Yang JianDr JIAN YANG (National): This is a bill that goes backwards and it seeks to reverse two key changes that were made by the Education Amendment Act in early 2015. It proposes to change the name of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand or EDUCANZ to the Teaching Council of Aotearoa and also to revert to a teachers' code of ethics rather than a code of conduct.The National-led Government has made a consistent effort to modernise our education system. We are determined to give education providers parents and families more options so that our young New Zealanders are able to succeed in an increasingly complex digital and global world. So that is our consistent effort and our focus is students and we are determined to make sure that students can achieve. So that is our focus and that is our aim.It is against this background that the National-led Government has made numerous changes basically to make sure that our education system is modernised. This includes the current Education (Update) Amendment Bill which we will consider further tomorrow morning. In early 2015 we passed the Education Amendment Act and also changed the New Zealand Teachers Council to Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. We did this for some good reasons. Firstly the New Zealand Teachers Council was not well positioned to do a good job. The Education Workforce Advisory Group and a subsequent review committee both found that the previous New Zealand Teachers Council was not structured governed and positioned … [to] effectively set and enforce clear standards for entry progression and professional accountability with the full support of the profession."A ministerial advisory group commissioned to provide recommendations on the reforms of the New Zealand Teachers Council did recommend that the name of the new professional body should be the Teaching Council of New Zealand. However we believed that it was important to have a significantly different name because we would like to walk out of the shadow of a body that did not perform and we would like to have a fresh start. So this is the first point.Secondly teaching and learning involves not only teachers but also educators and teaching leaders and also students—most importantly students. So students have to be our focus. It is our responsibility to make sure that students do achieve and the name of Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand reflects that kind of thinking.Thirdly the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand reflects the bicultural nature of our teaching. That is another important point.The name proposed in this bill was actually used in 1996 by a voluntary independent and teacher-run body but that body lasted for just 2 years. It failed for all sorts of reasons. Most importantly it did not see the differences among all the education providers. So it is not a good idea to associate a new professional body with a failed body. The name can also be misleading because it does not reflect our efforts to focus on students' achievement in the modern environment.With regard to the code of conduct provisions the old code of ethics was problematic and the new code of conduct is necessary. This is based on the findings of three separate expert advisory groups including the 2010 Education Workforce Advisory Group the 2012 ministerial inquiry into the employment of a convicted sex offender in the education sector and the 2012 report about the review of the New Zealand Teachers Council. All three reports pointed out the problems with this code of ethics. The code of ethics was not comprehensive was not binding was unable to resolve the issue of the employment of convicted sex offenders and it was also hard to use by employers to make assessments of professional conduct. So for all these reasons it was necessary to replace the code of ethics with a new upgraded code of conduct.We do need to learn the lesson and move on. As I said earlier we are focusing on students and their achievement. We all know that quality teaching and learning is particularly important in raising the achievements of our students but to have that quality of learning and teaching we need to have strong trust in the profession by the general public by the families and by the students—the learners. So how do we do that? A code of conduct in that sense is essential.As we know now the member's bill is now redundant because we now have a draft code of conduct and also what we call professional standards. That draft code has gone through a range of thorough professional consultation—a lot of very thorough consultation in the sector including teachers education providers and also leaders. It is currently out for public consultation. So in a sense this bill itself is indeed redundant. It is important to note that the draft code did not come from nowhere but builds on the existing 2003 teachers' code of ethics. It is an upgraded and updated code of conduct. So this is not a new set of new standards; these are just based on the existing standards and they make sure that we make it more updated and modernised.I need to emphasise that this bill demonstrates that Labour has run out of ideas. It is simply recycling failed bills. That is what it is doing. Instead the National-led Government has been making a consistent effort to modernise our education system. We have made so many changes—the communities of online learning or COOLs and a code which we are talking about now. There are so many changes and we are now simply trying to make sure that our education system after so many years can finally catch up with the changes in the world.For that reason I would like to thank our very capable Minister of Education the Hon Hekia Parata. She has been working tirelessly in the education sector and meeting so much resistance from the Opposition. Yet we are pushing forward and we are pleased to see—Simon O'Connor: A great leap forward.Dr JIAN YANG: Yes a great leap forward. We are very pleased to say that we are indeed delivering and achieving and we are very confident that New Zealanders will see a very different very modernised and very very advanced education system in New Zealand and all the public and all the parents will cheer for us. Thank you."