Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16322. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I am pleased that we have finally got to the debate on the Education Amendment Bill (No 2); I think it is fair to say that it will not take quite as long as it might have previously. I think there will be an interesting debate when we get to new Part 1A which we will debate after Part 1. 
That leaves us with a number of areas where Labour disagrees very firmly with National. The first area I will focus on is the question of whether entry to a State school should be a hereditary right; whether in the end someone whose parents or even grandparents went to a school should have a right to enter that school over and above someone who lives close to the school and who would otherwise be in the zone. It is the view of Labour—the very firm view of Labour—that State schools in New Zealand should not be subject to entitlement rights. People should not be able to pass down the right to attend particular schools. Generally this is from father to son; it is more often that way than from mother to daughter. The rule just about always concerns single-sex schools. I know National is firmly in favour of hereditary rights but generally that is not the case in New Zealand and for that reason we have amendments that focus on that question. 
Some amendments sitting on the Table focus on the question of private schools and their disciplinary procedures. The Law Commission undertook a very very thorough review of the law as it related to independent schools and made a series of recommendations. To give the Government credit it picked up a few of those recommendations but it did not pick up some of the more important ones and it was totally unable to tell the Education and Science Committee why. I am not blaming officials in this area—it is not their job to defend Government policy—but we were looking for reasons why some of the suggestions of the Law Commission were not picked up after its well-researched project. Because we did not get a good explanation we have in fact picked up two of the Law Commission’s recommendations ourselves. 
The first recommendation is pretty simple. It would make private schools’ disciplinary procedures available on request to students and their parents when students are facing suspension exclusion or expulsion. That seems pretty reasonable. We are not saying that the procedures have to be printed; they could be on a website and people could get them that way. They could be in a booklet. If we are to have a just approach to discipline within the private school system then having a system that records those processes and makes them available to students is as the Law Commission recommended pretty reasonable. We cannot see why a Government would not want to do that. 
In a similar vein the commission said schools should adhere to some basic procedural requirements. When students have been suspended their parents should have the right to request that the suspension be lifted or varied and have the right to make submissions in support of the request. Adequate notice of the proposed exclusion or expulsion should be given to the students and their parents. There should be a reasonable opportunity for the parents to attend a meeting. Again anyone who has any sense of natural justice would say that none of that should be a problem; it should be pretty much automatic. 
I do not want to in any way portray the Labour Party as a defender of independent schools but I say that most of them have very good processes. I think that very very few of them would have a problem with these recommendations. But as the Law Commission makes clear a few independent schools—some traditional and some I might describe as weird and wonderful—do not have processes that work in an appropriate manner. I see no reason why they should not have good processes. 
The next area I will focus on is the question of disciplinary processes to do with the Teachers Council. I thank the Minister in the chair the Minister of Education for inviting me to her office to give me a group of areas in relation to which she was proposing to table a late Supplementary Order Paper in the select committee. I think members of the select committee will agree that I probably ended up promoting the Supplementary Order Paper within the committee because I have no doubt that the disciplinary procedures for the Teachers Council are dated and do not work effectively. 
I acknowledge and I warn Ms Turei that Catherine Delahunty a member of the committee was not happy with that process. I agree with her: it was not good process. We asked both the unions the Teachers Council and the School Trustees Association to appear. None of us thought it was good process but then again none of us thought it would be worth waiting another couple of years till a similar bill came down the track and just leaving the gap there. That call was made. 
I must say—and I feel slightly surprised about this—I have read recently about a plan by the Minister for Tertiary Education for another Education Amendment bill mainly dealing with tertiary matters. It is too late now for this particular part but it might have been better process if in fact it had been associated with that legislation. As we are learning when Education Amendment bills occur they can be very broad. That would have been better process but that was not the case. 
Having said that the Minister and I talked about one area that we thought we would progress but which after she received further advice she chose not to move on. For me it was probably the most important issue that sat there—that is the fact that so often when cases are before the disciplinary tribunal there is a reflection across quite a big group of teachers because of the very poor suppression arrangements in the rules of the Teachers Council. Some very good work has been done by Simon Power on the suppression issue. 
I have picked up on that issue in Supplementary Order Paper 183 in my name. It would add new clauses 12DA and 12DB. They effectively incorporate those principles into the processes. We would move to an assumption of openness but then have the committee closed and have the ability to suppress names. No one wants to see the names of kids who have been molested by teachers published. But at the moment the rules of the Teachers Council are basically all or nothing. It is either all open or all closed. They do not have an ability there. 
There are two approaches. One is that we can write the rules for the council and those are set out in my Supplementary Order Paper. The Teachers Council says that it has not changed the rules because it thinks that the $1000 fine imposed on media organisations that breach suppression is not sufficient. I agree with the council. Media organisations want to get a lot of publicity. It is fair to say that probably the Minister and I both get calls on Friday nights and Saturday mornings from Sunday papers with case after case that they glory in. But they do have a case. It is reasonable that there should be an ability to focus on it. 
The alternative is set out in my second Supplementary Order Paper. New clause 12DC changes the $1000 fine to a $100000 fine. It does not rewrite the rules. That amendment would allow the Teachers Council to redo its rules and have proper suppression rules. It could name the teacher but protect the child. I think that would be reasonable and it would have a presumption of openness. At the moment that is not the case.