Hipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 14 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:9856. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):The very first question that any member of the House should ask themselves when debating any legislative change regarding education is whether this is going to be good for education. That should be our first question when we are debating any changes in the education system and on that count this bill the Education Amendment Bill fails at the very first hurdle because it will not be good for education. The question the Government asked itself was: “How do we get the votes in the House? Well we do it by giving John Banks charter schools.” It asked: “Is this consistent with Act Party ideology?” rather than: “Is this consistent with the evidence-based approach to education?”.We should start from the presumption that we have a very good education system in New Zealand. Our challenge is not to fix something that is not broken; it is to take a very good education system and make it a great education system. We can do that. We can do that but there is no evidence—no evidence—that charter schools are going to lead to improved results for New Zealand kids. There is no evidence—in fact there is very compelling evidence to the contrary—that having unqualified teachers in classrooms will lead to better educational outcomes. It will not. It is a recipe for disaster.Narrowing the focus of the education system in the way that the current Government is intent on doing is not going to be good for New Zealand kids. We should be focused on making sure that every student in New Zealand has the opportunity to reach their full potential and that means teaching them a broad and balanced curriculum—Hon Hekia Parata: Correct.CHRIS HIPKINS: I am glad Hekia Parata agrees with that because everything that this Government is doing—everything that this Government is doing—goes in the opposite direction. It goes in the direction of narrowing the focus of our education system down to two measures of success. Hekia Parata has two measures of success: national standards and National Certificate of Education Achievement level 2. According to Hekia Parata those are the only measures of success for our education system and that is fundamentally wrong. There are so many other things that go on within the education system that are far more important than that that Hekia Parata simply fails to acknowledge.This bill does not require even the head teacher in a charter school be a qualified and registered teacher. Even people who were in favour of charter schools—even the people who came to the select committee to argue in favour of charter schools—almost without exception argued that teachers teaching in them should be qualified and registered. Yet the Government continues to turn its back on amendments—Hon Hekia Parata: Then how do you account for the early childhood centres or kura kaupapa or trades academies?CHRIS HIPKINS: I think teachers in kura kaupapa should be registered teachers and the fact that we have a shortage of registered teachers in kura kaupapa is something that the Government should be focused on addressing not on lowering the bar—not on lowering the standard—for teachers.Hon John Banks: Shh!CHRIS HIPKINS: John Banks says “Shh!”. He does not like hearing the truth. He does not like hearing the truth although I suspect Mr Banks is going to hear a lot more about the truth in another area in the next few weeks. But let us talk about the truth around charter schools.Having unregistered and unqualified teachers in our schools will not be good for education. Who should we listen to on that? Well we could listen to one of the many contradictory statements that the Prime Minister has made about that because in fact a year ago John Key was telling the country—and I will give you a quote: “It’s not class sizes that matter; it’s the quality of teaching that we’re getting in our schools.” So what is the Government’s solution to that? The Government’s solution to that issue is simply to remove the requirement for teachers to be trained and qualified for the job that they are going to do because—make no bones about it—that is what this legislation does. It allows charter schools to be established without qualified and registered teachers and that is not going to be good for education.Under this legislation a teacher who has been the subject of disciplinary action in the State school system could go and teach in a charter school. And the Government members are silent. They are silent because they know that is true. A teacher who is suspended from the State school system could walk down the road to a charter school and they could get a job and there is nothing in this bill that will stop them from doing that—absolutely nothing in this bill will stop them from doing that. That is fundamentally wrong.I invite the Minister right now to tell me which clause stops this from happening. There is no clause. She is shaking her head because there is no clause that stops a teacher who is the subject of disciplinary action from teaching in a charter school. That is absolutely fundamentally wrong and Labour will under no circumstances support this. We recognise that the quality of teaching is vitally important to educational outcomes. It is the single biggest in-school influencer of student achievement and yet this Government—although it talks about valuing quality teaching—does so many things that go in the opposite direction.It is not just around charter schools. The