Peachey Allan: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Peachey Allan: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:631;Page:2887] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I rise to speak in opposition to the bill and before I do so I take the opportunity to thank the Minister for his acknowledgment. I did not have the opportunity during the Committee stage but I did appreciate the Minister’s kind comments about Rangitoto College. I know the college was very grateful that he took the time to visit the place unlike his predecessor and I express the hope that the Minister’s experience there gave him an insight into what makes up a successful school. There are major differences between the Minister and me on philosophical grounds and I doubt that they are reconcilable. 
I want to refer to a couple of things that came up in the Minister’s speech. I am sure it was a slip of the tongue when he referred to boards of trustees managing our schools. Maybe that sums up the difficulty that this Government finds itself in. The whole purpose of boards of trustees was to provide governance for schools not to manage them. That was to be the responsibility of principals and professional staff. One of the things I observed over the later years of my principalship was an increasing desire by the Government to suck boards into management and that is not what they were elected to do. 
There is a fundamental flaw behind this legislation and all legislation that has preceded it over the last 6 years and it is this. The Minister talks about the strategic direction the Government has for education. We all know we have to improve the learning of all our children. We all know that it is not satisfactory that according to the Education Review Office in its report to the Government up to 20 percent of our children are not experiencing success at school. They are not learning to read to write to do maths to understand new technology to develop the attitudes and attributes they need to be successful in a 21st century economy and to contribute positively to their communities. 
Frankly we could argue whether the figure is 18 percent 20 percent or 8 percent; it actually does not matter: if one child is not being equipped to function as an adult then we have to do something about it. The Government’s answer is to centralise centralise centralise and when that is not working centralise some more. Sooner rather than later the Government must come to the realisation that the answers to the learning issues that face our children are not in bureaucrats’ offices in Wellington. I have said it in this House before and I repeat it: no child learns in the office of a bureaucrat. Children learn in schools with their teachers. 
I want to take a moment to acknowledge schoolteachers and I am pleased that reference is made in the bill to giving them protection from insult abuse and intimidation. In the book I published last year  
What’s Up with Our Schools? 
 I wrote at great length about the importance of schoolteachers and the role that school principals have in making sure that teachers are looked after. I had a rule in both the schools I led that children who swore in the hearing of a teacher or at their teacher could go and empty their lockers because that was the last we were going to see of them. If our teachers are to do their job in the classroom then it is vital that they are able walk into the classroom every morning of every day of the school week knowing they are going in there to teach and knowing that their self-esteem their sense of self-worth is not going to be challenged by things like bad language. 
Too many of our school principals are willing to turn a blind eye to that sort of behaviour and make an excuse for it. All they are doing is detracting from the way teachers feel about themselves and their job. And we know that what happens is that the best teachers leave first. We need every good teacher. 
Do members know what good teachers do? They make children learn. Teachers do not just entertain children and keep them happy; they make them learn. They cannot do that if the environment in which they are placed by their principals and their communities detracts from that ability. They will just leave and go to a school where they are looked after and where they can teach. Worst of all they will leave teaching. That is one of the problems with the Government’s policy. The centralised micro-management approach is driving teachers nuts. They have to spend far too much time ticking boxes saying they got the process right not establishing whether children are learning and what we will do about it if they are not. No legislation should ever be introduced into this House that does not address the issue of what we will do about children who are not learning and about schools that are not making them learn. 
The Minister was right when he answered a question I put to him in the House some weeks ago. For the first time the minimum literacy and numeracy standards in level 1 National Certificate of Educational Achievement give us a measure. That is fine but what will we do with that measure? How will we change what is happening in schools as a result of the information we are getting? The information we are getting—clearly published in the  
Herald on Sunday  
for Auckland schools last Sunday—is that too many of our children are not succeeding. 
So even if we take that Education Review Office figure of 20 percent then look at level 1 students in year 11—I think of it as fifth form—we find that in some schools as few as 40 percent of students are achieving level 1. The Government is going to have to confront a very important issue. How will it explain that in Auckland there is for example a decile 4 secondary school whose students are achieving at 15 to 20 points better than the students at a decile 5 school? How can that be? What is the explanation for that? When will we hold schools responsible for their students’ learning? There is no point at all in having an assessment system that is standards based if we do not do that. 
There is one thing we must believe above all else and it is that every child can learn. A child who can learn to talk can be taught to read. There are far too many excuses. I trust that this Government in the unlikely event that it brings further Education Amendment bills to this House will begin to address that issue—that it will begin to think about the type of school environment that needs to be created if all children are to learn. That environment is not one that concentrates on the micro-management of process rather than on the analysis of data and on improving teaching and learning for children. The greatest gift any community can give its children is a teacher who makes them learn.