Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): We have a world-class public education system in Aotearoa New Zealand already. Most of our schools have Bring Your Own Device. Blended learning is already happening in most of our schools. So why is there a need for communities of online learning (COOL) schools? Some of the submitters told us that we have too many schools. We have a shortage of teachers however. Young people they need interaction with each other in terms of building up their social skills and interrelationships with adults including teachers. That is something that they cannot learn from a computer.The Hon Hekia Parata's communities of online learning proposal will see students sitting at home probably in their bedrooms in front of a laptop receiving their instructions directly from a computer—most likely from a private corporation probably an overseas private corporation. That is what this legislation will allow.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Order! I just want to draw to the member's attention—she may not have been here through the whole debate but the points she is making now have already been made several times by several speakers and it sounds much more like a first second or third reading speech rather than a Committee stage. In the Committee stage we are looking at submissions that were made before the select committee and the discussion around that we are looking at discussion of Supplementary Order Papers that are on the Table and questions to the Minister. I invite the member to move to new material please.JENNY SALESA: So I would like now to comment on a submission to the Education and Science Committee by Bronwyn Cross someone with over 40 years of experience as a secondary teacher a parent and a member of a board of trustees. What she told us in the select committee is that the communities of online learning are not about learning. I quote her: New Zealand schools already use online learning to expand options for students but they do it in the context of a learning relationship which includes face-to-face support within a wide range of other collaborative school experiences". COOLs as it is currently being proposed will take away the emotional content students being able to learn how to have better working relationships with each other as peers and with their teachers. What it does is it will reduce the content transaction. She said: "It is a factory model designed to enable private probably international companies to make maximum profits from our children at the lowest possible cost." That is directly from Bronwyn Cross.She went further. She said that communities of online learning give parents options. She said that it gives them choice—at least that is what the ministry and the Minister will have us believe—but we are not giving parents a choice of different flavours of ice cream here; this is more about privatisation. She said that this COOL model has been plucked from the United States plucked and plonked here in New Zealand but it is a failed model from overseas—her words not mine.Another submission was made to us from Rural Women New Zealand. They told us that they have strong concerns about this proposal for communities of online learning in this legislation because it will allow the Government to give accreditation for online private charter schools. Their concern was that they will be so affected especially rural schools. Already they are facing closure of many of their schools and they see that communities of online learning have the effect of closing even more of the rural schools. Another submitter told us in her words of communities of online learning that "This is the death knell for rural secondary schools."There were a lot of concerns. The majority of the submitters who came to us in the select committee were against communities of online learning and we should not be rushing through with such a proposal as this—something that is untested something that we know from overseas countries has failed. Why are we rushing through with implementing it in the Education (Update) Amendment Bill? Thank you."