that the expectations can be met with school choice. We campaigned strongly on this and it played a large part in our negotiations which resulted in the National-ACT confidence and supply agreement. 
We are pleased that National has stated that it will work over time to increase the educational choices available to parents and pupils so that families have more freedom to select schooling options that best meet the individual needs of their children. We look forward to the setting up of the inter-party working-group which will be resourced as necessary to consider and report on policy options relating to the funding and regulation of schools which will increase parental choice and school autonomy. This bill we are debating tonight is a great start in that process and I welcome this initiative that has been brought to the House tonight by the National Party. The ACT Party will be supporting it through its entire course. 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
 Tena koe tena tatau katoa. E te uri o Te Tai Tokerau ka nui te mihi ki a koe. Tautoko i nga mihi nga korero a enei ki a koe ehara wau korero he tika tonu me ki te ngako o era korero. No reira ka nui te mihi ki a koe otira ki a tatau i tenei po. 
[ 
Greetings to you and to all of us. Much admiration to you the relative from Te Tai Tokerau. I endorse the accolades and comments expressed by these ones to you. My word what you said at least the nub of it was on the mark. Therefore much admiration to you and indeed to us tonight 
.] 
The concept of setting standards—high standards—is something that is expressed in many whakatauaki Maori: “Ko te manu kai i te miro nona te ngahere. Ko te manu kai i te matauranga nona te ao—the bird that eats the miro berry can claim the forest but the bird that eats or feasts on education can claim the world.” And there are others of course. I believe that it was a theme that was referred to in the House just recently by my colleague Hekia Parata in her maiden speech. The aspiration of course is pretty easy but it is of no use if there is educational system failure. 
In 2006 more than 10000 16-year-olds did not achieve minimum requirements in literacy and numeracy. Is that a standard that we can feel proud of as a nation? I do not think so. For Maori 40 percent of our tamariki by the end of year 11 and 44 percent of Pasifika students did not meet the literacy and numeracy requirements of year 11. Can we feel proud of that national standard? Hell no! What are we doing so wrong? More to the point what are we doing so right for other students—namely 76 percent of Asian students and 79 percent of Pakeha who did meet the literacy and numeracy requirements for level 1? 
This bill cannot remedy these institutional and longstanding inequalities in its mere three pages but perhaps it is a kick-start to the conversation. This bill will enable the Minister of Education to set national standards in literacy and numeracy and then assess standards against them. The Maori Party suggests that the real test for us would be if the Minister of Education were able to assess the competency of schools themselves to respond to the unique and distinctive needs of their student population. The research by Professor Russell Bishop which resulted in the Kotahitanga project suggests that there is a lot to do here. 
In the Maori Party policy document  
He Aha te Mea Nui? 
 our priority is both to help young people to succeed and to improve the performances of schools. We want to ensure that the public be provided with better information on school performance including Maori and Pasifika achievement. To do that we suggest there are specific and tangible steps that the Government can take. The Government could support professional development for teachers particularly around the notions of cultural competency. The Government could invest in key support staff such as those focused on improving levels of literacy and numeracy. The Government could establish incentives that reward schools’ success and innovation in reducing underachievement and disengagement. The Government could invest in mobile literacy and numeracy services that can reach children parents and whanau in rural areas. These are just a few of the many ideas that the Maori Party—the awesome Maori Party—will be willing to contribute to the education portfolio with the appointment of Dr Pita Sharples as Associate Minister along with the honourable Minister Anne Tolley. 
Our ideas actually dovetail quite nicely with the recommendations presented in the report that the Education and Science Committee released to the House in February of this year. So they should. That inquiry lasted almost 2 years and I was pleased to be a part of that committee when we had a cross-party inquiry into making the schooling system work for every child. There are a whole host of recommendations that are useful in the context of raising standards of achievement in the compulsory education sector. 
An interesting observation of that report was the comment that teachers have plenty of suitable assessment tools at their disposal but that the schooling system as a whole is not using the huge potential of these tools to support programmes to improve student achievement. Our report recommended that more resources be devoted to the provision of comprehensive professional development in assessment practice so that by 2010 all schools have experienced appropriate training in the collection and use of assessment data. The committee believed that this would make a considerable difference to student achievement particularly among the so-called long tail of underachievement. 
The crucial thing is our estimation that not just the right assessment tools are used and teachers are supported with appropriate professional development but also assessments are reported to whanau. Whanau need to know where their children are. Such information is not to label tamariki but simply to assist in showing them that they may need assistance or that they may be doing very well. The gathering of evidence would also hold schools to account and the monitoring and reporting of achievement of Maori students is a policy statement that we intend to follow up over the next 3 years in our agreement with the National Government. Schools simply having information and not using it and not being accountable for a lack of strategy to lift student achievement must be considered in the near future. Having around half of young Maori men and women not achieving at least one single qualification before they leave school should no longer be tolerated and the Maori Party intends to work cooperatively with the Minister to address this matter. 
Although we are generally happy with the focus on national standards in literacy and numeracy I have to say we are concerned about the other set of changes proposed in the bill to do with truancy levels. Truancy rates have for many years now been highest among Maori and Pasifika students yet the problem continues to be ignored despite the inevitable disruption to learning that high truancy rates must create for Maori and Pasifika students. The implications of truancy are not associated just with underachievement. Several of our submitters such as Family Court Judge Becroft and others emphasise that many of those presented to the court were illiterate among other things. 
So we agree absolutely that something must be done but does that mean slapping a fine on those people hoping that increased fines will lower rates of truancy? We do not think so. There is no evidence to suggest that hefty fines will lead directly to improved attendance rates. The bill raises the level of fines imposed on parents who fail to enrol their child at school or who fail to ensure that their child attends school once enrolled. It also allows the Secretary for Education to prosecute parents for those actions. It doubles the daily rates of fines for non-attendance to $30 a day. It doubles the fine for first-time non-attendance offences from a maximum of $150 to $300 and it trebles the fine for parents who fail to enrol their child at school from a maximum of $1000 to a maximum of $3000. 
That is tough. The thing is will bombarding parents with fines make a difference? We say no. The parents whom we are likely to be talking about again according to the evidence in the select committee report are those who suffer from issues of poverty. Hitting them with a fine will we believe do little. In the United Kingdom the annual report of Christine Gilbert Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools grappled with many of those same issues around non-attendance and rates of educational attainment. The 2007-08 report indicated a number of circumstances for individual institutions and providers from which improvements may emerge. They included firstly leadership with a clear and ambitious direction for change; secondly objective open reflective self-evaluation of strengths and weaknesses; and thirdly dialogue and feedback to ensure that needs are being met in a culture of excellence. 
