Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1419. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I would like to address three particular issues related to this bill. First of all the Labour Party does not support it. Secondly the first issue I would like to address is the make-up of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ). Chris Hipkins has already alluded to the fact that the Minister of Education is going to be the person who appoints the members of the council. As Chris Hipkins said there are no other careers or places of work where the people who work in the sector are not elected to represent their sector. It just goes to show that the voice of teachers is not being listened to. As a former teacher and as a former principal I would like to think that the people who were representing me on any council were people whom the sector had put there—at least the majority of them. I see in the first draft of the bill that there was going to be a maximum of five teachers put on to the council; however there was no minimum. So what we are saying is that there could have been a case where absolutely no teachers were part of that council. I know that teachers would find that abhorrent.The second point I would like to make is around the appraisal audits. I see that 10 percent of appraisals for re-registration are going to be audited. I think that what this does is it undermines or underestimates the complexity of teaching—the complexity and the dynamic nature of being a teacher. EDUCANZ is going to be responsible for auditing 10 percent of appraisals. What I would like to know then is what the criteria are that those appraisals are going to be subject to. We have got 2000 or thereabouts schools in New Zealand and every one of those schools does its appraisals according to its own needs. So there is not a standard format for appraisal and yet the council is going to come along and audit them and say to this school over here “Well your appraisal system is good.” and to this school over here “Your appraisal system isn’t good.” But based on whose criteria? Is it based on what suits the council? Nobody knows so we need to actually have some criteria but that is problematic in itself because then if we have criteria for appraisal we are absolutely going to narrow down appraisal and the curriculum and education to what the council thinks is important for education. That is unacceptable because education and teaching are such dynamic work.When we look at the breakdown of the curriculum—at least when I was still teaching some 7 years ago there were seven curriculum areas. Each of those curriculum areas was broken down into strands. Each of those curriculum areas was broken down into levels. There are so many aspects of the curriculum that a teacher could be appraised on. So what is important to EDUCANZ? Is it what is important to the communities of those schools? I am not sure because we do not know what the criteria are. But if we do have criteria then we narrow down the way teachers are going to teach and be appraised and that is not good for education.If we focus the appraisals solely on the curriculum then that absolutely ignores the rest of the work that teachers do. For example are teachers going to be appraised on the extracurricular work they do—the sports teams they coach the music groups they coach running a school fair having a school drama or play all the duties they do and the camps they run? Are teachers going to be given credit for the broad nature of the work they do or are their appraisals going to be audited basically on a very narrow set of criteria? It is really important that teachers are recognised and valued for the dynamic nature of the work they do. It is such a relentless job and they are not getting credit for what they do in the schools on a daily basis for all the children in our communities.There was some count-up of all the different objectives throughout the curriculum. There are thousands of specific objectives. Are teachers going to be appraised on each of those? Which ones are the most important? If we take the subject of maths—there are five strands I think from memory—a teacher could be appraised on how well they teach number. So they may get a whole heap of children over the national standard in number but not in measurement for whatever reason. Does that mean they are a good teacher in maths or a bad teacher because the students are achieving in one strand but not in the other? In maths alone there is number there is measurement there is geometry there is statistics and there is algebra. How do we determine how good a teacher is or whether they deserve any increments in their pay if we have some sort of EDUCANZ-imposed appraisal system?Then we have English. There is written language oral language—there are so many ways. So a teacher could be teaching reading really really well but not doing so well in written language. How is EDUCANZ going to say that in the school over here the teachers who are doing really well in reading but not so well in writing deserve to pass the audit for their appraisals? It is just such a fraught concept. I just do not think that it is going to work and I do not think that it is going to be fair on teachers because as I say it is such a dynamic job. I think that Parliament needs to recognise and needs to really understand the relentless nature of teaching the paperwork the number of objectives and the number of curriculum levels.We have curriculum levels but then over the top come national standards. Where does that leave the curriculum levels that we used to assess children against which could make up part of appraisals? Now national standards have turned up and been imposed on schools and again it just makes this whole auditing of appraisals fraught. I am talking only about the primary sector. I was never a secondary teacher so I do not know how much more complicated it is for secondary teachers but I also wonder whether the same standards for appraisal are going to be imposed on secondary schools as are imposed on primary schools. I have real concerns about that part of the bill in particular.Another part of the bill that I have concerns about goes specifically to clause 38 which inserts new section 353. It says—this is referring to registration of teachers—“(1) The Education Council must register an applicant under section 352 if satisfied that the applicant—”.Then we go down to subsection (1)(e)(ii): “has(in accordance with the provisions of any relevant enactment) been granted an exemption by the chief executive in respect of every conviction for a specified offence listed in schedule 21.” So there is a list of offences in schedule 21 where a person can apply to be a teacher and get exemption even if they have committed one of these specified offences. These offences are (a) sexual violation (b) attempted violation (c) sexual conduct. Why on earth would we try to grant any exemption for anybody who is guilty of any of these offences? It starts at (a) and goes down to (z). So there are 26 pretty abhorrent types of offences and yet we are allowing the possibility of somebody who has been convicted of one of these offences actually becoming a teacher. I think that that part of the bill is really quite ridiculous. Why would we want to employ anybody who is guilty of any serious sexual type of crime?Labour opposes this bill. I have those concerns around the make-up of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand around the appraisal and also around that section that I have just spoken about—around the list of offences that teachers could get exemptions from. Labour does not support this bill. Kia ora.