Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): The education legislation—there is absolutely no question that it desperately needs updating and consolidating. I know that the education community including parents teachers school trustees principals and students themselves has welcomed the opportunity to discuss the objectives of our education system and the purpose of education. Why is it that we spend $11 billion a year on a public education system? Why do we make all kids after the age of 6 attend school? I know that people have welcomed that debate and I know that that has been a wide-ranging debate and that is one of the reasons why when I sat down with this bill I came to the debate wanting to support what the Government may have come up with—I know there has been wide-ranging discussion about it. Unfortunately I was very disappointed because the bill reinforces the worst aspects of what we are doing now and the one future-focused thing that the bill has in it is so far out there and so far based on no evidence at all that it is almost impossible to support in its current incarnation. But let me begin at the beginning with the education system objectives and priorities and the associated changes with school planning and reporting that this bill necessitates. The current Government—and this in my view reinforces one of the worst aspects of the current Government's policy approach—has taken the view that the only learning that matters is the learning that can be assessed that the only assessment that matters is the assessment that leads to the accumulation of standards or credits and that the only credits that matter are those that contribute directly to a qualification. I think that the education system needs to embrace a much wider definition of learning and of student success than that very narrow one that is being now locked in in this bill. That is why the planning and reporting requirements—the very bureaucratic planning and reporting requirements—being imposed by this bill could be very damaging to the education system. We know that despite the focus on qualification attainment and standards attainment that the Government has had in recent times kids are still leaving school without the basic literacy and numeracy requirements that they need to succeed after they leave school. How do we know that? Because Bill English the Deputy Prime Minister told us that when he described young New Zealanders as pretty damned hopeless." I think that we have got to be better than that and we have got to have an education system that is better than that. We know that kids are not getting the literacy and numeracy skills they require because when international objective studies are done like the Programme for International Student Assessment study we find that our rankings are going backwards not just in terms of where we sit relative to other countries but where we sit in terms of our own performance. Comparing ourselves against our past performance we are going backwards. Constantly testing kids which is what this bill focuses on and locks into the education system is not going to improve student learning. Then we come to the communities of learning proposal. I passionately believe that greater collaboration and cooperation between schools and educators will be good for kids' education but the communities of learning system imposed by this bill is heavy-handed it is bureaucratic it is managerial and it is not in any way focused—to the extent that it needs to be—on quality teaching and learning. It is also not fair. Go back to July this year when I got data from the Ministry of Education that showed that 32 percent of all of the funding that has gone into communities of learning thus far has gone into decile 10 schools whilst only 1 percent has gone into decile 1 schools. The communities of learning proposal therefore is reinforcing inequality in the education system rather than tackling it and that has to be one of our key objectives. The bill introduces a new proposal that allows students to start school in cohorts closest to their fifth birthday. I am open to the debate around that and I am looking forward to the evidence that kids starting in cohorts are going to be better off than if they simply start on or nearest to their fifth birthday. I absolutely do not support a proposal that would allow kids to start school earlier than that. If it is a matter of weeks either side of their fifth birthday then I am open to a debate about that but if it goes earlier than that then that is something for which I have yet to see any evidence to suggest that that is going to be good for kids' education. I am also interested in the debate around the establishment of a competence authority and I will very much look forward to hearing what the profession has to say about that but it is a problem when the body that is going to oversee the teacher competence authority is completely appointed by the Minister. If this is a self-governing profession then surely teachers should have the ability to elect their own representatives. At the moment this Government will not allow them to do that. They pay the full cost of the Education Council through their registration fees and yet they do not have any say in how that council is run or what it says on their behalf. At least allow them an election for some of the members on the council so that they have a say in how it is administered. Then we come to the proposal that has perhaps resulted in the most debate and that is the establishment of communities of online learning (COOLS) which could of course see students sitting at home with a computer doing all of their learning at home without the peer-to-peer interaction that they get at school and without the face-to-face interaction with a teacher. It completely ignores all of the research that says that even in an online learning environment the quality of the teacher and the quality of the interaction with the teacher is still going to be the thing that has the biggest impact on student learning. This bill does not take that into account in any way. Kids learn a lot outside the classroom too which is not purely academic but actually contributes a lot to what they can achieve later in life. This bill does not in any way accommodate that. It does not look at research that is coming from other countries. Look at the United States where they do have fully online private charter schools. An evaluation carried out in the United States—and it was a pro - charter school foundation that conducted this research—found that students attending these schools lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in maths during the course of a 180-day school year. That basically meant they lost all of their maths and they lost roughly half of their learning. That is simply not a good basis on which we should be experimenting with kids' education in New Zealand. There is no real evidence base to support what the Government is doing around COOLs. There is no doubt that online learning within schools is taking off in New Zealand in a good way and in a positive way. The idea that schools can be sharing teachers and sharing resources using online learning is good and it has already been embraced by the education system without the need for legislative change. This bill goes much much further than that. I have a couple of other points to raise before I conclude because we are going to have plenty of opportunity to get into the details of this bill when it gets to the select committee. I am interested in the proposal that the Minister has put forward to bring the legislation concerning integrated schools into the primary Act—the Education Act—and we are very much looking forward to hearing what the integrated schools have to say about that because they are the ones who will be most affected by that. We support the changes that the Government has made around the provision of career services and the disestablishment of Careers New Zealand because we certainly need to do a much better job of careers advice in schools. At the moment the system is not working the way it should. This is one step. We need to go much much further. The Labour Party has already set out a pretty concrete proposal to significantly improve the quality of careers advice in schools and we certainly welcome the opportunity as this bill progresses to debate how we can further build on that and do that even better. So overall there is much in this bill that is worthy of debate that is worthy of scrutiny and that will lead I think to some improvements to our education system but there is more in the bill that is backward-looking that is overly bureaucratic and that locks in some of the worst aspects of what we are doing now. Unfortunately those negative aspects of the bill make it impossible for us to support at this stage. We will continue to engage with this bill as it goes through the select committee. We will improve it if we can. We will look to the submitters for their very practical suggestions. We will look to the Government for evidence to support the proposals it is putting forward. The Government has yet to put forward robust evidence for many of the proposals that are contained in this bill and of course we will keep an open mind as that process continues to unfold. But at the moment as the bill is drafted now in an overall way it is not going to be good for teaching and learning and that is the thing that is going to have the biggest impact on student achievement and on what students end up leaving school with. As a result the Labour Party will not be supporting the bill's first reading."