Hipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1417. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): The Education Amendment Bill (No 2) represents a hugely wasted opportunity to make some changes that would genuinely increase the quality of teaching in New Zealand and genuinely lead to better outcomes for New Zealand students. The review of the New Zealand Teachers Council was welcomed by the whole profession. There was nobody in the teaching profession who thought that things were going swimmingly well and that there was not room for improvement. Everybody whom I have spoken to in the teaching profession believes that there is a significant role for a regulatory body like the Teachers Council to set the standards of entry into the teaching profession to review and manage the registration and renewal of practising certificates and to manage the competency and disciplinary functions that the council should have. Everybody accepts that there is a role for that body and the teaching profession want to ensure that it is a quality body that will genuinely be owned and driven by the profession.So right from the outset this bill is flawed and the measures in this bill are flawed because it simply removes the autonomy of that whole teaching profession and gives away complete control of the regulation of the profession to the Government. All of the appointees on the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ) will be selected by the Minister of Education. What other profession that we genuinely believe is a profession and that we genuinely respect the autonomy of would we do that to? We do not do it to lawyers doctors or engineers and we do not even do it to real estate agents. Yet the Government seems to think that it can take complete control of the profession. I can see the knowing smile from the Deputy Speaker but it is absolutely important that we ensure that if this is going to be a professional body for teachers teachers feel that they have some ownership over it and they simply do not.The Minister of Education mentioned in her opening remarks in this debate that there was widespread consultation and there were a huge number of submissions to the Education and Science Committee. That is true. There was widespread consultation and there was a huge volume of submissions to the select committee. Those submissions were listened to but they were not heard. The Government members sat there on their email checking their messages. They did not listen. The overwhelming feedback from the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who came along and gave up their time to have their say on this bill was that they were opposed to it and that they did not support the provisions of the bill. They made some very constructive suggestions for improvement because like I said there is not a teacher in the country who does not want the education system to be better. That is why they go to work every single day. They want better outcomes for Kiwi kids and they have been completely ignored by this Government and the changes that are being made in this legislation. So although there was widespread consultation it was listened to but it was not heard.The Government is going to handpick all of the members of this council. I went and had a look at what other jurisdictions do. In Australia they have elected representatives. In Scotland in England and in all of those other countries where we look to compare our education system they all have some form of elected representation on the professional body for teachers—not here; not in New Zealand under a National Government.This bill creates a huge duplication of roles and confuses responsibilities rather than clarifying them. For example the bill gives the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand the responsibility for sharing best practice. Is that not the role of the Ministry of Education the Education Review Office the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and so many other Government agencies? Now it is being given to another agency and it is simply dissecting that very important task down even further and confusing more roles.And of course it adds to the burden of costs on individual teachers themselves because who pays for this? It is not the taxpayer. It is not the Government. It is actually individual teachers. Their teaching registration fees are going to go up. Most teachers that I have spoken to would say: “Well what are we going to get from this increase in the cost of our teacher registration?”. A lot of it is simply going to go into bureaucracy. Another example is that the bill requires 10 percent of all practising certificate renewals in any given year to be audited. That audit will be a paper-based process undertaken in Wellington. It will not result in one additional appraisal of a teacher in their classroom—not one. It will not result in one additional person sitting in somebody’s classroom monitoring their teaching and giving them constructive feedback on how they can be better teachers. This is going to increase bureaucracy. It is going to increase bureaucracy which individual teachers will pay for. It is not going to increase the quality of teaching and learning that take place in our classrooms.What we need to do is take best practice and make it common practice without making it standard practice. When we make it standard practice it becomes form-filling compliance a bureaucratic exercise and it completely defeats the purpose and that is what this bill does. Everyone will have seen news stories about people who simply should not be in classrooms because somehow they have fallen through the cracks and something bad has happened. Let us be clear about this: the provisions of this bill would not have changed the outcome in any one of those cases. Not one of those people who should not have been teaching would be prevented from getting into the classroom by the provisions of this bill. It would not have made one bit of difference. We all agree that we do not want people who should not be in classrooms to be in classrooms so how can we effectively do that?It actually starts with quality professional development from the top of the system to the bottom. School boards of trustees need quality professional development when it comes to the recruitment and appraisal of school principals. School principals need quality professional development when it comes to the recruitment appraisal and professional development for their teaching staff. And yes principals need support on how to deal with teachers who are not performing because at the end of the day who is responsible for removing teachers from classrooms who should not be there? In most cases in almost every instance the first port of call for that is the school’s principal. And if the school’s principal is not being supported in that role then we are going to end up with teachers in classrooms who should not be there.This bill does nothing—absolutely nothing—to deal with that. It does nothing to provide the additional support to where it will actually make a difference. These are not functions that should be undertaken by regulators; these are functions that should be undertaken in schools by getting the right support in the right place. This bill simply is not going to deliver on any of that. There is a disconnection for example between the Education Review Office which will go in and audit whether a school is doing what it should do in terms of its teacher appraisal processes and where the support comes from. So if a school is found to have ineffective leadership there has not been early enough intervention in there. If it is found that a school does not have the right systems in place for the development of its staff the follow-up is so critical and yet there is a real disconnect. Those are the things that we should be debating. Those are the things that the Government should be working on fixing. This bill does not address any of them.The Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand is being set up to fail from the beginning. It is being set up to fail because it does not have the support of the profession because the profession does not have any say on who is going to be on its governing body. It is set up to fail because it is being given a massive increase in its remit compared with what the Teachers Council had and yet as we know from past experience the Teachers Council had not fully got on top of the remit that it already had. There was room for improvement there and it was making incredible strides. It was making big improvements but to throw more responsibilities on to it before it has really nailed down what it was already doing is simply irresponsible and yet that is what this bill and this Government are doing at the moment.And is there not an enormous double standard at play here where the Government talks about wanting to increase the quality of teaching and increase the status of the teaching profession and yet it says that charter schools do not have to employ registered and qualified teachers? And then it talks about EDUCANZ having to have openness as its default setting and yet the charter schools have no such provisions. They are not subject to the Official Information Act. And this Government still will not release their quarterly reports from last year so while schools are enrolling new kids for this year the Government still will not tell anybody how those schools actually performed last year.This is bad legislation. It is bad for the teaching profession. It is not going to result in better education for New Zealand kids. That is what the Government should be focused on. This is going to increase bureaucracy and increase red tape and it is not going to result in the removal of one ineffective teacher from any school in New Zealand.