Government promised to focus on teacher professional development and yet it has cut $15 million from the budget for teacher professional development. Under this National Government teachers have lost $15 million per year in professional development funding. That is not the action of a Government that cares about raising the quality of teaching in New Zealand.What did John Key say? Again after last year’s Budget when the Government thought that the big solution to improving the quality of education was to put more kids in every class what did John Key say? He said: “We have to find another way to go and lift those teacher quality outcomes. And we’ll go away and do that.” Well this seems to be his answer. John Key’s answer to lifting the quality of teaching in New Zealand is to remove the requirement for teachers to be trained and qualified. That is fundamentally wrong.The Government’s own advisers in the Ministry of Education who of course probably start their analysis of this from the question: “Is this good for education?”—what have they said? They have advised—and it is a quote—that there is a “potential for a negative impact on students’ education from teachers who do not meet the minimum standards for the profession”. That is what the Ministry of Education has said and it has also argued that changes in this bill will significantly damage the credibility of the Crown. I agree with the Ministry of Education that this bill will significantly damage the credibility of the Crown because the Government should be focused on lifting the quality of teaching in New Zealand and on making sure that every school in New Zealand is a good school—every school in New Zealand is a good school—not on trying to pour money into private profit-making institutions because money that is going towards the profits of the private providers of these charter schools is money that is not going into quality teacher education.I talked about teacher and school safety a moment ago and we agree with the amendments that have been made in this bill around the surrender and retention of student property. We worked through that process with the members of the Education and Science Committee very constructively and I want to thank all of the members of the select committee for the manner in which they approached that particular debate. I think we came to a very sensible compromise in the end.But I am concerned about students’ safety from being in classrooms with unqualified unregistered teachers and we were unable to reach any agreement on that because the Government followed Catherine Isaac’s advice. She came along and said: “Do not water down the purity of this legislation. The ideological purity of the legislation should not be watered down.” That was Catherine Isaac’s advice to the select committee and that was exactly what the National Government members on the select committee said that they would not do. There is—Hon Nikki Kaye: Is the member saying that children in early childhood centres are unsafe—is that what the member is saying? Is that what he’s saying to every single child in an early childhood centre?CHRIS HIPKINS: At least 50 percent of the teachers in early childhood centres have to be qualified and teachers in charter schools do not have to be qualified. Why should students in charter schools have a lower standard than those in early childhood education? In fact until this National Government came along we were working towards having 100 percent qualified teachers in early childhood education. But the Government does not like having qualified teachers because it has lowered the standard in early childhood education to 50 percent and now it is removing it altogether for charter schools.Actually we believe in quality teaching and we believe in having registered qualified teachers in classrooms including in early childhood education settings. That is something that this Government does not support so now it is going to lower the standard rather than focusing on how we get more teachers who are qualified and who are filling the skills shortages and gaps that we do have—and we have big gaps. Rather than focusing on that and rather than focusing on saying how we can improve the quality of teaching by making every teacher a brilliant teacher it is saying: “Let’s just do away with the requirements altogether.” and that is fundamentally wrong.There are so many other aspects of this legislation that are wrong which I am sure we will get into as we get to the debate in the Committee stage of this bill. Charter schools will not have to enrol students who live right next door. A charter school could decline the enrolment of a student who lives right next door to the school—no problem with that. There is nothing to stop a public school in Christchurch being forced to close by Hekia Parata only to have a charter school then pop up on exactly the same site and that is fundamentally wrong as well. That is also very very wrong.Charter schools will not have to teach to the curriculum. They will not have to teach to the New Zealand Curriculum. They will not have to teach science in the way that public schools have to do. Under the wording of this legislation they could teach creationism and there is nothing the Government could do to stop it. It is fundamentally wrong.This is bad legislation. It is going to be bad for education it is not based on evidence of what works and Labour will certainly not be supporting it. We have not supported it at all up to this stage and we will not be supporting it from this point onwards.