Harawira Hone: Urgent Debates — Student Achievement—OECD ReportText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHarawira Hone: Urgent Debates — Student Achievement—OECD Report[Sitting date: 04 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15231. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HONE HARAWIRA (Leader—Mana):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker.Tēnātātou katoa e te Whare e noho tahiana ekōrero tahiana kitēnei kaupapawhakahirahira kaimuai atātouitēneirā.Nō reiratēnā koutoutēnā koutou kia oratātou katoa.[Greetings Mr Assistant Speaker. Greetings to us all the House seated together and speaking together to this important matter before us today. And so I acknowledge and greet you collectively and thank us all.]National’s education policies have just taken a major hammering in an international assessment that has heavily downgraded New Zealand students’ achievements in maths science and reading yet all the Minister of Education can do is trot out some irrelevant philosophical rubbish and tell the Opposition to stop playing the blame game. But the ugly reality—and I have not heard people mention it too often and somebody needs to say it—is that New Zealand’s education ranking has fallen from seventh to 18th in science from 13th to 23rd in maths and from seventh to 13th in reading according to a report released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last night. Yet this Government point-blank refuses to accept that the deteriorating test scores and New Zealand dropping out of the top 10 are because of its out-of-touch education policies.The Programme for International Student Assessment—PISA—highlights the fact that National’s approach has increased inequities between schools. It notes that the gap between test scores in high-decile and low-decile schools is bigger than ever before andranks this country New Zealand firmly in the bottom third of OECD countries in terms of equity ratings. Yet despite all of the Government’s hot air about lifting the achievement of all learners and especially those in low-decile schools it has done precisely nothing to address the fact that poverty and inequality matter hugely to learning achievement.Instead this Government has done everything it can to entrench and exacerbate poverty and inequality like cutting funding to early childhood education and State schools while increasing funding to private schools and now charter schools and grinding down the already low incomes and living conditions of strugglingwhānau. This Government continues to refuse to acknowledge the fact that poverty and inequality matter at all even though it has had ample evidence from experts about how important it is to address equity issues if it seriously wants to address educational underachievement. For example we know that the Government currently helps to feed children throughKidsCan andKickStart Breakfast but we also know that 80000 children are still going to school hungry. All of those children are our children and they are going hungry. We know—because all of the facts tell us so—that hungry children of whatever race colour or creed simply do not learn well. We know too that a Government-funded food programme as spoken of in the Programme for International Student Assessment report in low-decile schools has been recommended as an immediate way to help address child poverty raise educational achievement and improve child health by a range of groups and organisations right here in New Zealand in recent years and most recently by the Children’s Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty in its final report released in December last year.We know too that my Feed the Kids bill—whether it is mine or David Shearer’s Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill—aims to provide free meals to all students in decile 1 and 2 schools and won broad support from groups and organisations right across the country including the Child Poverty Action Group Every Child Counts Unicef New Zealand Save the Children IHC the Methodist and Anglican churches TeRōpūWāhine MāoriTokoi te Ora the New Zealand Educational Institute the Post Primary Teachers Association the New Zealand Principals’ Federation the CTURūnanga the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and the Māori Medical Practitioners Association. Yet this Government still refuses to acknowledge the importance of equity of nutrition and of the need for a fully Government-funded food in schools programme.The Programme for International Student Assessment report also recommended increasing equity increasing resources and providing help for poor children but this Government has chosen to put its energy into other areas like national standards private education and charter schools. The Programme for International Student Assessment report pointed out that disadvantaged schools struggle to attract qualified teachers and that poor kids suffer as a result.It also pointed out the obvious fact that high-performing countries—I have not heard the bell Mr Assistant Speaker—pay teachers well and actually choose that as a policy priority over reducing class size and that they also put a lot of focus into ensuring that high-performing teachers actually get placed in socially disadvantaged schools. Yet what does this Government do? It continues to blame teachers and the education system. It attacks teachers unions criticises teachers’ standards cuts back on curriculum advisers and even goes so far as to suggest that 6-year-old kids rate teachers all the while paying those teachers through a broken Novopay system the sum result of which has been to confuse confound and demoralise teachers in what has been widely recognised as one of the best teaching collectives in the world.Tēnā koutou. Kia oratātou katoa.