It can be done; all it takes is a vision for excellence. We do support the need for national standards. There should be reporting back to whanau; schools should be held to account. We do not agree that increased penalties will promote whanau engagement in schools and increase attendance rates. To that end our preference is that the changes proposed to address truancy levels could be separated out from the bulk of the bill and treated differently. We have tabled a Supplementary Order Paper for the Committee to consider and we believe that it might address this issue. With those words kia ora tatou. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 Firstly I congratulate the new Minister of Education on introducing to the House a bill that I think will have a greater positive impact on the challenges facing our nation than probably any other issue that we will consider in the course of the next 3 years of this term of Parliament. This Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is a litmus test as to whether members of this House are prepared to sit silently by and see one in five of New Zealand children fail basic literacy and numeracy and whether we are prepared to take seriously a 50 percent increase in the number of students who are truanting from our schools. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: What rubbish! 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I do not think in all honesty there is a member of this House I say to Chris Carter who can put hand on heart and say that the long tail of underachievement shown up in every piece of educational research on our schools is not a serious issue for our nation. I do not think that even Chris Carter who is interjecting in his heart of hearts really believes that that is an issue we should not be concerned about. So the question we as parliamentarians need to ask is what we should do. The truth is that it is not members of this House who stand up the front of classrooms each day and do the really important job of teaching our students but we have to ask what we can do. 
I believe in a very simple principle not just in education but in other areas as well and that is that we manage what we measure. If we are serious about lifting educational standards then we should be prepared to measure them. I reflect on one of the really hot debates in this Parliament in the 1990s which was about the issue of financial performance. This country had a disgraceful record in the management of public finances. One of the reasons was that we did not honestly report the state of our public finances. I was proud to be part of the National Government that passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act which required independent honest reporting of our public finances. That Act resulted in the years since in a substantial improvement in the state of our public finances. I say that education needs the same honest reporting. 
Other countries have grappled with the same issues. Some countries that have been concerned about their literacy and numeracy standards have passed legislation that prescribes how teachers should teach. Some countries have passed laws—we have even had such a bill in this House—that require teachers to teach by phonics. Well this Government does not agree with that. I will tell members why. We trust the professionalism of teachers and it is not for this Parliament to prescribe how teachers should teacher—whether teachers should use phonics or whole language or any of the many other proper educational debates amongst the professionals. Other Parliaments around the world have prescribed the number of hours that schools should spend on teaching literacy and numeracy. The United Kingdom prescribes that teachers spend 2 hours on it; in other countries it is 2 hours and 30 minutes. Again Anne Tolley and this Government say that no that is not the right approach. This bill says that we do not mind how teachers teach—whether it is phonics or whole language whether it is for 2 hours a day or 2 hours and 30 minutes a day—but they do need to meet a national standard. I am proud to be a part of a Government that is prepared to say just that. 
Let us look at some of the arguments—or I should say “excuses”—that have been put forward by the Labour Opposition because they speak volumes about the difference between Labour’s values and the values that are held by this Government. I was very interested to hear the new member Mr Prasad say we should not introduce this measure unless teachers agree. Are we really so lacking in leadership so prepared to let down the children of this country that unless every teacher agrees we are prepared to sit by fail the leadership test and not set the standard? I say to Mr Prasad that the responsibility of this Parliament is not to the teachers of this land but to the young people—the students the children. I tell Mr Prasad that they are the ones to whom we owe our first responsibility. 
The problem for the Labour Party is that it is captured by the teacher unions. That is one of the reasons why over the last 9 years we have gone backwards in education. Labour members are more interested in serving the needs of their mates in the teacher unions than in doing what is right for the children of this country. 
I come to the point that was raised by the member who said that the provisions in this bill are wrong in that they give the Minister the power to prescribe national standards. What a facetious argument! Why did Labour members support an Education Act that allowed the Minister of Education to prescribe the full curriculum? They say it is OK to prescribe the whole curriculum but not OK to prescribe national standards of literacy and numeracy. What a pathetic argument! 
Then we heard the arguments in opposition to the issue of assessment. I ask members opposite what their answer is to the report from the Education Review Office that 58 percent of schools in New Zealand are not providing for assessment. What is their answer? I will tell members what their answer was. After 9 years the answer we got from the Minister of Education Chris Carter was the “Wassup!” badge. Well the new Minister of Education wants more for the children of New Zealand than a “Wassup!” badge and members on this side of the House are proud to back her up. 
I want to bring this debate back to the very practical experience of a constituent who came to see me in my electorate caravan. Her child had just gone on to secondary school to Nelson College. She was horrified to learn that her son had been put on a reading recovery programme. She brought to my constituency clinic every school record— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: School report. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: —school report that she had received over the last 5 years. None of those school reports gave that parent any indication that her child was falling behind. I simply say to the members opposite that we need transparent reporting of school results. I say to members opposite that providing parents with honest reports on how well their children are doing is just what they need. 
The last point I want to make in this debate is that it is interesting that not one Labour member has been prepared to talk about the truancy provisions in this bill. I will tell members why. It is because they are embarrassed by their track record. The last 9 years have seen truancy rates in this country go through the roof and they are embarrassed and ashamed— 
Hon Chris Carter 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I say to members that when I call a point of order I expect there to be order and I expect members to let the person who is raising the point of order to have his or her say. I do not expect there to be an increase in the barracking from both sides of the Chamber. Let us have some order. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: The member Nick Smith in his usual extravagant and outrageous manner has just claimed that none of the members on this side of the Chamber talked about truancy. I myself did as did Dr Prasad and others. Mr Smith again is not telling the truth in the Chamber. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: That is not a point of order; that is a debating point. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I note that no Labour member has debated at any length the truancy provisions in this bill. Chris Carter should hang his head in shame. He should hang his head in shame because during his watch thousands of New Zealand young people who should have been in school receiving an education were not there and he did nothing. The fact that Labour continues to have him as its education spokesperson shows that it is soft on standards soft on truancy and an apologist for failure. I am proud to back Anne Tolley and national standards which will make a difference for this country. 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 I congratulate the National Government and I call on my colleagues not to be quite so harsh on them because they are on a literacy crusade. I think I am on a crusade to give credit where credit is due. This is a kind of turbocharging of education in the first 100 days and education is very important—there is no argument from this side of the House that it is not important. We can listen to all the maiden speeches; I think every one of us so far has talked about how education is the most important thing we can do as a nation. 
