Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 27 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:955. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):I am delighted to take a call on this important piece of legislation the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) and would like to reiterate what my colleague Chris Hipkins has said about the submitters. I think for those of us who attended the hearings there was an amazing consistency in the submissions from the many voices of people and we really heard very clear messages about what is important. Hence the Green Party is opposing the bill and we are putting up 10 Supplementary Order Papers on different aspects of the bill in an effort to make sure that the bill could actually reflect what the profession wants out of its council.If we go back to how change is best achieved it is interesting to think about whether change is best achieved by imposition or inspiration. Nobody disagrees that the Teachers Council could go through a review process. It is a necessary part of any institution that it be reviewed and that it be reviewed by Government which puts money in and by the profession which should own it in the professional sense. Clearly the profession is not happy with what has been suggested for this organisation. We had an overwhelming number of submissions that clearly stated that the profession did not want the Teachers Council to be turned from a registration body run by professionals where at least some of the people were appointed by those professionals to a creature of the Minister of Education of the day. This is basically what has happened. It has become a creature of the Minister of the day. Hence the large number of submissions that focused on the issue of representation. Although we did have a victory on one issue which is to get teachers on to the council I would like first to address the issue of representation which is in one of my Supplementary Order Papers.One of the problems that we have with representation is teachers not being able to choose their own people. The field is now open to anyone to vote and every single one of the nine appointments will have to be accepted by the Minister. That is not the situation at the moment. At the moment though the Minister appoints some of the people we actually have a large number of teachers engaged in voting for the representatives. They have just been through that process and we have seen the result which is some very high-calibre people being voted on by the profession. We do not see why—and hence Supplementary Order Paper 29 we have put up—there is such a lack of trust in the ability of teachers to govern themselves.We support as do the teachers who came and submitted—and it was largely teachers organisations that came and submitted—an improvement to registration. They actually would like to see an improvement to registration. There was no disputing the support for the improvement to registration and the importance of having tight and heavily monitored guidelines for making sure who gets to work with our children because this is what this Teachers Council has been about. It has been about who gets to work with our kids. When there has been problems then it has been really important that we look at the loopholes in the structures and make sure that we cannot have loopholes and that the vulnerable—the children—will not be exposed to people who should not be there. That is one of the issues that we wanted to raise in the Supplementary Order Papers—the critical issue of representation. We really do believe that if we want change it should be inspired not imposed and teachers themselves should have control of their own professional body. You have already heard that from a number of us in the first levels of debate but we heard it thousands of times—literally thousands of times—at the Education and Science Committee. Day after day after day in different cities we heard people say: “Please. We want to represent ourselves. We are professionals.”This leads me on to another of my Supplementary Order Papers Supplementary Order Paper 35 which relates to the question of ethics versus conduct. Again the professionals were saying: “If you really want to lift the status of the profession which you claim to do in this bill why don’t you respect the fact that the code of ethics is a fundamental recognition of that? Why are you going for a code of conduct which is far more about a tick-box public service control model than recognising our professionalism?”. It should be remembered that the fees that teachers pay are for their own professional body. Therefore they should have the type of code that reflects their responsibilities their beliefs and their capacity as professionals. The medical profession does as was pointed out to us numerous times as do other bodies so why not the teachers? If we are really serious about valuing teachers and making sure that we have the best possible education system in this country this was the moment to listen to those submitters. But unfortunately the Government has not listened. The bill has not been changed sufficiently to do that. That is very disappointing. A code of ethics would have been a signal from the Government that we recognise that the teaching profession is more than capable of distinguishing the difference between conduct and ethics and that ethics require a broader deeper and more educational approach.Continuing with some of the other Supplementary Order Papers on the functions of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ)—these are really important issues because again the status of the profession is at stake in this. The idea of the broad powers of this new council—it is interesting but it is very vague. It does not really address the issue that the council was set up for. It is changing its function profoundly without again the support of the profession. If it is going to raise the status of the profession the way this is structured it relies far more on the actions of the Minister and the Ministry of Education. It does not actually raise the status of the profession at all. The purpose statement of the new body is really vague; it is not clear. The status of teaching relies much more on matters such as employment conditions and remuneration than something that the council itself can control. We do not really need a ministerial body duplicating the efforts of other bodies that we already have for raising the status of the profession and for the functions that are suggested. It will not lead to safe high-quality leadership in teaching unless it has buy-in from those people unless it is the core business.The debate remains. What is the core business of this council? I do not think that was clarified at all. We did not hear in these statements about the function and raising status etc. what they mean and how that is core business. Teachers were very concerned that they were going to pay fees for something that was vague and that could rely on certain things happening with that money that did not raise the status of the profession that it was just fashion of the day or an opportunity to spend money which they had paid for to do things that they did not have any power over. For example if the council started to run expensive advertising campaigns or give out awards or invite new standards or criteria which no one had any proper input into. These costs could then be sheeted home to the teachers who have not got those powers who do not want to change the functions in the way that has been suggested. We are going to say that if you are going to put a cost on teachers we ought to listen to what it is that they want done. That is another of our Supplementary Order Papers. There are several of them relating to the functions of EDUCANZ because it is critical that the functions are not only clear but that they are supported by the people who have to carry them out.We are also very concerned about the clauses in the bill around changing the name of the council because of the symbolic importance of the word “teacher” and we understand why so many submitters raised this. It may seem like a petty and minor point to some people but actually it is quite critical if you recognise that teaching is a profession that we want to uplift in this country and therefore a teachers council will understand exactly what a teachers council does. EDUCANZ—that could be any NGO it could be any consultancy it could be any private body. It is one of those meaningless names that does not actually inspire the confidence of the people whom it is supposed to represent. So it is a very concerning issue and a symbolic issue rather than a profound content issue. But people were afraid that it would flow into content.The clauses around limited authority to teach—we want to change those so we have Supplementary Order Paper 25 about skill shortages. We have no problem with the limited authority to teach so long as it is related to skill shortages. But actually what we heard around the country from the submitters is that there are not these skill shortages so why are the limited authority to teach clauses being expanded in this? Is it something to do with charter schools? Is it the fact the Government wants to make sure there are more unqualified people in front of groups of children who have been identified by it as priority learners? We do not know. But when many of us from the Opposition asked at the select committee: “Do you have skill shortages?” the schools said: “No that’s not the issue. Not in that way. We do not need an extension to the limited authority to teach.” So that was another one.We would like to change the law to make it clear that we support the limited authority to teach where there are skill shortages but not as a blanket increase in the number of people who are coming into schools without having the pedagogical background to understand the difference between knowing a subject and teaching a subject. That is a profound difference. It is a difference particularly for primary schools but it applies to secondary schools as well. When you are teaching a person as opposed to a subject you have to understand the dynamics and the pedagogy not just be really good at understanding how to do some particular thing or have even a knowledge of quantum physics. That is not how it works if you want people to learn. So we are disappointed in those clauses and we are making those suggestions. In the late stages my colleague and I will talk about the clauses around tertiary governance. It is very very concerning.