Maharey Steve: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Maharey Steve: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4160] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I think that is all the speakers in the debate so let me just review a few of them if I can for a moment. I thank those who have participated in the debate. As I think Mr Peachey said at the beginning this is one of the areas we ought to be talking about and I will reflect for a moment on what I think the argument was that he was putting forward about the nature of modern education—meaning to offer a lot more choice flexibility and responsiveness to pupils their parents and the community. There are a number of ways we could do this. 
I remember some time ago I had the privilege of being in Minneapolis - St Paul when they offered full choice total choice to people just within the city. As people know Minneapolis - St Paul straddles quite a large area but it is a compact area. I arrived there just after the educational authorities had stopped their experiment with choice of the kind that used to go with the model whereby one allowed people to go to any school they wanted to. The reason they had stopped was that within 6 months of allowing people to take their children wherever they wanted to and make that free choice to go to any school their bus budget had blown out by US$22 million. That is of course why countries do not opt for that kind of choice because if they did they would be paying for people to transport themselves all around the schools. The other thing they found that was a corollary of that policy was people immediately shifted into black and white schools which Minneapolis - St Paul now has a legacy of. 
I think that that does not mean we should not be offering choice flexibility or responsiveness but I guess the way we are approaching it is to ask ourselves how we can make sure that every school is able to take pupils in the classroom and tailor the learning to what they actually need. That has to be our ambition. 
I notice that the OECD is now talking about that being the ambition for the countries that it represents—that the educational policy should move away from the mass form of education of the last century which we all know was the vision we had here. We all went through it. We sat in large classes and we got pretty much one-way traffic from the teacher. It did not matter whether we learnt fast slow or whatever our learning style was we kind of took what was given to us. I think that was totally cutting edge education in those days. 
These days I think we would say that unless we can more and more begin to address the speed at which students learn the style in which they learn and their interests so that they maximise their opportunities at school we are not doing a good job for them. But my ambition and this Government’s ambition is to try to deliver that level of choice school by school by school—not to have us say that some schools are not doing so well so that we end up with ghettos where some kids cannot get out and the kids who can migrate have gone off to schools where they can do it. 
So I do not think we disagree on the ambition I say to Mr Peachey. I think our vision this century has to be how to have the kind of teaching and leadership— 
Hon Bill English 
: Why do you always agree with us? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Well I always agree with people who make common sense statements—I am coming to Mr English in a moment. Mr Peachey raises interesting points and so does Mr Donnelly but Mr English is a different kettle of fish. We are saying we agree I think on what we need from education but we have to have some interesting debates about how we get there. So let us keep that discussion rolling. 
I say to Mr Donnelly just to respond to the university staff business that I was delighted to see that staff are to receive some more money. It is ridiculous that people can study for a post-doctorate qualification for 3 years—they might have been off doing some insecure research somewhere—and they start on $45000. I mean who is kidding who? Few people will stay in the university system in this country if those are the kinds of wages available to them. And of course we have to put up with the fact that as a country we cannot afford the kind of library facilities or infrastructure that there may be in some of the better universities around the world. Let us not applaud other universities too much. If one is in the French German or other university systems one can be in some pretty ratty universities but the best universities can offer enormous advantages to students who have gone on to get a good PhD and so on. So we have to fight for our share of those people and getting a lift in their wages is one of the ways of doing it. 
I would encourage universities to come under a multi-employer collective agreement. That is the answer I think to having differentials between different universities. 
Hon Bill English 
: More social democratic nonsense. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I think it is a good social democratic idea—and I thank Mr English for reminding me. But that is one of the answers to try to make sure we get that kind of compensation across the sector. That does not stop a university saying that it will pay Mr Donnelly the same amount of money that it is paying Mr Peachey but on top of that Mr Donnelly is somebody the university wants to hold on to because of his research record so it will pay him some more. At least it gives a basic comparison across the sector and I think a multi-employer collective agreement would do that. 
Maybe a universal loan is something that New Zealand First wants to put up in the next round post the next election and Mr Donnelly certainly would not find me resisting the general argument of why we would want a universal allowance. It is an idea that we have clearly signalled we would like to go to if we could afford to prioritise that kind of expenditure. So that is something that stays on the ground. 