Moreover the members on that side of the aisle are right to focus on the problem of underachievement. In spite of the very creditable performance of our young people in the OECD rankings in science literacy and maths the so-called long tail of underachievement is one of the major challenges this country faces. About that there is I hope no disagreement on our side of the aisle. So I congratulate the National Government for focusing on an extremely important issue. 
However it is not enough to identify the problem. It is not enough to campaign up and down the country spreading fear and anxiety. The members opposite are in the Government now and they need something more than slogans and fearmongering. They need good sound practical ideas that can be turned into policy and law but I have to say that at this point the National Government falls down rather badly. It is sad to say it but I would have thought that 9 years was long enough to come up with better ideas than are contained in this bill. 
What is the National Government’s response to this problem of underachievement? It is national educational standards. On the surface that is an interesting idea. We all want standards right? But let us think about this. There is no point having standards unless we test. Otherwise how do we know whether we are reaching those standards? What we are really talking about here if we are honest is standardised testing. That is the conceptual basis of this bill. The National Party has pulled a page from George W Bush’s playbook and his No Child Left Behind Act policy as Metiria Turei has explained. 
Paul Quinn 
: Saviour of the free world! 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: I say to Paul Quinn that standardised testing is the tired old cliché policy of conservative politicians all around the world. This bill is a Trojan Horse for standardised testing. I will say more about standardised testing but first let me make some other comments. There is a very interesting thing about this bill: it does not actually do anything. It is the National Party’s idea of virtual Government. It is very modern it is like a hologram it looks real and it gives the appearance of substance but in fact there is nothing there; it is a complete illusion. In this respect it bears an uncanny resemblance to the dreary bail bill that we spent the afternoon discussing. It is campaign rhetoric in drag. It does not introduce anything new it does not provide any resources for literacy programmes and actually it acknowledges— 
Paul Quinn 
: They won’t like that in Mt Albert. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: It acknowledges—I say to Mr Quinn—that some very effective assessment tools are already at work in our schools. 
This policy caused quite some confusion on the campaign trail. At a candidate debate in Devonport my opponent the honourable member for North Shore was asked by a very nice woman in the audience whether National would introduce standardised testing. He said that no they would have assessment. She asked what the difference was. I have to tell members that there was a lot of huffing and puffing but not much light shed on the issue. I had some sympathy for my opponent the member for North Shore. It is not surprising that he found it difficult to explain the difference because after all how does one assess without testing? Assessment is simply another kind of testing. 
I was talking recently with a literacy and numeracy specialist who works at a school in Auckland. She said that the real question about this debate asks why we are testing. What is the purpose? Is it so we can improve the quality of teaching and learning or is it so the school can publish league tables and market itself as being better than the school down the road? I think that that comment was very perceptive. The bill in fact requires State schools to assess and report student performance against national standards. This will inevitably lead to the establishment of league tables of winner and loser schools and compound the challenges that lower-decile schools are already struggling with. That is exactly what has happened under standardised testing regimes in the UK and the US. 
I lived for 4 years in the United States which is a happy hunting ground for standardised testing regimes. My son was 9 years old and in middle school in Maryland. He did four different sets of exams every year and all the teachers and all the parents complained that all they had time to do in the academic year was prepare for an endless round of exams and testing. After 6 years of George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy one commentator at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing said there was overwhelming evidence that the law was deeply flawed and doing more harm than good. It relies on “limited one-size-fits-all tools” that “reduce education to little more than test prep.” We hear exactly the same story in the United Kingdom. Introducing national standards and making schools accountable sounds good on a bumper sticker. It is very much like ACT’s “three strikes and you’re out” policy or the Bail Bill that we discussed this afternoon. It looks good on a bumper sticker but it is not really based on sound policy is it—is it? 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: What’s your answer? Give us an answer. Give us a policy. Give us a single idea. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: If this is the rigour the innovation and the depth that the National Government will bring to education policy the children of New Zealand should be very afraid I say to Mr Smith—very afraid. [ 
Interruption 
] Standardised testing I say to Mrs Parata is against fairness it is against accuracy and it is against quality. I will tell members why. For decades educationalists have complained that standardised tests are unfair because the questions so often require a set of knowledge and skills that is likely to be possessed only by children who come from a privileged background. And the member should know that. Can members guess which kinds of children are best able to prepare for the tests? Can members tell me? It is the kids who come from privileged families who are best able to prepare for those tests. The quality of teaching suffers inevitably. Testing encourages the temporary acquisition of skills and information— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. This bill is about national standards. It has nothing to do with national testing. I ask you to remind the member on his feet to speak to the bill. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: That is not a point of order. It is a debating point and the member knows that. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: The so-called long tail of underachievement is indeed a very serious problem and it is one that I do not doubt that every member of this House on both sides of the aisle cares about. But this bill has nothing to offer. It is all sizzle and no sausage. It does not introduce anything new—actually it recognises explicitly that effective assessment tools are already at work in our schools. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Half of them aren’t doing it. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: But worse than that I say to Mr Smith the bill is based on shonky educational theory. It dignifies the concept of standardised testing as a valid educational tool for children as young as 5 years old and it lays the groundwork for a National Government to impose national standardised testing on our schools. And that is the objection I have. 
Finally the National Party has been dining out for months—actually years—on a line it got from Crosby/Textor about the nanny State. This bill demonstrates how shallow that rhetoric is. This bill is about the governess State. Do members know what? It is the National Government wanting to impose Victorian values of education on our children. It flies in the face of international best practice and everything we know about personalised learning. Next the members on the other side of the aisle will have us lining up in the classrooms rote learning. 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 The Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is very interesting. It is an enabling bill because it gives the Minister the ability to establish national standards. We can look at the explanatory note of the bill. For the benefit of members on the other side of the Chamber I will try to talk quite calmly so that we do not excite them and waken them from their numbing sleep. 
If we rely on regulation we will stay where we are. We find when we look at the Education Review Office reports that there is considerable inconsistency. We have heard from the fine member sitting in the back corner what a good school is doing. We know that that is just so incredible. That school is made up of a relationship between teacher pupil and parents and that is the way all schools should work. There are thousands of schools in this country and we want to see them all succeed. But relying on a regulation that is implicit is not good enough. I agree with what Dr Smith said: if we cannot measure it we cannot manage it. That is why the National Government will put it into law the standard that will have to be achieved. It is not appropriate that we are not all as a nation on a crusade to improve our children’s education. If we want to give people the opportunity of being able to put a foot on the ladder and go up and inspire we have to succeed and we have to do better. 
