Shearer David: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Shearer David: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
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DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) and I am pleased that Labour is supporting it. But let us face it this bill is not a revolutionary visionary aspirational piece of legislation. This bill tinkers around the edges tidies things up and closes some loopholes. It is certainly nothing more than that and if we look at the five or six things it proposes to do we see that in a sense that is all it does. 
I will pick up on a couple of things that Government members have hit on this evening. Obviously parents should be able to send their kids to the best schools they possibly can but our education system should be about making all schools the best not having super-schools and trying to police entry into those super-schools. It should be about raising the standard of schools throughout New Zealand. 
I have two very big schools in my electorate: Mt Albert Grammar School and Avondale College. They are two of the biggest schools in New Zealand. Avondale College has 2600 students and Mt Albert Grammar School has 2300. Certainly with Mt Albert Grammar School there is a long waiting list to get in and the school takes only a few out-of-zone students. The point is that the schools are good right throughout that region and there are very few bad schools. As a result although some parents choose to put their kids in Mt Albert Grammar School they have the choice of other schools in the area that will give their children a first-class education. 
The other issue I raise is the preoccupation with national standards. Perhaps the only thing people will remember of this Government will be national standards. Let us look at what is happening at the moment in the United States with what we could broadly call national standards. I am talking about George Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy which purports to do many of the same things that this Government’s national standards purport to do. The US is more or less throwing that policy out. It has been loudly and widely criticised and undermined by academics and practitioners alike who are saying that it is not the way to go forward. 
Now the US education system is looking at how much progress children are making from the time they enter school to the time they finish. This was brought up by a head teacher at one of the primary schools in my electorate who said new entrants come to his school with an English reading age of a 3-year-old. His school has to take those kids and by the time they leave that school they will have an English reading age and a speaking age that are appropriate to their age. 
Jacqui Dean 
: National standards! 
Hon Nathan Guy 
: National standards—terrific! 
DAVID SHEARER 
: In other words his school has lifted those kids’ abilities by 2 years. That is terrific. I am pleased that members on the other side of the House think it is good. 
The only problem is that for years 2 3 and 4 that school will be seen to be failing under national standards because the kids will be below where they should be. It has nothing to do with the quality of the school—the quality of the school is excellent. But because of the ridiculous way in which national standards are measured that school will be seen to be not fulfilling what it is expected of it in terms of years 2 3 and 4. That was the concern that that principal raised with me. 
I will speak on two or three of the key aspects of this legislation. One is the secondary-tertiary interface and my colleague Grant Robertson has mentioned it as well. I think this measure provides more opportunity for students. As a former teacher I have seen children who did not cope terribly well at school and had difficulty progressing to tertiary education. This bill enables that progression to happen more easily. An amendment brought in last year allowed the Manukau Institute of Technology to provide a secondary-tertiary programme and this bill amends that provision to make it more universal. I think it was Colin King who mentioned Stuart Middleton who was running that course and showed it to be a very effective way of progressing kids from secondary school to a technical institute. Actually Stuart Middleton is a former teacher of mine. That type of role— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: He learnt afterwards. He got better as time went by. 
DAVID SHEARER 
: He progressed as time went on yes. He has gone on to much better things after that particular experience. 
I raise the same question that Mr Mallard brought up before. Do we need special legislation for this? Why can we not allow this to occur within the confines of the community involved? I think that is an issue we will bring up at the Education and Science Committee as it looks at the bill. 
The second issue in relation to this legislation is that of international students. This bill makes some useful technical changes. It enables a technical institute to bring in fees that will stop the gulling—that is a good term that Mr King used—of students. In other words it will stop them going from one technical institute to another and costing the first technical institute a great deal of money. It also will close the loophole whereby people are coming into New Zealand to enrol in a technical institute and using that as an excuse to enter New Zealand. 
The international student industry is a huge industry for New Zealand. It is a $2 billion industry that has grown incredibly rapidly and it is now extraordinarily important to our trade and our relationships with other countries particularly in Asia. Many of those students who come here to study will go back to wherever they came from—China Korea and increasingly India at the moment—and the connections that they have created here will be fostered through for example business. The real issue is that we are now seeing a reliance on overseas students to effectively subsidise the very institutions that we want to send our kids to. In fact many of our own students find it more difficult to get into New Zealand institutions than overseas students do. Effectively we are using international students as a default way of funding priorities for our educational system. Despite the so-called record amounts of money going into education we are simply not putting enough money into tertiary education. 
Finally I shall touch on private schools and some of the legislation concerning them. The Law Commission looked at this issue under the previous Labour Government in 2008 and made a number of recommendations. The commission did not say that we needed wholesale change but it did say that we definitely needed to lift some of the regulations around who can run a private school and for what purpose. That legislation was brought into force in 1921. It is pretty outdated and it is pretty vague in terms of both the regulations on schools and guidance for schools. Currently there are 97 private schools in New Zealand and this legislation at least addresses some of the shortcomings identified by the Law Commission. 
The great thing about private schools is that they do not have to adhere to national standards. That must be a real incentive for teachers now to go to private schools. They are 80 percent funded by the State. The prominence being given to private schools was reinforced last year when this Government gave $35 million to private schools then promptly cut the amount of money it put into adult education. We can see what is happening in the education system