Hipkins Chris: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12091. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):There was a reasonable amount I agreed with in what the Minister of Education was just speaking about. I agreed with many of her concerns around the students who are not currently achieving within our education system. That is something that I hope all sides of the House and all people in the House would be concerned about. I want to see our education system delivering for every student in New Zealand. But there were also things in that speech that I am sure you will not be surprised to learn I did not agree with the Minister on.I think fundamentally if we go right to the very beginning I do not believe that a Government declaring war on the teaching profession is the best way to improve outcomes in education. Make no mistake that is what this Government has done. We have had a Government with two Ministers of Education now that has repeatedly questioned the competence the professionalism and the dedication of New Zealand’s teaching profession.Tracey Martin: While taking accolades overseas.CHRIS HIPKINS: That is right. I do not believe there is any teacher anywhere in this country who gets out of bed in the morning goes off to school and thinks: “How can I do my job really badly today?”. Every teacher in this country is there because they want to improve the lives of young New Zealanders. They deserve our thanks for that. They deserve our praise for that. Yes there are some gaps in the system. Quite often it is actually the system that lets the teachers and the kids down not the other way round. It is not the teachers who are letting the system down; it is the system that is letting the teachers and the kids down. We should be focused on making sure that we deal with those issues. Simply putting labels on teaching and on the kids who are not achieving in the education system will not do that.Hekia Parata mentioned in her speech that every level of achievement has gone up under the current Government. Well only in the ones that it is measuring. And it is a very narrow range of ones that the Government is measuring. How have kids’ problem-solving abilities improved under this Government? There is nothing. There is nothing because it is not measured because it is actually hard to measure. How have their interpersonal skills improved under this Government? Again there is nothing absolutely nothing because there is no measurement for that. But those are things that are going on in our classrooms every day.Good teachers are not just teaching literacy and numeracy which are very important but also teaching kids all of those other vital really valuable life skills that they are going to need to prosper and succeed in their lives. Because they are not measured this Government is saying to those teachers and to those schools that those things do not matter. Well I think they do matter. In fact they are critical because if we want to turn out kids from our school system who are going to be full and contributing members of society and who are going to be useful employees to future employers those are the sorts of skills they are going to have to have and they are very difficult to measure.But actually when you talk to employers—if we take the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) for example. The Government has set a target around NCEA level 2. It is difficult to disagree with the target that it has set but if you talk to an employer and you ask what sorts of things they look for in a graduate coming out of school they will talk about their level of qualifications but they will also talk about whether they are going to show up on time whether they are going to be polite and courteous whether they are going to respect the authority of the person whom they are working for whether they are going to be creative and be able to problem-solve and whether they are going to get on well with the other employees. Those are the things that employers will be asking of their future employees but we do not measure that in the school system at all. But that is actually where the kids are developing those skills.So many of the things that go on in our schools are not measured. We should not focus on managing only what we can measure. We have got to actually have a school system that embraces all of those other things and that says that yes we recognise that those things are vitally important and that they are also going to have a significant impact on a child’s or a student’s future in this country. Yet this Government says those things do not matter. I think that it is totally and utterly wrong with regard to that.So when we talk about education our question has to be not how we deal with this particular set of statistics but how we make sure that every New Zealander—not just the kids who are at school but every New Zealander—has the opportunity through education to reach their full potential in life and contribute fully to the society in which they live. It is not just about kids in school. In fact we need to be thinking about lifelong learning opportunities and vitally second-chance learning opportunities for those who did not do well in schooling in the first place who may not have made it all the way through the schooling system and who have found themselves I guess reallystruggling now and needing that second chance at learning. We have got to be focused on them as well. A good school system would be able to cater for those people yet this Government has cut all the funding to night classes. The Government said that they were hobby courses. Well actually for many people they were actually a foot back in the door to education again. Those courses got them back on the pathway to learning more. Maybe it did start as a hobby but for many people it then went on to something else. For many people what we might look at as a hobby is actually the beginning of a new vocational opportunity for some of those people. I think it is really tragic that the Government has cut that.Let us look at the quality of teaching. I heard Hekia Parata mention several times that she felt that the quality of teaching was the biggest in-school determinant of student achievement. I absolutely agree with that. That is very clear. That is what the research says. So we do have to look at teacher professional development. We have a very very successful teacher professional development programme—or had a very successful teacher professional development programme—in New Zealand targeted exactly at those students who have not been achieving in our system. It was called Te Kotahitanga and the Government has cut it. It has cut the funding for it because it was too expensive and it has come up with something that is cheaper. It penny-pinches. It came up with something that was cheaper. Actually what we should be saying is that this is a really successful programme it is working really well it is achieving what we want it to achieve and the long-term investment is much much more valuable to us so we are going to put more money into programmes that work rather than simply penny-pinching and cutting them.When Hekia Parata talked about quality teaching she also neglected to mention the fact that charter schools are not going to have to employ fully qualified and registered teachers. In question time today Hekia Parata made the comment that there is a difference between unqualified and unregistered teachers. If that is the case what is the point of teacher registration in the first place? We have teacher registration because it certifies that somebody is fit to be in a classroom. It certifies the fact that not only do they have knowledge of the subject but they have knowledge about how to impart that subject knowledge on to other learners and that is vitally important. People can be experts in their trade or in their profession; it does not mean that they know how to pass that knowledge on to somebody else. There is an art to teaching that we should make sure that the people we are putting in our classrooms actually understand and actually know how to do. That is what teacher registration is about. It is also about making sure that the people in our classrooms are appropriate people to be there. So there are safety checks in there to make sure we are not putting people who should not be in classrooms in front of kids who are often in very vulnerable positions. That is what teacher registration is designed to achieve. So I think it is wrong that the Government is saying that it does not think that teachers working in charter schools should be registered. Of course they should be registered. Every teacher working in a school should be registered.I hope that we can get back to the point where we have a goal that every teacher working in an early childhood centre should be registered as well. That was what the Labour Government was working towards. The National Government has backed away from that and I think that that was the wrong decision because we should be focused on raising the standard of teaching in New Zealand. That means a focus on a qualified registered teaching profession.So coming back to the issue of charter schools the Labour Party has been very clear. We do not see the need for charter schools. In fact we see many many detrimental elements to the current charter schools model that this Government has put forward.Charter schools will not have to employ qualified teachers. They will not be subject to the same levels of public scrutiny as State schools—for example they will not be subject to the Official Information Act or the Ombudsmen Act. They will not have to teach to the New Zealand Curriculum. Our curriculum is recognised around the world as being an absolute leader yet the charter schools that the Government is setting up will not have to teach to it.So we have made it very clear that we do not see a future for charter schools. We have already got enough schools in New Zealand now. What we should be focused on is making sure that every one of those schools that we have now is one of the best possible schools we could have and that every teacher working in them is a member of a valued and collaborative teaching profession that is constantly striving for ongoing improvement. We will get that by having a partnership between Government and teachers and parents and communities not by dividing and conquering as this Government seeks to do.Driving a wedge between teachers and parents has been one of the most divisive things that this Government could possibly have done and that is exactly what it has been focused on doing. I do trust our teachers. I do believe that they go into school every day wanting to make a difference for students. Yes I accept that in some cases some teachers could be better. All of the teachers that I speak to want to be better—even the really really good ones want to be better. They are looking for ways to be better and they are saying: “Well if you want us to be better why don’t you invest in our professional development? Why don’t you actually support us to be better teachers?”. I think it is a very very reasonable thing for them to ask of a Government—that is that the Government does not label them and that the Government supports them. We have got to work with teachers not declare war on them.Vote agreed to.