Dean Jacqui: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Dean Jacqui: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2659] 
JACQUI DEAN (National—Otago) 
: 
 I was going through my mail just before and this little story is relevant to the title and commencement of this bill: I spent a wonderful hour with the pupils of St Josephs School in Oamaru a couple of months ago speaking to them about leadership and challenges. I have just received the replies from the students. They are year 8 students in a school of year 7 and 8 students. It is excellent to receive these replies. They are absolutely delightful and they speak from the heart. 
I want to read to members one little paragraph from a pupil: “Once I have compared your job to my role as a year 8 there is not much difference in them because we both have people relying on us. We also have to make decisions that would affect others.” So that is a little bit relevant because I believe that education is about children. There is so much to enjoy and to celebrate in education and to see the level of literacy and the level of good thinking going on in those year 8 children is wonderful. 
The Education Amendment Bill should be about children but I believe that some parts of it are more about an increase in bureaucracy an increase in regulation and a decrease in the role of parents. I believe that the bill proposes to impose extra costs on early childhood centres. Those costs come as costs in time extra costs in money and costs in teacher resources. 
I will confine my comments mostly to Part 1. When parents drop their children off at an early childhood centre they really need to know that the teachers are caring for their children and looking after them—and that “care” word is very important. They need to know that the early childhood educators at those licensed centres are not just filling in forms not spending too much of their time in a cramped office—because that is what they always are very cramped—filling in forms and accounting for themselves measuring reporting and prescribing minimum standards. What we want in our early childhood educators those people looking after our kids is for them to be out there with our kids—playing with them reading to them reading with them talking to them and doing numbers with them. 
When I was in Alexandra several months ago—this is another story—I visited an early childhood centre and it was a wonderful place. The sun was shining and the kids were all playing under a shady tree and having a wonderful time. But the supervisor of the childcare centre spent all her time showing me what she has to do to account for what she does—and this was before the provisions of this bill have been brought in which will add further to the work she does. For example she showed me a box full of notebooks. Each one of those notebooks described the progress of a 2-year-old. Well OK! Then there was another set of notebooks that had other pieces of information in them. It seemed to me that we already have plenty of regulation in the early childhood sector. 
I am also concerned about section 317(2)(b) in clause 43 which states: “authorise the Secretary after consultation with those organisations that appear to the Secretary to be representative of persons likely to be substantially affected by these regulations to prescribe criteria to be used by the Secretary to assess compliance with the minimum standards imposed by these regulations:”. So it is not the parents who are making the regulations and minimum standards for early childhood centres and it is not the parents who are making decisions about the care of their children but a ministry representative. Now I am not sure that I support that. In fact I do not support that. 
Parents will not be making regulations and minimum standards; the Ministry of Education bureaucrats will be. I do not support anything that takes power away from parents in this regard. The ministry will have the ability to make regulations that take responsibility away from Parliament. I do not think that a bureaucrat is the best person to set standards for the care of my child. I think that parents need to have a very strong say in the care of their children. A basic principle to me is that all of us are in danger of regulating all the fun and risk out of childhood.