English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4158] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 The Minister in the chair the Hon Steve Maharey should tell us why Parliament is bothering to appropriate any money for him and his ministry. Appropriating the money through these estimates for students and teachers is fine but in the fading months maybe few years of his career the Minister needs to do something better than try to spend all his time oiling the social democratic consensus around Wellington about education. That is what he says it is about. He told the  
New Zealand Herald  
a couple of months ago that the problem with the National Party was that it was trying to “wreck the social democratic school system”. Well we are not appropriating money for a plaything of the left elite; we are appropriating money so that students get the best education we can give them. The Minister should get up and tell us just where the momentum is in his education policy. Because there is none. At least with Trevor Mallard as education Minister—it might have been all in the wrong direction or all over the place and sometimes right—at least he had some energy and momentum. No doubt Minister Maharey is so thoroughly burnt from the mess he made in tertiary education—and I hope so because I would not want to see him trying too hard in schooling if he were going to have the same impact as he had in tertiary education. I want to know where his sense of direction is that is not any more than overseeing the last remaining momentum of the moves that Trevor Mallard made. 
I would like the Minister to give us his considered analytical rather than political opinion about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. This year three things have happened with that certificate. The first is that in the external examinations 30 percent of the results fell outside the National Certificate of Educational Achievement benchmarks for valid results. I did not make that up; that is the analysis. The second is that his ministry did a survey that showed there are major problems with motivation for the large bulk of students— “If you make it easy they’ll take it easy.” And they are! Over three-quarters of students get only an “achieved” or “not achieved”. The trend to unit standards in internal assessment is picking up speed because students think that that is the easy way to get through. 
The third thing is the revelations over the weekend that the internal assessment moderation is actually a joke. I can recall the new chief executive of the ministry when she was in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority saying the ministry moderated every standard every year. Well that is just nonsense. The Minister stood up in the Chamber today and said: “Oh it’s only 3 percent of the standards.” and then admitted that it was a sample. If the ministry moderates only 3 percent what happens to the other 97 percent? So we have no idea what is going on. The 3 percent is a sample—a slightly biased sample if we believe what the rules say. Of course the Minister has no idea whether teachers are sending in the assessments they should be—no idea at all. There is no way of telling whether teachers are doing what the New Zealand Qualifications Authority says they are. So those are three pieces of evidence and none of them is being listened to. Each one of them has a solution that has been tried out thought through and implemented in other jurisdictions. But no the Minister is so fixed on his social democratic position—keeping faith with the left in case he can have a shot at the Labour leadership—that he will not concede one single issue. 
Now he has a new chief executive of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority who does not know anything about education. They have appointed Bali Haque who has been one of the strongest political proponents of it in every controversial media story as the senior civil servant in charge of it. So now nothing is going to happen. It is all perfect it is all right! The fact that thousands of students get the wrong result does not matter nearly as much as maintaining the Wellington pinko consensus about education and how it is working! 
It is the same consensus that is preventing parents from getting access to information about their schools. We have had a bit of a tussle over the last 12 months or so over the SchoolSmart website and apparently it is going to bring down civilisation if parents find out that the school their child is at is going off the rails. Everyone else is allowed to know—the Minister the bureaucrats the Education Review Office—but parents are not allowed to know. 
To make a total nonsense of that position RateMyTeachers.com shows up in New Zealand. That is a website where they rate their teachers. It has all sorts of gossip and malicious material on it and they should filter out more. But that is where the technology is taking us. The last time I looked was a couple of weeks ago and there were 50000 ratings of teachers in just about every secondary school in New Zealand. Actually on average most teachers rate above average—once they have enough postings on the ratings out of five most of them are over 2½. That is not a bad thing. But it makes a nonsense of the Minister’s trying to sit on valuable tested and reliable data that would be available instead of malice and gossip from kids. Of course the union has come out and said it will take legal action and figured out very quickly that that looked really stupid. So now we are all allowed to sit in the comfort of our own homes and read gossip about any teacher anywhere in the country and what the kids think. We can know that in great detail but we cannot know the valid objective data the Minister of Education has. 
The Minister stood in the Chamber and said firstly that we could not have it because it was collected on the basis that it would not be divulged. That is wrong. There is no formal arrangement. He did not know or he deliberately misled us. Then he stood up and said that all those groups agree that it should not be made available. Well I have written to all the groups. School trustees do not agree. They are trying to get access to it. So far from being opposed to its being available they want access to it. The Post Primary Teachers Association has no formal policy position on it—except that it does not like it. It suspects that it will now become public. The New Zealand Educational Institute has got formal resolutions. The Secondary Principals Association will not reply and I think that that is because it cannot decide. 
Even if they all did agree to keep that information secret they cannot all agree to break the law. In fact it is official information and should be available under the Official Information Act. But what does the Secretary for Education do? I sent him a request under the Official Information Act and first he said he had lost it so I sent it again. Then he took about 5 weeks to read my two-paragraph letter and then said that I could not ask him; I had to ask the Minister. Well it is on the Minister’s plate. The Official Information Act request was for the website—not access to it—in electronic form and he has to decide whether he will make it available. 
The Minister does not care about the information; he just wants to make sure that his mates in the unions and the upper reaches of the Labour Party believe that he is a true believer and he is not going to let anyone wreck his social democratic school system. Does it not make one wonder what they talk about when they all get together in the Minister’s office about how they are going to defend the social democratic school system from nasty right-wingers like parents! 
Hon Steve Maharey 
: Like you. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well I am. I believe that parents should make their decisions about schools on the basis of the best information the Government can give them not prejudice or decile rating. Because that is the system that the Minister prefers. 
 What this Government does is to put an index of brownness on every school and make sure that everyone knows what it is. That is the only objective data the Government provides to every New Zealand parent—that is a decile rating. Nothing could be more misleading about educational achievement or progression of students than the decile rating of a school but this Minister thinks that is fine because he does not care. All that matters to that Minister is that he is quietly managing his portfolio and keeping Dr Cullen off his back in order to maintain his credentials as a potential Labour leader—and the momentum is gone.