Delahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19097. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Thank you for recognising me and allowing me to take a call.The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): You are welcome.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I knew I would be. The goal of the education system should be to help all kids reach their potential and to create a fairer society for all but unfortunately the Appropriation (2013/14 Supplementary Estimates) Bill fails to deliver on this issue. It is not about disputing endlessly the amount of money because in fact more money will always be spent in every Budget on education otherwise we would be slipping further back let alone standing still. That is just the reality. So there really is not any point in having that debate about who has spent the most money. That is not the issue. We do not need to fight over that.But the estimates have failed to address the elephant in the room that holds back many of our communities which is poverty. While we ignore and deny poverty and say that it is irrelevant to educational achievement we are always going to have difficulties with the education system. It does not really matter how many lime-green squabs and classrooms with sliding doors you create and call it a modern learning environment if the children are arriving at school reliant on charity for breakfast because their parents are not earning enough money. It does not really matter if they are sick and there is no school nurse because she has been taken away and was only part-time anyway to work on the rheumatic fever programme somewhere else. So we have got to acknowledge the context.I think it is really important that we recognise that education is not in a happy state. The Government cannot say that Vote Education has solved the issues. I think the previous speaker Tracey Martin when speaking about the targets for charter schools was reminding us that an enormous amount of money is going intro fringe experiments because the Government says that it has this goal of five out of five. But what it fails to recognise is that five out of five of our children are not getting fed are not well and are not having access to resources and that we have the greatest inequality in this country that we have had in many many generations. I am quite ashamed to live in a country now where I now see older people begging on the streets—that never happened in my childhood—and children going to school hungry.The Green Party recently did a tour where we promoted a very positive response which is not in the estimates and that is the community hubs plan. What that is about is making sure that we provide for kids in school so there is a free lunch there is a school nurse for every 400 children in decile 1 to decile 4 schools and so there is after-school care and free out-of-school care and recreation programmes available to these kids so that they get the things that other children—middle and upper-class children—get as of right: those extra after-school care and activities that you otherwise have to pay for. When we toured those mainly decile 1 to 4 schools it was really interesting to talk to principals and teachers about the issues.Some of those schools did not have lime-green squabs and sliding doors but what they did have was absolutely dedicated principals and teachers who wanted the best academic opportunities for their students. They recognised that without the school having a good relationship with the local community having food there to feed the kids and having an ability for those kids to participate in learning have a good time and have cultural experiences that other kids have as of right there would not be that five out of five. So it is fine to talk about all of these wonderful things—and we support digital literacy and we love lime-green squabs; that is great—but the reality is that we need to listen to what our decile 1 teachers and principals are telling us about the kids.The Government has made a strong argument that things like Te Kotahitanga should be frozen because they are expensive apparently and that building on success is the new way to bring forward cultural inclusion. Well actually Te Kotahitanga has been very successful because just like school hubs it put a person in the school to support the profession to meet the needs of Māori children in particular. So when we start talking about really making a difference it is not going to be about spending money on constantly revising programmes and getting rid of ones that work. We need to uphold the fact that we need people in the school system who have the skills whether it is the school nurse or the Te Kotahitanga facilitator or whether it is quality early childhood education with 100 percent trained teachers. We cannot talk about quality in one breath and in the next breath say that we are going to open up early childhood education to Kidicorp and we are going to allow charter schools from zero to 8 years.We have this very odd estimate in Vote Education this time around the Minister of Education’s new idea which is that babies aged nothing and children up to the age of 8 should be allowed to be in charter schools. We know that it was the Minister’s idea because we have seen on the report that she received from the ministry what she wrote in her own handwriting: “This is the idea. Add this to the criteria.” We see these very odd experimental fringe ideas that come from an international system called “the GERM”. If people are not aware what that is it is the global education reform movement and it is based on the market philosophy that education is the new frontier where we can all make money and turn it all into a franchise. This has been attempted with very minimal success in the United States and Britain. These are not the places we should be using as the models for a modern education system. We need to go back to the fundamentals and the fundamentals are not narrowing the curriculum to a narrow definition of literacy and numeracy.The money that will be spent in the estimates on professional development around national standards will not succeed because those standards are neither national nor a standard. What they have done is reduce children’s confidence in themselves and teachers’ confidence in themselves. If there is one thing we know about learning it is that you have got to be confident. We have to be confident that we can do things. If we are constantly told that we are below standard or that we are failing our children because we have taken kids for whom English may be a second language and moved them up in their ability to learn to read to write to think to talk and to participate but that does not meet the standard then is the teacher a failure? I do not think so. And if the child has come to school with barriers that hopefully no one in this Chamber has ever faced in terms of poverty dislocation transience possibly no English all of those experiences—if those children are expected to meet a standard and are then called a failure when they have hugely improved as a result of the efforts of teachers then we have missed the bus about what learning is.Learning is not a tick-the-box mechanistic exercise. We do not need tick-the-box exercises. We need to take the New Zealand curriculum we need to take the cultural experiences of some of our expert people who are involved in looking at what makes it work and we need to invest in that. Yes it takes money but there is no greater investment than in our children and there is no greater investment than in recognising that children who are hungry and communities that are alienated from education require our attention in the most profound way. It is not rocket science. There are people out there who are growing food in schools who are teaching people to cook in schools and who are building adult and community education back into schools despite the Government cutting it out of the previous Budget in 2008. We are seeing excellent practice going on in our schools and there are people with a lot to tell us. We should be listening to those people very carefully before making up experiments like the charter schools for 0 to 8-year-olds or the limited authority to teach without any professional commitments being allowed to be expanded to 3 years which is what the new Education Amendment Bill (No 2) will do.We are disappointed that the estimates for Vote Education do not meet the real need. We do consider it an underperforming economy when 290000 children live in poverty. It does not matter how many statistics we hear in this House about how successful everything is if our kids are hungry if they cannot learn and if our schools are underfunded. We have to invest in changing that cycle and empowering those kids and their families to believe that they are entitled to participate in society as well as in all the things that the privileged have and that can be done. The Greens have a positive and modern vision for how that can be done. It was awesome to travel and to get positive feedback from all of these people who work at the front line saying “Yes we want to be in that relationship with our communities. We would appreciate your support. We are creative with our funding. We do not expect the earth but what we do want is to be able to build these relationships alongside you.” That is what we believe the school hubs programme and putting kids at the heart of it means. If children rather than rhetoric are at the heart of our decision making we are going to get a different outcome.The school system does need to be constantly scrutinised. It is important that we check ourselves in terms of what we are doing but we should not be adopting the global education reform movement and the fringe experiments simply because they offer an ideological consistency with the idea of education being business and just another market. Thank you.