English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:626;Page:21316] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I want to raise some issues with the Minister Trevor Mallard about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. The board has decided to appoint Ms Karen Sewell as the acting chief executive officer. I ask the Minister to tell me whether this is the same Ms Karen Sewell who used to be the principal of Green Bay High School. The community around that school thinks that it will take at least another 5 years to clean up the mess she left. I know that she has been running the Education Review Office— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Very well. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well the Education Review Office reports are sounding more and more like old-style primary school reports than they ever used to. 
I ask the Minister to tell us why he thinks that that appointment will restore any confidence in the role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in administering our secondary school qualifications. I can tell the Minister that my feedback has been that it will not. That lack of confidence will be built on by his silly initiatives today. Is it not just so much the Labour Government that when there is a serious issue with exams and assessments for our secondary school students it spends months and months chewing it over and then comes up with the solution of having a workshop and a seminar? The other thing it will do is put out a pamphlet. This Minister thinks that less time spent teaching and more time spent putting out taxpayer-funded spin will fix confidence in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). I want to know why he thinks that that will be the case. I want him to tell us how he will explain to parents that sending teachers off to more workshops and more seminars is the answer for NCEA. 
It is time the Minister accepted that there are a couple of critical problems. The first is that the assessment is not consistent and valid and the second is that NCEA is not manageable. It needs more resources at the margin than are worth it. The Minister should just fix those problems. Instead we have gone back to the line that this Minister has taken right from the day he took the job—that any people who do not like NCEA or think there is a problem with it do not understand it and therefore must be stupid. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No just this member is stupid not everyone. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: He thinks they are all stupid so the Government will send them a pamphlet in the mail that will tell them that NCEA is actually fine. Then they will think that the Government is fine. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: If they can read. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: If they can read—they are the lucky ones. I want the Minister to tell us a bit about that. 
I also want the Minister to tell us what his plans are for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. I will give him a little bit of advice if he is still thinking about those plans. He should not roll the New Zealand Qualifications Authority into the Ministry of Education. That would be a mistake. If the qualifications framework is going to work then it needs to be administered by a body with statutory independence so that we do not see happening to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority what has happened to the Tertiary Education Commission whereby the Government is shamelessly manipulating the funding levers to meet its own political requirements. 
 The qualifications framework is important for New Zealand. It should be kept separate and at arm’s length from political intervention and that means running an independent statutory body in the way the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is set up now. If the Minister rolls it into the Ministry of Education that will do more than anything else to undermine the existing bipartisan support for the qualifications framework. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Oh we’ve really noticed that. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: The Minister knows that NCEA is only part of it. Of course there are questions about the quality of what is in that framework but the concept of the framework itself is supported by both parties. So I tell the Minister not to roll it into the Ministry of Education. That would simply put it under the control of people who have already made a mess of NCEA policy. Why give them the job of administering this as well? I am sure that if the Minister persists until the election he will not get a permanent chief executive officer. But as the new Minister after the election I will be able to get a new chief executive officer for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority because National will take a set of measures designed to increase the credibility of the qualification. [ 
Interruption 
] Well when the board sees a Government getting to grips with community concerns about the qualification it will be able to go to potential chief executive officers with some confidence whereas at the moment it is out there trying to recruit people to resuscitate a body that is on life support. Of course that is not a particularly attractive job. I want the Minister to explain to us also the rise in costs in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and other bureaucracies because that is where he is spending all his money instead of in the schools.