We could have a very very long conversation about this legislation but I believe that the weight of the argument is very much in favour of it. I must acknowledge what Te Ururoa Flavell said. I was also on that 2-year select committee review of making schools work for all our children. It was very very enlightening. There are some wonderful teachers around. One person who came to the select committee said that he trained teachers for another year. I have tried to remember his name but it escapes now. He had a private training establishment that was limited to taking only 100 full-time equivalents a year. He was limited because of the funding. Those teachers graduated and were all picked up by schools and they have all done remarkably well. 
I am just so convinced as a parent and now as a grandparent that we can do better and that what we must do is lay a solid foundation for that to happen and get on with it. That is what this bill does. It is an enabling and empowering bill and I support it wholeheartedly. I commend Anne Tolley for having the courage to bring it forward. I think we have to keep away from the rhetoric of the negativeness and on that basis I am very proud to be backing this bill. I recommend it to the House. 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 The member for Kaikoura promised us no excitement during his speech and he was right. He has been right for the last 3 years. I rise to oppose the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. I think that this bill might be called the “Tolley Bus Bill”. It is ramming through radical legislation— 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I know that Labour Opposition members always revert to name-calling because that is about as good as their debate is. But I think that as a new member he should be reminded that using such references to fellow members of the House is not appropriate. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: I think it is a bit rich for that particular member to be talking about personal nasty attacks on members. He is notorious for his vicious attacks on members of this House. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I draw the member’s attention to the point that he should address members respectfully. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. This bill is being pushed through under urgency with no consultation with the sector it most affects—that is the education sector. It gives the Minister the power to set education standards for every State school in this country but when the bill comes through the dark tunnel of night the Minister says that she will go back then to consult the education sector. That will be a bit late and it is a bit rich to offer consultation after the fact. 
My colleague Chris Carter acknowledged that the education system is largely collaborative. That is the strength of the system; that is what underpins the system. But this bill is about pitting teacher against teacher and school against school. It is a slippery slope. It is if you like a deluge. The member Hekia Parata has already referred to this bill as being the national standards/local testing bill so the Government needs to get its lines clear about what this bill actually aims to achieve. 
This bill has come about because during the election campaign the National Party had to present a moderate face to the electorate in order to be successful and win the election. It dropped the policy of bulk funding which had been a National Party policy in previous elections. It made no mention of education vouchers. This bill is now the thin end of the wedge. 
Hon Members 
: Oh no! 
BRENDON BURNS 
: Yes it is. Here is how this bill will work. It introduces standardised testing. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: It does not. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: The member opposite said that it will introduce local testing following standards. That will then I am sure lead to schools being required and forced to publish those results. That will of course then lead to funding being linked to those results. As we already know the National Government has indicated that it will weaken zoning and that will of course mean that rich schools will get richer and poor schools will get poorer. That is exactly how it works. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Oh the politics of envy! 
BRENDON BURNS 
: No it is not the politics of envy; it is the politics of reality which always ends up with the poor paying the price. That is a feature of National Governments. This policy borrows very heavily from the Bush administration’s first Act in office—the No Child Left Behind Act. What that Act did in the United States was take away from schools that were underperforming. That is not me speaking; that is from the US Department of Education. I will read from the preamble to the commentary for members opposite: “A key aim of the  
No Child Left Behind Act 
 of 2001 … is to provide additional educational options to parents of students in low-performing Title I schools specifically the opportunities to move their child to a higher-performing school or enroll their child in supplemental educational services.” The point about the educational services being provided in the United States as a result of that bill is this: I ask members to guess who is providing those supplementary educational services. Is it the State school sector? No it is not. The private sector is now providing most of those supplementary services in the United States. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: So? 
BRENDON BURNS 
: We have a State education system and that is what we need to fund rather than start to spin money out into the private sector. 
The other fact that comes through from the US Ministry of Education’s analysis is that the children who have done worse since the No Child Left Behind Act are those for whom English is a second language. In my electorate of Christchurch Central there are 35-plus schools. There are some very very good schools and they range from decile 1 to decile 10 but the predominant number of schools are in the low deciles. There is no comparison between a decile 1 school and a decile 10 school. 
David Bennett 
: You can’t say that! 
BRENDON BURNS 
: If members want to put assessments on them the comparison is that in a decile 1 school the primary importance for children might be something as simple as whether they had breakfast that day not whether they sit an assessment or a test. There are schools in my electorate that have up to 55 percent of their students coming from Pasifika Asian and other ethnic backgrounds. 
Hekia Parata 
: So what? 
BRENDON BURNS 
: So the point is that if the American experience has been that children from non - English speaking backgrounds fare the poorest under that programme then the likelihood is that it will apply here. I will come to the funding issue shortly. The point is about how a school with a 40 to 50 percent non-English speaking profile of students would feature under this bill. There is nothing in the bill about resources. There is not a mention about the funding that is actually what drives educational outcomes. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: It’s called a budget. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: That is right. It is about creating another level of bureaucracy— 
Hon Members 
: Ha ha! 
BRENDON BURNS 
: Yes it is. It is about adding another layer in there. There are plenty of tools within the current framework to assess children as my colleague Kelvin Davis so eloquently pointed out. The tools are there already in the current procedures. The Minister says that it is about resources. I think I have the figure correct when I say there is $18 million once the assessment has taken place. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: Extra. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: It is extra! I thank the Minister very much. The current funding for the primary sector is about $3 billion and if the Minister is talking about adding $18 million to $3 billion my calculations are that that is 0.00006 percent. So much for turbocharging educational achievement! 
The second part of the bill deals with truancy— 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Your numbers are wrong. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: —I would be quite prepared to take one zero off—it is about holding parents accountable. I have no problem with the concept of holding parents accountable. The problem is that I do not think that parents are the key issue in terms of truancy. The greatest numbers of truant children are in secondary schools and the numbers increase as they go through the secondary schooling system. Trying to get a 14 or 15-year-old to go to school who does not want to go to school is not going to be solved by having $4 million more for truancy officers whose allocation I worked out on the number of schools would be about $30 a week per school or about two blocks of cheese. The other issue around the truancy issue is that it is strongly predominant in decile 1 and 2 schools—and again I say that comes back to issues of poverty and resources—and is not about decile 9 or 10 schools which have six times fewer chances of truancy being a feature. 
