Hipkins Chris: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:10938. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):There are few areas of Government operation that highlight the contradiction of this National Government in education more than the Teachers Council. On the one hand we have got a Government that says it is focused on the quality of teaching and on improving educational outcomes yet it does so many things that go completely the other way.The review of the Teachers Council came back and argued that teaching should be a postgraduate profession that in order to enter the teaching profession someone should have a postgraduate teaching qualification. I think that is something that is very worthy of discussion. Yet this Government went the other way with charter schools and said: “Actually you don’t need to have any qualification at all. Anyone can go and teach in a charter school and that’s OK.” So we have got a review of the Teachers Council that says all of the international evidence tells us that the quality of teaching is the thing that makes the most difference and the Government turns round and says it will ignore all of that and have charter schools that do not have to have qualified teachers at all. I think that is wrong.In the early childhood area where we were moving towards a system where we would have fully qualified and fully registered teachers again the Government went the other way and it has abandoned the targets that would have seen us moving to a more qualified early childhood workforce. It has simply scrapped that altogether. Actually what we should be saying is that early childhood education is vitally important we should have qualified and registered teachers in early childhood centres and we should fund them in order to cover the cost of that. This Government is not doing that.It is a double standard for Hekia Parata the Minister of Education to come to the House during question time today and talk about the importance of trusting in teachers’ judgments when it is very very clear that the national standards policy was designed because the Government does not trust teachers’ judgments. The Government says to parents that they cannot trust what teachers tell them and it has to set these arbitrary standards in place instead. Even then after it has set the standards in place it is going to manipulate the results to get the outcomes that it wants.In the case of the national standards in writing there is only one standardised assessment tool. That is the e-asTTle assessment tool. This year in term 1 when that produced results that the Government did not like or that the Government did not think were reliable it simply went in and scaled the results. It went in and changed the results to give it the outcome that it expected. So how is that in any way a national standard? How does that reflect a national standard when the Government is going to just change the results of the assessment in order to get the outcome that it thinks it should have got in the first place? It is an absolute hoax.National standards are neither national nor standard. Although we can have an enormous amount of faith in the professionalism of teachers teachers exercising their professional judgment against a pretty vague standard in one school are going to make adifferent judgment from teachers exercising their professional judgment against a vague standard in another school. Unless there is something in place that ensures consistency across those it is not the professionalism of the teachers that is at question. It is the very concept of the standards in the first place that undermines our education system and that means that parents cannot have faith in the information that they are being provided.National standards are not a reliable indicator of a student’s achievement they are not a reliable indicator of a teacher’s professionalism or the quality of the teachers and they are certainly not a reliable indicator of how successful and effective a school is.John Hayes: So you don’t want any standards?CHRIS HIPKINS: No I absolutely think there should be standards but these are not national nor are they standard. In fact good schools already were reporting quality information to parents and in fact some schools are now reporting less information to parents as a result of national standards because they are reporting only the standards and they are not reporting all the other information that they used to give parents.So parents are being duped by national standards because the information they are getting is unreliable. It is not consistent. There is no guarantee that a child being assessed at one school against a standard is going to get the same result if the parents take them and have them assessed at a different school because the standards themselves are vague they are inconsistent and there is no moderation process. For Hekia Parata to try to draw a comparison between national standards and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is absolute hogwash because NCEA has a moderation process in place. There is no such moderation process in place for national standards.National standards are not an exercise about lifting student achievement or about education; they are bad for education. Internationally they have not worked. They are not working here in New Zealand. We should be focused on making sure that we have a system that works for Kiwi kids. National standards do not.