Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:661;Page:9646] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 Labour is supporting the Education Amendment Bill and that is a change in our position from the first reading of the bill. We think that it has been improved in the Education and Science Committee and it has gone from being a 55:45 decision one way to a 60:40 decision the other way. So we will debate this bill through the House. Unless there are any further amendments from the Minister of Education with which we disagree we will support the bill as we progress. 
We agree with the changes especially the improvements to the vetting procedure that came to the committee on the question of home-based care and on the very real danger of people who are not responsible for children but are living in homes where home-based care is occurring. It is a gap in the legislation and a gap that I am happy to acknowledge as a former Minister of Education who was involved in a lot of the development of this legislation back in the early 2000s. 
There is always a very fine balance when it comes to working out what limits we are prepared to go to in order to protect children. We want to make sure that as far as is possible everything reasonable is done but no one wants to get tied up so much in a bureaucracy that schools cannot get on with doing what they want to do and that people cannot be involved with their children in schools as parent helpers and in similar types of arrangements. We always want people to be involved if they can. I think that the test we have got to in this legislation relating to people having charge of children and to people not being alone with children without being vetted is about right. I think that the world has changed a lot certainly in the 30-odd years or a bit longer than that now since I was in a classroom— 
Louise Upston 
: Bit longer than that. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: —bit longer than that—with primary school - aged children. Our practices were very different at that stage. I can remember teaching form 2 kids at South Wellington Intermediate. We had a store cupboard at the back of the room as many classrooms did and still do and that is where I did remedial reading with both boys and girls on their own with the door shut to stop them from being embarrassed by their inability to read. No one ever challenged the practice at that stage. I would tend to say that these days it is something that is unlikely to be done and it would be seen to be inappropriate. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: Not in a store cupboard anyway. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well “store cupboard” is probably the wrong term for it but it had a wee table and it had books around the outside. It was a room that was probably— 
Moana Mackey 
: A schoolroom. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: —a schoolroom; I thank my colleague—2 metres by 3 metres in size or something like that. It was not a broom cupboard. But the point I am trying to make is that it was somewhere where there was no line of sight from outside that room into the room. What I am saying is that my judgment at that time and the judgment I think of most teachers at the time was that it was better to protect kids of 11 12 and 13 from embarrassment about their lack of reading skills—effectively from being laughed at by some of the other kids—and I did not contemplate the questions that might arise. Times have changed and I suppose that it is the best thing but I am not quite sure whether society has changed in the right way because of the assumptions that occur. 
Most of the amendments in this legislation were in the bill that the Minister’s predecessor introduced in September 2008. I think it was called the Education Amendment Bill (No 3). The Minister has made some changes and some areas have been added and some other areas have been left out. I think that the question of getting the data matching between the Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education is very important. I think there was probably an assumption again at the time that the legislation was introduced that it could be done automatically. I think we thought that there would not be a restriction on it. No doubt someone from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner or—God bless her—maybe Marie Shroff can sometimes be slightly overzealous in that area. But there is no doubt that getting that information matching will help both ways. It will help the Ministry of Education in making sure that it is getting the right people and it will also help identify the people in the schools who are not currently registered. That in most cases will not matter very much but some individuals are likely to be there who should not be in schools and this is a good way without incurring much cost at all other than setting up the system to make sure that the data matching occurs. 
I think there was general acceptance of the idea that it might take more than 3 months after the suspension of a teacher’s practising certificate to sort a case through and I think there is quite a lot of support for the ability of the Teachers Council to extend the suspension for another 3 months as the case is worked through. One area provided an interesting period at the select committee and I think it was an education for some of the newer members of Parliament as they watched MMP at work. An unusual coalition developed for the Green Party. I must say that I think it was an interesting exercise for Catherine Delahunty who was a new member at the time to learn a little bit of the art of compromise in working through the system because she found it pretty hard to vote with the ACT Party—which she did in the end—in order to make an amendment to the bill. The amendment was supported by Labour the Greens and ACT but it was not supported by National which was promoting the bill. 
That amendment effectively put us in a position to have commissioners and other statutory managers of schools similar to receivers in companies that are under statutory management whereby there is an individual or sometimes two individuals responsible for that. These are the people on whom fingers can be put and to whom direct contacts can be made people who are responsible rather than having as was proposed by the Minister a fairly bland and broad corporate in charge. I think unreasonably the Greens and maybe even some of my colleagues saw some dangers of privatisation out of that route. I say to those people that I think a relatively long bow was being drawn and I did not mind getting a Green vote because of that concern; I think it was probably something I was not that anxious about. But what I would be anxious about—and will be anxious about again—is the ability of the Minister of Education to pick up the phone to ring an individual and say to that individual: “You are the person whom I have appointed commissioner of this school. I want a report from you. I want your view on this.” I would not want to ring the switchboard at PricewaterhouseCoopers and try to work my way through the system after that. That is the reason why I have promoted what I think is a bit of a compromise in order for that to happen. 
One area of concern that I have and we will get to it at a later stage of the bill is that a section concerning the responsibility of boards that was in the original legislation is not in this bill. I think it would have been good for that to occur and we will get back to that. But as I indicated we do not think this bill will make an enormous difference to the quality of education but it will make the administration a bit tidier.