Pita Sharples from the Maori Party supports this bill. He wants teachers to be trained to lift up Maori. I ask what on earth in this bill does anything to lift Maori teachers or teachers teaching Maori students. If Maori are underachieving now what will happen when we mirror the American and British experience and force teachers to focus on lifting those students around the middle of the expected standard and keep those teachers focused on that rather than on delivering attainment across the board? 
I also acknowledge the comments from a Christchurch truancy officer Andy Parr who has been in the job for 8 years and who was reported in this morning’s Christchurch  
Press 
 as saying that tougher fines would have no effect on the families he dealt with: “We feel that the social stigma or the embarrassment is the main deterrent … The main ones we deal with are parents who have lost control and the student is usually calling the shots.” So putting the fines up to $3000 is not likely to make one heck of a lot of difference; that is from somebody who is actually working in the field. Thank you. 
TODD McCLAY (National—Rotorua) 
: 
 What a great piece of legislation this will become when it is adopted later this week. Finally after 9 years of a Government whose members are now sitting on the Opposition benches we have legislation that will deal with the big issues. The big issues are the children of this country who cannot read or write properly. Is it not great that finally after 9 years we have a Minister of Education who cares about children in our country? Is it not great that we have a Minister who is willing to do the hard yards and who is willing to stand up and say that we believe promises are important? Promises are important. 
I can understand that Opposition members would be concerned. They would be concerned that the explanatory note states that the bill gives the Minister of Education the power to set national standards in literacy and numeracy. I can see why they would be concerned because how many Ministers of Education were there over the last 9 years and how many of those Ministers of Education cared enough to set standards so our children would be able to read and write properly? I can understand their concern. 
What is wrong with setting standards? What is wrong with parents knowing whether their kids are able to read and write properly? Every single parent in this country wants his or her child to do well and I tell the House there is nothing at all wrong with that. Schools will be required to assess students and report to teachers in plain English— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Report to parents—the member can’t even read. 
TODD McCLAY 
: —report to parents in plain English and not in text-speak I tell that member or in little slogans that say “Wassup”. It should be in real common English that people can understand. That is the important thing. 
This is about national standards and that is the three Rs. That is not Rip Van Winkle and his two sleepy mates over there; that is reading writing and maths—arithmetic. That is what we need in this country and that is what our teachers want to teach children in this country. I think it is disgusting that members on that side of the House firstly want to blame parents and say they are responsible. Then they want to say the children are the ones who are responsible. Finally tonight in this House we have heard that it is the teachers who are responsible. Well it is not the teachers; it is the system. And do members know who is responsible for that system? It is the Government of the last 9 years the party sitting on that side of the Chamber that has not cared enough about our children. 
As I sat here today I found a magazine in front of me  
The 
Economist 
 which has just been published. I was flicking through it because I am like a lot of other people around this country—mothers who are listening here tonight—who are concerned about the future of their children but all we are finding from the other side of the House is rhetoric and concern. No wonder so many of our kids are concerned at the moment. On page 51 of  
The 
Economist 
— 
Hon Phil Goff 
: They are awake at the start of the speech but they won’t be awake at the end of it. 
TODD McCLAY 
: I tell the Leader of the Opposition that it says “Hold your breath!”. I think that was written for him. It says “Hold your breath!”. Then when I moved over to the next page I thought “Oh look at this; someone must have seen what has happened in this country in the last month. Somebody must have realised what happened on 8 November.” It says “On your bike!”. There is another one—it says “On your bike!”. This cannot be about New Zealand but page 53 says “The Fading of Labour”. I thought “Well that must be it. There can’t be anything else in here at all.” But sure enough on page 56 it says “Stopping the rot”. This legislation is about stopping the rot that the Labour Party has allowed to develop over 9 years. 
I am proud to stand up and speak on behalf of the people of Rotorua. I had a great opportunity to talk to thousands of the people of Rotorua and they told me they like their teachers there but they do not like what this previous Government did over the last 9 years. Do members know what those people said after 9 years of listening? They said they wanted more for their children. They want more for their children in Rotorua and they want more for the children in many other parts of this country. I am glad that this Government has been able to help them get better things through this legislation— 
Hon Parekura Horomia 
: Give an example! It’s on zero mate. 
TODD McCLAY 
: —and I am glad that member has finally woken up so that he can listen to a good speech. 
I received a text from the people of Murupara that said “Todd we’re looking forward to your speech but you can tell one of those members on the other side that we would like to see the colour of his eyes when the person behind him is speaking.” That was from the people of Murupara. The member is welcome to come to Muruapara with me and we can go and see those people. 
I went to Murupara 3 weeks ago when one of the smallest schools in my electorate held its annual prize-giving. Teachers are working hard at that school and parents come to the school to help their children. The parents in Murupara say to me that members on that side of the House not only should wake up but they should know they need some more help. Those members should be making sure that the parents know how hard the teachers are working and finally we have a Government that will help teachers support teachers and let them get on and do their job. How about no more complaining about the teachers from that side of the House? How about supporting the teachers? I think there is still a teacher in Rotorua who voted for the member’s party. I say to the member that he should still support him. 
I will finish here because the previous Minister wants to take the floor. When Labour came into Government—9 years ago—children were being born. This year when Labour was thrown out of office those children were 9 years of age. One in five of those children cannot read properly cannot write properly and cannot do his or her maths properly. It might have been all right for the last Government that New Zealand falls below Kazakhstan when it comes to maths but it is not good enough for this Government. 
I will conclude on something that is potentially dangerous. I have heard what is potentially dangerous tonight from members on that side of the House. They told us it is education. It is not education it is the lack of education that is potentially dangerous—the lack of education. The people in the Rotorua electorate had a choice this year and they stood up and said what was potentially dangerous for them was Labour Party sponsored underachievement. That is potentially dangerous for them. They also said Labour Party ignorance of mums and dads is potentially dangerous. But the biggest choice for people in Rotorua this year was whether to have another Labour Government that was potentially dangerous for our children. The people of Rotorua are wise and I thank them for letting me stand here as their local member of Parliament to make sure that this Government will do the right thing by their children. Thank you. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. 
Ayes 66 
New Zealand National 57; ACT New Zealand 4; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 46 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 3. 
