Delahunty Catherine: Education Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8665. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Mr Deputy Speaker tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare Pāremata ko tēnei pō. I am very pleased to make a first reading speech. There is quite a lot in the bill which I have read and there are a few things in the bill that we are very comfortable with—for example the modernisation of the scholarships for the Pacific Islands Polynesian Education Foundation and the Ngārimu VC and 28th (Māori) Battalion MemorialScholarships. Obviously those things are useful. But in the main this bill is a continuation of the privatisation myth-of-flexibility meme that is dominating the education system.It is interesting because parallel to the bill there is a process going on at the moment that is about consultation on the purpose of education. What I would love to see in this bill—which is not addressing the purpose; it is just a whole lot of fairly conflicting and in some ways confusing amendments—is the purpose of education defined myself. I would love it to be—and so would the Greens—that the purpose of education is not the myth of choice. It is equity human development and mutual liberation but that is a foreign country where children come first. It is not about measuring not about targets and not about managing a business.To get down to the specifics of the bill of which there are quite a few there are some parts of this on which I am looking forward to their scrutiny at the select committee. The joint principals clauses are not necessarily the worst. I would say that the worst clauses are those around home care after-school care and early childhood education which I will talk about in a minute. The joint principal of a number of schools is an idea that might sound very logical in a “franchise-y” spin-it-around “let’s get flexible and see about managing”kind of manner—because this is all about managing not about children. But having spent last year in particular visiting decile 1 schools and talking to principals the principals of decile 1 schools told me that they were passionate to stay there in that specific community with that specific school to support those communities that are suffering from major inequality and they were needed to be there every single day. They did not want to spread themselves around; they wanted to stay there for that community and be there every single day because the principal is where the buck stops when things melt down when communities are suffering from poverty transience and social stress. That is why a principal needs to be there with their school.There might be situations for example in rural areas where there are very small schools where you might argue that so long as you have got an excellent teacher or two you can share the principalship but that needs to have safeguards and it needs to be spelt out. If there were safeguards and it was spelt out properly we might consider it but right now no. We would be interested in that debate taking place at the select committee. The Minister of Education talked about moving these principals these very high-performing—it sounds a bit like a type of sport—people into interesting career paths. I think that for those at the front line of where education is critical—which is every school and particularly schools where communities are in distress—it is interesting enough. What they actually need is the ability to focus on their community and to be accountable to that community.But the issue in the bill that most concerns us is the changes to the home-care and after-school care provisions because home care was already a concern. Home care was a concern because there was a review into the quality of it that got dropped. As earlier speakers have said some home carers are extremely successful—I am thinking about some of the Pacific models in Porirua working with the Wellington kindergartens—but there are also others where we are very concerned about what is happening. This bill will make it worse because now the home-care industry if you like can actually include after-school care for children and those people are allowed to have up to six of those children excluding children of the person themselves. So if that person has up to four to five children themselves they can have another six in their home with one adult who may or may not be trained and that will be sufficient to give them the right to be called a service and to have a licensed home-based service.There is not enough protection in this bill to make sure that expanding from early childhood education to including after-school care in one service is actually going to be protecting the ratios which is so critical. At the moment you are not supposed to exceed more than four children per home but in clause 31 inserting new section 317A it says that while children are receiving the service the total number of children aged 13 or younger in the home—because now it is about older children as well—other than the children of the educator must not exceed six. So we have got these children of the educator not being counted—they do not matter. We can have a number of those plus another six children.That is why I call it a business bill because this is about facilitating the opening up of the early childhood home-care industry to after-school care without putting the kids first without saying that there has to be quality and without putting in ratios that would normally be expected across the early childhood education service. It is all about making money; it is not about children. It is objectionable to do that when we know that early childhood education—much of it—is not meeting the standards required for actually supporting children’s development. The Ministry of Education said that not me. There is a lot of work to be done and we will be opposing this bill primarily because we believe that this is creating a lack of safety and creating risk. It is very very serious. That is the serious point.We would like to see some discussion at the select committee about the student number and its efficacy. Some people—and I am not saying that the Greens agree with them—want us to have a look into this one because of how student numbers are used in early childhood education to actually try to dob in beneficiaries and force their children into sometimes inappropriate care. But we do not think this is necessarily going to be a problem with this.The school hours flexibility does currently exist so why do we need to change this? There is a little clue as to why this is being put in the bill. That clue is that—David Seymour: Is the member for or against school hour flexibility?CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: —parents can work longer hours with kids in schools. The Green Party is not romantically for flexibility or romantically against it Mr Seymour. It is not ideological. It is about what will work best for kids. What is important is whether we do need a legal change here. Is it necessary to change the law? What about school transport? What about parents with kids going to different schools? Flexibility is a universe that people do not actually live in—it is a universe of theory that everything is just wide open out there. Flexibility already does exist in some schools and we support what is happening already so we do not think it needs to go further at this point in time.When it comes to charter schools these enabling clauses do concern us. We are not here to enable a continuation of charter schools. Interestingly I just read the PhD work of a Crawford School of Public Policy study in Australia that looks at the charter schools so far. You would have to say that you would not want to enable more because the conclusions of this research were very interesting. It kind of said: “Charter schools? Hmm New Zealand hmm. Not necessarily better not necessarily worse not necessarily anything really—just kind of like State schools.” The most interesting part then is the well-being study of the children. At the beginning of their term in a new charter school 84 percent of the children themselves said their life was good and by term 3 59 percent said the same. It had dropped that much. You see if you look at the figures and if you look at the statistics on the literacy achievements that the schools at best keep up with the State schools or at worst drop. It shows you that when independent people from other countries start researching our models that exist so far they find that there is a problem.There are these issues with the tertiary institutions being able to be expanded to run charter schools as well. It really concerns me that we would assume that private training education institutes know more about teaching than schoolteachers and that we need to allow these people whose pedagogy is focused on older people focused on the older end of the education system—we assume that they are going to be the people to really make a difference. We assume that without accountability without the Official Information Act without Ombudsmen these people who are not focused on the pedagy of how children learn—David Seymour: “Pedagy”?CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: —pedagogy—will be able to do that. Having just been part of the inquiry on special needs I just wonder because they are falling through the cracks now what is going to happen if there is more of a training focus and less of a whole-child focus in education? It is really concerning that we would allow that to happen. It might be great from a business point of view—yes make more money if you want to—but actually—Hon Hekia Parata: What about Te Wānanga o Aotearoa famous for looking after Māori communities?CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: It is completely not typical. Te Wānanga o Aotearoa is not typical of other training organisations.I oppose this bill because I do not believe it is correct. We will be having a lot more discussion about this. Thank you very much. Tēnā koutou.