The languages policy is something that worries me quite a lot. We do not have a great languages policy at the present time. We do know that we will cover the three official languages—sign language Maori and English. We know we have the languages policy around the larger Pacific Island languages which means that we will not do total immersion but what we are paying for is to ensure that those languages are able to be taught. In areas where there are large numbers of Tongan and Samoan students and so on students should have access to their language but the member is right. In Counties-Manukau at the present time 164 languages are present in that community and there is no way that the New Zealand educational community will be able to say that because someone comes from Somalia and there are 30 people in that person’s community in Wellington the educational community will be able to provide a full effort for that person to be involved in that curriculum. 
My belief is that the best way forward is to guarantee our three official languages and to look at those languages that have large constituencies where people may want to be able to speak them. In the case of the Tongan language for example in an area like Auckland we could have schools where 80 percent of the students come from Tongan families and we could offer quite substantial language tuition in those schools. Elsewhere I think we should simply offer language tuition in the way that we traditionally have where people can learn French German or whatever. That policy has to become clear in the very near future because we are in deep trouble if we do not resolve that issue. So I think that is a very very good point. 
I will just turn to Mr English who is known as the new conservative. I do not know whether people know this. I thought it was an oxymoron—new conservative—but an oxymoron is what Mr English wants to represent himself to be. Of course we know that all this talk about leadership here tonight is really just a projection I think Freudian psychoanalysts call it because he is concerned about his own leadership opportunities and we have seen that time and time again in the House as he tries to prepare for it. It is hard as the newspapers say. How does one come back from having destroyed the health system and the economy and from having been the leader of a party through the worst campaign anybody can remember in its history? How does one come back from all that? That is why I think it has been so difficult for Mr English this evening. It would be good if he did not go through all those kinds of things and force people to argue with him but of course that is what he did this evening. 
He did raise some points that I want to mention. I think that the majority of people right throughout the education sector regard the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) as being the best way to go. Mr English may want to return to norm referencing but the educational community does not. The educational community wants to move on with standards-based assessment and it knows the bulk of it is going well. It wants to see effort put into refining the system so that it becomes as good as it can be. 
Mr English claims constantly that people do not recognise issues. We do. There are things wrong with the system at the present time. It is only 3 years old; there are many things we still have to do. There have been 226 changes made to it already and a lot more changes will be made in the future. But what we have at the present time is a system that is working well. After the assessment season last year it has worked well. We have had good fair consistent assessment across the bulk of students. 
When we go back to the kinds of debates that have been raised here we see these kinds of spurious debates all the time. Mr English for example tells us about a piece of research. I am not sure whether he noticed this but the Government actually commissioned the research—both lots of research. We asked for them because we want to improve the system. We were told by Luanna Meyer from a good research team that the system is fundamentally sound but that we have some improvements to make. Those improvements mainly rest upon the way teachers use the NCEA system. Professional development as they begin to understand how to use the system will mean that the system will be used a whole lot better. 
It has always been a problem to motivate students. I would ask how many people in the House who have a university degree did not at some time during it get what was called a “gentleperson’s C”. Lawyers often ask themselves how much work they really need to do to get through a law course—I imagine that Mr Simon Power now and again said to himself that he would pull back on one course because he needed to put a little more into something elsewhere. He might like to stand up later and tell us what his transcript says he got at university. I imagine that it is outstanding but I imagine also that the odd “C” appears because he kind of cruised through some of his courses. 
Did he lack motivation in the way Mr English wants to define it? Did he get lazy? Did he sit back and say that he did not want to do it? Of course not. People who go through all the assessment we have in this country will make some choices and it is up to teaching teachers and leadership. We have a chance to use the system to motivate students to do better. People in the House who like Mr Donnelly me and Mr Peachey have taught in classrooms know that that is the job of the teacher. This system does not de-motivate people; it actually stretches them more than any system has ever done before because it offers them the chance to reach a level of excellence that they have never had before. It is down to the teaching. That is what Luanna Meyer told us in that research and that is what we will have to focus on. 
I will move on to what we are spending our money on. Let me just remind Mr English of the things we are spending our money on. We are focused on great teaching great leadership adequate resourcing for our schools keeping kids at school until they are 16 and making sure that clear boundaries are set for good behaviour in schools so they can focus on what they are doing. We are focusing on foundation skills so kids can read and write. We are focusing on the teaching and learning in secondary schools where we think major changes are yet to be made. We are focusing on parents and the wider community engaging with their schools to ensure they are doing as much as they possibly can. Those are the things we are focused on. 
If we do all of those things well we will take a good system and turn it into a great system. Going back to Mr Peachey that has to be the aim of every member here—not the nit-picking of the man who calls himself a new conservative and is waiting to try to take over the National Party.