Bill read a second time. 
In Committee 
Part 1 School enrolment and attendance 
Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 There has been an interesting and a frank exchange of views up to this point with regard to the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill. I want to talk to Part 1 which deals with the truancy issue but I would like to preface my comments and then direct some questions to the Minister in the chair the Hon Anne Tolley. I preface my comments by saying I am sure that every person in this House wants to see in school every young New Zealand person who should be in school. That is a desire we all have. However in order to do that we have to engage with the students who are truanting. Very few parents want their children to truant school. I think all of us would be hard-pressed to find even what we might regard as the most difficult parents who do not want their children to succeed. 
However I will concede—and I know this as the former Minister of Education—that a tiny minority of people actively encourage their children not to attend school. There must be penalties for them. Raising the level of fine is not something that in principle we are opposed to. But we in the Labour Party are concerned that parents who themselves are victims of their children’s own behaviour will be impacted on by this legislation. I would not like to see and I am sure nobody in this House would like to see any parent who really wants his or her child to be at school and who is not aware that the child is truanting be hit by this change in the law and get a $3000 fine. We have put up an amendment to require that the proposed changes in fees will only impact on the most uncooperative of parents. I really urge the National members to consider supporting our amendment because I am sure that they like us do not want to see good parents penalised by the behaviour of bad children. 
I ask the Minister whether in addressing the issue of truancy—which is a subject that she has asked me many questions about in my former role as Minister of Education in the last 14 months or so—the increased fines are her only step to address the question of persistent truancy. I remind you Mr Chair and also the rest of the Committee and particularly the Minister that the previous Labour Government took a huge range of steps to try to address truancy. Indeed in 2006 when the Hon Steve Maharey was the Minister of Education we reviewed truancy services— 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: The vice-chancellor. 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: That is another subject 
Hon Phil Goff 
: Could Mrs Tolley tell us what a vice-chancellor is? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: I know it has been reported to us by very reliable sources that the new Minister of Education had to ask the Tertiary Commission what a vice-chancellor does. I hope that Mrs Tolley knows what truancy officers do. We reviewed truancy services in 2006 and as a result of that review a whole series of resourcing actions were taken including the provision of both organisational and financial resourcing to combat truancy. That is the only way to deal with the real problem of truancy. The issue is not about parents; it is about children and young people who are disengaged from learning. 
Mr Peachey was a fine educationalist; we have different views but I respect what he did in schools. He was and still is motivated by a desire to have good educational outcomes in our country. He has in the past acknowledged to me and he will acknowledge the contribution made by the setting up of the electronic enrolment system with every school now on it. We put about $6 million into that so that for the first time ever we know exactly which children are in school and which are not. Every school is online and the staff report truants daily into a central computer database in our schools. For the first time ever we put that in so we knew exactly what the truancy problem was. We also put another $2 million into individual schools where there were particular problems that had to be addressed and the schools needed support to do that. Again the issue was not about fining parents because we are talking about a very small number of students here. We are talking about a much larger number of disengaged students. So there was another $2 million of funding for the individual schools that were most affected by truancy. 
We put another $4.5 million into district truancy services so that the contractors and people who work with the Ministry of Education councils and schools could deal directly with the problem. The 89 district truancy services that were set up worked very closely with territorial authorities to try to deal with the problem of truancy. We employed 10 officials—the bureaucrats we hear about from National which wants to get rid of them scale down the bureaucrats and use their salaries to enhance resourcing at schools—at the Ministry of Education to deal with very persistent individual hard-core cases of truancy as well as with children who were under the care of Child Youth and Family. Those are very special cases that needed very sensitive and professional care. 
The Student Engagement Initiative at schools was again very extensively funded with $1.8 million provided to help schools to deal with truancies. We introduced the Youth Apprenticeships scheme in schools. It started off in 10 schools in the time I was the Minister it was in 20 schools and 120 schools will have the scheme in 2009. Those are actual practical things that engage students in learning. Schools Plus was the flagship policy of the Labour Party at the election. We promised to commit $170 million to it in order to explore alternative pathways for learning for young people capture their interest deal with Youth Apprenticeships and set up the institute at Manukau Institute of Technology. Those are real concrete resourcing issues that deal with disengaged pupils. That is how we deal with truancy and get kids back into school. Yes we do need to punish parents but that is a tiny part of the problem. The real problem is disengaged students and how we deal with them. 
I ask the Minister Mrs Tolley how she is going to deal with persistent truants. We have left her a well-resourced sector. We have not solved the problem. We made good progress but we have not solved the problem. It is a really difficult issue in education. We are not unsympathetic to increasing the penalties but again I stress the issue of making sure that good parents are not punished by the behaviour of their children. I urge the Minister to look at our amendment that is on the Table over there. Hopefully she will look at it but I do not think she has done so yet. I am sure that she also does not want to have good parents punished for the behaviour of bad kids. 
I come back to the point I made at the beginning of my presentation that probably 99.9 percent of parents want the best for their children. They want their children to be in school and they want them to be successful. Children who are not in school are mostly absent not because of their parents; they are absent because they are disengaged from learning. The key to solving truancy issues is to engage children in effective learning keep them interested keep them at school liaise with homes and have professional staff in place to deal with that. Schools are really struggling with the truancy issue. As I have said we now know for the first time ever which kids are not at school because of our electronic system ENROL. That will be able to tell Mrs Tolley exactly what the truancy situation really is at the moment. 
I again ask the Minister to please consider protecting parents from the unintended consequences of raising this fine because we do not want good parents to be punished for the bad behaviour of young people. 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to rise and talk to Part 1. I am rather sad to acknowledge that normally during the Committee stage of a bill as important as this we would be able to refer to the many submissions that we would have received during the select committee process. I am sure there would have been many submissions in the select committee process had the new Government allowed that opportunity for the public the parents the education sector and the many people who would have had an interest in this. I know we would have had a lot of very good submissions on Part 1 and the school enrolment and attendance issue. I feel very sad that we are not able to refer to those submissions but there have already been many fine contributions during the course of the debate on this entire bill. If we think about the passion energy and information that has come through this debate just from the members sitting in the Chamber alone I know we could have had so much more coming through had we had the opportunity to have public submissions on this bill. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: They wouldn’t want that! 
SUE MORONEY 
: I am not sure why the Government would not want that because I think it is a missed opportunity. It is a missed opportunity to engage the broader community. All parties across the Chamber have acknowledged that education is the key to our future. Our children and their education are the key to our future and we should be taking some time to gather that information. 
