Salesa Jenny: Education Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSalesa Jenny: Education Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8663. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker for the opportunity to speak on this omnibus Education Legislation Bill. This bill is proposedbecause it will apparently improve as we heard from the previous speaker Jian Yang the administration and the governance arrangements for educational entities as well as funding organisations. I note that this is the first omnibus bill of its kind for education in over a quarter of a century. If passed it would amend eight different pieces of legislation to ensure that they align with the Government’s policy objectives.According to the general policy statement the bill will make operational and administrative changes to early childhood education and to compulsory schooling as well as to the tertiary education sector. The proposed changes span the breadth of our education system allowing tertiary institutions to sponsor charter schools creating the role of a “super-principal” allowing the State Services Commissioner to approve generic or specific terms and conditions of employment adjusting school opening hours and modernising the Pacific Islands Polynesian Education Foundation Act 1972 amongst many other things. These are very wide-ranging changes to the education system. These are a myriad of issues and the changes that this bill proposes are way way too wide. I have time to touch on only one possibly two of those matters.Firstly I turn to the measures allowing principals to run multiple schools. Labour is certainly very open to discussion about how best to encourage collaboration between schools as well as to reduce the negative impacts of the competitive model of schooling. But taking a successful principal and first diluting their positive impact on their own school and then second stretching them thinly across other schools and hoping for beneficial effects on par with the current successes that they are actually enjoying in their school is I believe taking a huge gamble with our children’s future.Are the successful principals in our community keen to do this? In my electorate of Manukau East there is an excellently performing school which some of you may have heard of: McAuley High School an integrated Catholic school. I am very very proud of the achievements of girls and students at McAuley High School. The principal of this school is someone whom I really admire. She is hard working she is passionate she is very intelligent and she is one of the best—one of the best—principals whom I know. She is aspirational for her students. She helps each and every one of her 800 students. She and her teachers help their girls to believe that they can achieve and that the sky is the limit. She helps them believe that they can succeed in life regardless of their home their socio-economic status or indeed even their race.The principal has informed me that it has taken her several years of dedicated effort with the support of a good governance board as well as the support of her teachers support of the parents and support of her students to get the results that they enjoy now at McAuley High School. Even the Education Review Office has decided that McAuley High School does not need to be reviewed in the next 3 years. It will not be reviewed again by the Education Review Office for another 5 years. McAuley High School outperforms other schools like it in the country. It even outperforms other schools that are decile 9 and 10. It is made up mainly of Pacific—David Seymour: Fabulous.JENNY SALESA: Maybe if you listen Mr Seymour you might learn a thing or two. It is made up mainly of female Pacific students. This is a community where the median income ranges from $19700 for those from the Māngere-Ōtāhuhu Local Board area up to $21000 for those from the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board area. Last year the McAuley High School pass rate for university entrance was 74 percent. The national average was 69 percent and many other schools like McAuley High School—because it is a decile 1b school—sit at around 40 percent. For National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 1 at McAuley High School it was 90 and 95 percent—Hon Hekia Parata: What’s this got to do with the bill?JENNY SALESA: The national pass rate was 81 percent. For level 2 it was 91 percent and for level 3 at McAuley High School it was 91 percent compared with the national average of 78 percent.These academic results are astonishing. McAuley High School results are transformational for the students. They are transformational for their families and for our local communities. You would think—this is where it relates to this bill—that the principal of this school would be the very sort of principal who should be asked to manage a super-school pursuant to this bill but she does not want a bar of this. She is strongly dedicated to making a difference for her students for the girls in her school. She does not want to put any of that at risk. Similarly she says that she cannot imagine another principal coming in from the outside not knowing what things are like for her teachers and for her students and deciding how things should be done differently in her school.Hon Hekia Parata: Read the bill.JENNY SALESA: I have read the bill. According to this principal the success that is elsewhere perhaps based on theory and success that others have met in other schools would not necessarily be successful for her school. Our children—our students—must be at the centre. The changes we propose in this House must be about what works for our children. Putting principals in charge of multiple schools is gambling with our children’s education and their future. Further looking at the details a bit more having a principal reporting to multiple boards of trustees is fraught with risk. This could create significant accountability issues that would need to be carefully worked through.I would like to turn now to the provisions relating to charter schools. This Education Legislation Bill allows for the expansion of the charter schools model to many other schools. I am most familiar with the charter schools model in the United States particularly charter schools in the state of Michigan where my husband and I lived for 10 years. The state of Michigan introduced an unlimited number of charter schools. The model was brought in from other states because it was touted as a silver bullet—as the solution especially for educational failure rates of African-American Latino and other ethnic minority students. There are over 10 million people who live in the state of Michigan. In the city of Detroit charter schools were opened left right and centre. Educational success for these students was supposed to improve. Detroit was supposed to save millions. Instead the educational success rate either remained static or as in most of the schools went downhill and worse the city of Detroit became bankrupt.Charter schools are a very expensive experiment here in New Zealand. The few charter schools that we have here right now have been and continue to be plagued with problems. Only a few streets away from the school that I spoke about earlier on McAuley High School we have a charter school that has been opened—a Pacific charter school to be exact. It is apparently supposed to deal with the issues of Pacific students. It is supposed to fix the issues for our community. That is just disgraceful when you already have a school with over 90 percent Pacific female students who are already doing very well. McAuley High School is achieving way better than many other schools across the country here in New Zealand.We do not support this bill. Thank you.