However much has been made by the Government about clause 6. This is the clause that allows prosecutions to be taken by the Secretary for Education. I want to ensure that people listening to this debate know that prosecutions can and have already been taken over the issue of truancy in this country. I think it is really important to acknowledge that and it is important that the new Government does not make it look as though this is something that it is bringing in because this ability has been there all along. Sadly on 29 November the  
Waikato Times 
 reported on two families in the Waikato who were prosecuted for not having their children attend school. One was in the town of Morrinsville—a student from Morrinsville College—and the other was in Matamata—a student from Matamata College. It is rather interesting because I come from Matamata and my good colleague Jacinda Ardern comes from Morrinsville so we both knew those families. It was really very interesting to note that when we looked at the information and talked about those families we knew that there were many many issues going on for these families. Prosecution has happened in this instance. It probably is not the best outcome for those families; neither was the unavailability of their children—those students—from the education system. 
But it is not as simple as just increasing fines. It is not as simple as just having an outcome at the end after everything has gone wrong. Very complex issues are at stake here. It is really interesting when we observe the families who face prosecution. Often they come from the lower socio-economic ends of our communities and this was certainly the common thread that existed in those two cases. There has been the ability to prosecute and it has been happening. Certainly I think the initiatives the Labour-led Government put in place have helped to ensure that we know what the level of truancy is. 
Again there is a bit of a theme developing here. I think it is quite misleading to say that because we now know and can quantify what the problem is it means therefore that there was not a problem before and that it somehow emerged just over recent years. Of course these problems did not emerge just over recent years but the Labour-led Government was committed enough and was brave enough actually to quantify and measure these problems. The Labour-led Government implemented the ENROL system that my colleague the Hon Chris Carter talked about before and that helped us quantify what the nature of the problem was. That is a very important thing that the previous Government did. 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I want to briefly mention the Maori Party’s position on this part of the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill and its amendment that proposes to split off Part 1 and Part 2 into separate bills. We certainly support its intention to do that its reasons for doing that and its acknowledgment that although Part 2 is an ideological argument that we will no doubt continue to have Part 1 is about punishing the poor simply because they are poor and there is absolutely no justification for it. I am very pleased that the Maori Party opposes Part 1 of this bill. 
The fact is that the long tail of underachievement that is touted around here and was touted all through the election campaign is actually a long tail of poverty. Mr Peachey is wrong in his statement that somehow education is to blame for the increasing poverty in our communities. In fact it is poverty that is to blame for the impossibility of many of our young people getting ahead and getting the education to which they are entitled. I am not surprised that Mr Peachey is wrong about this but he is wrong and it is important to point that out. 
We are talking about communities where there are very low and very insecure incomes and where people are living in unstable and largely unsuitable homes. I think it was in today’s paper that we saw an article about 15 people living in one house—a family of seven in one room. There are ongoing health problems that arise from that level of poverty—for example skin infections that are treatable. In fact a large number of doctors who work in public health organisations say that one of the biggest disgraces of this country is the fact that so many children present with preventable diseases and illnesses like asthma glue ear eczema and scabies. Those diseases are all the result of living in poverty—for generations in many cases—and certainly that is the case for children living in poverty in those places. Poverty results in perpetual shifting as people with very insecure housing and very low incomes keep trying to find adequate housing that they can afford. If they find that they cannot afford it for whatever reason it leads to perpetual moving. 
This leads to children having to change schools very regularly. We often hear about this happening in South Auckland but it happens across the country. Hundreds of children every Monday change schools because their families have not been able to find secure employment and secure housing where they can set up a long-term base for the benefit of their children and their children’s education. 
What then happens is that children who are continually moving from school to school are really living lives of absolute turmoil over which they have no control. It is impossible for schools to then be relevant to the needs of those children and their ability to concentrate to stay well so that they can do the work to be socially connected to the school and to that community and to trust and have faith in and build relationships with teachers and other children. Those things are impossible when the children may well have to move in just another month or so because of the family circumstances. 
Those are all problems and challenges that schools have to deal with in order to find some way to be relevant to these kids who are living lives of turmoil over which neither they nor their parents have any control. This is not about families neglecting their children or wanting to keep their children out of school. It is completely reasonable to see why children would not want to go to school in those circumstances. Why would they want to try to go through the whole process of going to another school with more kids more teachers and more relationships only to have that stripped away from them again because their parents have lost their jobs they have not been able to keep up with the rent they have been evicted and they have to move and find somewhere else to live? This is the real lives of the people we are talking about. 
What is the National Government’s response to these real lived lives? Those members know barely anything about this issue and they have virtually no contact with the kinds of communities that we are talking about here. What is their response? It is not to deal with the causes of the poverty that leads to this kind of turmoil and instability is it? There is no policy here to deal with the dislocation of these children. In fact the priority for National is to punish these families by fining them three times more than they would have been fined otherwise—$3000 a family. 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA (Labour—Ikaroa-Rawhiti) 
: 
 I rise to support the great speech made by my colleague Chris Carter in relation to what the Labour Government has done in the last 9 years. I see that Mr McClay has disappeared but he was huffing and puffing about those young people who were 8 9 and 10-year-olds and who are now 18 19 and 20. 
I would say to the Minister in the chair the Hon Anne Tolley—apart from congratulating her because she lives in Gisborne—that the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is quite a fascinating bill. We listened to debate on the bill providing a 90-day trial period for employees where National took away workers’ rights and said that it was good for them and took 2 percent off KiwiSaver and said it was good for people. Now standardised testing which has been tested internationally is something that turns around to more bad practice. I wonder whether there is a hint of that in this bill because when boutiques and the Esprit Group tried that practice in France and when people tried it in Wisconsin it turned towards being a voucher system. I ask whether this bill is the lead-in to that because it is quite incredible: we started off with the teachers being blamed then the parents and now it has become a monetary issue. If we double or triple the fine will that fix up the issue? How cranky is that? 
Mr Peachey said that a lot of the practices from his time in the classroom are now antiquated. Steve Maharey understood that and he moved to modernise the classroom. As Chris Carter said the Labour Government put a lot of effort into solving the problem of truancy and that is why it declined by 24 percent. I am really happy and thankful that this Minister of Education Anne Tolley has said teachers will not be affected by the 90-day probationary provision. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Courageous! 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: It is courageous stuff—great decision-making. I thank the Minister for that because she knows she said that like that beleaguered statement that was being tossed around over the other side of the House. We see the failed national standardised testing in the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill and it is being linked to other activities that National wants to bring in. We know what bulk funding did and we know how that practice got around. This is incredible. 
In the last two days when the Opposition has performed remarkably against a Government that is still trying to find its way we have all said that education is the cornerstone to going forward. There was something in the Speech from the Throne about invigorating and turbocharging the aspects of enterprise. I see Hekia Parata over there and she is a great educationalist. I am so proud of the Maori members in here. [ 
Interruption 
] That is right she is my cousin and I am so proud of her. I am so proud of Nanaia Mahuta who will most probably become the vice-chancellor of Waikato University. I am so proud of Te Ururoa Flavell even though St Stephen’s School closed. He was the principal and he knows about it. 
Hon Members 
: What about Paul Quinn? 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: And Paul Quinn went to Stanford University. I left school at 15 but I became one of the longest-serving Associate Ministers of Education in this country under the great Labour leadership so I learnt a fair bit. 
Few parents encourage truancy and members know that full well. We practised Te Hiringa i te Mahara which brought up the performance of schools up in the East Coast led by Parata and well resourced by this Government. If members go to the Tolaga Bay Area School—do members know where Tolaga Bay is?—they will see that every student who leaves that school goes somewhere. I say to Mr Bennett that at Turakina Maori Girls College where truancy was high and at St Joseph’s School all of those young ones go somewhere. They are not as privileged as he has been through life and Governments have to be careful in this standardised testing stuff not to create a bigger class distinction because a whole range of issues and ramifications both social and cultural are bound around truancy. 
Mr McLay talked about Murupara. We gave the people of Murupara a curriculum that was relevant to what the community wanted. They wanted to teach Ngati Manawa and we did that. Truancy came down through the Labour Government. Government members should be thankful that we supported the Education Review Office because if they want to construct frameworks of performance they should be sure about what they put into them. The Minister has not thought this through well enough she has just rushed this legislation and bleated and bleated about this being important. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I noticed twice during the member’s speech that he talked about “his Government”. I hate to remind him but there was an event on 8 November in which Labour lost the election. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: That is not a point of order. 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 I rise to speak in this debate this evening and I want to endorse the comments of the Hon Chris Carter that truancy is indeed a bad thing. No one in this House would regard truancy as a good thing and very few parents across New Zealand would regard truancy as a good thing. Tonight we are debating an issue that is sufficiently serious for the parents of this country to deserve a chance to discuss it and debate it. I am appalled that we are sitting here tonight when this bill has not gone through the select committee process. That is an outrage. There are parents out there with good and important views to be heard on the issue of truancy. 
I want to ask Minister in the chair Anne Tolley a number of questions. How much work was done to talk to parents about truancy before this bill was put in place? How much work has that Minister done to find out the real reasons behind truancy? What are the real things that are causing students not to go to school? I am looking for the Minister to take a call and let us know how much research she has done on what is causing truancy in this country. The parents of this country deserve a chance to have a say about this bill. 
This Government has come in and has been so arrogant within the first week that it is not even prepared to refer this bill to a select committee. There are important views to be heard from parents right across New Zealand on truancy and I simply cannot believe that this Government would not be prepared to put the bill before a select committee. Is it because it is ashamed of the bill? Is that why it is doing this? This Government needs to know the views of parents the views of teachers and the views of truancy officers right across the country. We need a proper discussion about this and the only conclusion I can draw is that the Government simply does not care about the views of parents. That is the conclusion I draw from the fact that there is no select committee process. 
Allan Peachey 
: Rubbish! 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: I ask Mr Peachey whether he wants the bill to go to a select committee. Would he like to hear the views of parents? We need to have a proper debate on this issue. Mr Peachey is the chair of the Education and Science Committee. It would have been a perfect opportunity for him to have heard the views of parents from right across New Zealand. 
I have a number of questions for the Minister. As I said I would like to know from her what work she has done to talk to parents and to students who have been truants. What work has she done to find out what the real reasons behind truancy are? On this side of the Chamber we want to know a little bit more from Mrs Tolley about what research is being done around whether increasing fines will actually reduce truancy. What do we actually know about the impact of increasing the fines on truancy rates? Has the Minister got an answer for that? I look forward to her taking a call on that matter. At the moment all we have is a bill that puts the fines up to $3000 to make sure that the National Government can show it has done something about truancy in its first week. This is all about the politics of the National Government; it is not about reducing the rates of truancy. 
I also want to hear from the Minister whether she has analysed any research from overseas about what has happened in the area of truancy. We do not know anything at this stage about whether the Minister has talked to educationalists around the world about what works when it comes to reducing truancy. That is the kind of information we would have been able to find out during the select committee process. But this Minister and this National Government do not want to hear real research and real information about what might work in terms of reducing truancy because they simply do not care about the views of parents. 
National has come in and had 1 week of shameful behaviour. It has been ramming legislation through the House and not making any time for the views of parents right across New Zealand. That Minister needs to stand up take a call and answer the questions. Has she talked to truants? Has she talked to parents of truants? Does she know what the international research on truancy is? Can she tell us whether there is any research internationally— 
Hon Annette King 
: She’s not writing it down. 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: She is not writing it down? Do we think she can remember the questions? I will ask them again for the benefit of the Minister. Has the Minister talked to the parents of truants? Has she undertaken any studies of truancy internationally that we can learn from? Where are the experts whom we could have heard from on this bill? 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 It is very very clear that this is a punitive measure rather than a constructive one. This is not about making schools a place where students want to go; it is about punishing them when they do not make it through the gate. What is wrong with making schools places where kids want to go rather than places where they are forced to go? That is a much more constructive approach. 
Mr Flavell talked before about truancy being particularly high amongst Maori students so surely a big part of that and a big part of solving it is making school a place where Maori students feel comfortable and a place where they actually want to be rather than trying to make schools into one-size-fits-all places which is exactly what the rest of this bill does. National will impose these standards and tests and make school a one-size-fits-all place and if one does not conform one will just get shoved out the door. 
Hon Parekura Horomia 
: Nanny State! 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: That is right. I have a number of questions as well and I hope the Minister will take the time to write these down. She has not written down any of the other questions—she will lose track I am sure—but I am certain she will give us a good explanation. I am sure she will not listen to Simon Power who put his finger to his lips to stop her standing up and taking the last call.