Martin Tracey: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Martin Tracey: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 October 2012. Volume:684;Page:5997. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First) 
: 
 Kia ora. I rise to speak on the Education Amendment Bill and I want to start with something that I agree with. I want to start by saying that I agree with Nikki Kaye when she says that this bill is a pivotal bill for this country inside education. However I think it is in the wrong direction. But I would also say that if Ms Kaye was actually the Minister of Education I would have greater faith and greater trust that open-mindedness would take part on both sides of the House in the conversation. So I am sorry that Ms Kaye is not the current Minister of Education because I actually believe that she cares for the children of this country and that she understands has an open mind and is prepared to work cross-party to make things right for the children of this country. 
None of us denies that 20 percent failing or not achieving at their best is not good enough. But I also want to acknowledge that in that 20 percent are a large number of special-needs children—the parents of them were out there today—who have had their special-needs units closed who are going to be put into mainstream schools and who are trapped by national standards. Add to that those numbers of children who are not going to be cared for in any way shape or form by this amendment bill. So I start with something that I agree with and it is the quality of Ms Kaye inside this House. 
I also want to say that I agree with the surrender and retention clauses in this bill and I am pleased to see them there. As a current member of a board of trustees I am pleased to not have to have the conversation in the future with some more virulent members of boards that they cannot bring drug dogs into the school once every week just because they think it looks cool. So I am very pleased that there will be some structure around the search and seizure abilities of the school boards of trustees. 
I want to remind the House that when New Zealand First came into this House we said we would vote for good legislation and we would vote against bad. The way this is worded right now is bad. It is not going to achieve what I think is truly the desire of the Government which is to start to lift those one in five. I do not believe that this is the way forward. I believe it is going in the opposite direction and the fact that Mr John Banks quotes from 1938 to justify this bill indicates that he is nowhere near a 21st century learning environment. 
It is actually scary that Mr Banks has got anything to do with this bill quite frankly. However I do not think we should blame Mr Banks for this bill being here because this work was done and was started prior to any agreement being signed with the ACT Party. I do not want the National Government to have an excuse that when this goes bad it is going to blame it on MMP. This was National’s idea. The Secretary for Education was hired some months before the parties actually signed an agreement so the Government cannot blame this on MMP. This came from its Cabinet. 
This Government has turned the word “choice” into a weapon. It is using it to bash every public institution to death quite frankly. It has altered the meaning of that word and has turned it into a weapon against education against health and against our public servants. Part 1 of this bill actually has a statement about the “Right to free primary and secondary education”. We all agree with that. But how about the right to know what your taxpayer dollar is being spent on? Why are these schools not included in any Official Information Act requests? Why have they been exempted? I am very very concerned. 
The bill actually says that charter schools are required to abide by the discipline procedures that are inside the legislation. I am very pleased to see that. However they are exempt from the Ombudsmen Act. At the end of the discipline procedure when a child is excluded or expelled from any school the last point of complaint is to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman can actually seek the records from go to whoa with regard to the discipline procedure to make sure that the processes of natural justice were carried out and that the board did not unduly influence or unduly require those parents to remove their child. That has been removed from charter schools. That means that charter schools can exclude or expel students with nobody knowing why with nobody having any oversight as to whether natural justice was a part of that process or what support mechanisms were put in by the schools to try to keep that child engaged in education. That is a major concern. I hope we can discuss it further at the Education and Science Committee. 
How about the right to be consulted by your Government before it decides to close or merge your school? I mean that is another little issue that has come up in here. With regard to that I asked the Minister a question in the House the other day about whether for any Christchurch schools that would be merged the current 3-month period inside the Education Act 1989—the 3-month time frame by which new boards of trustees’ elections must be called for any merged schools—would stand. She said to me that yes this bill removes that clause. This bill allows the Minister to decide to not do that. What that means to two schools being merged is—and I want to point out here too that the Secretary for Education has actually been quoted as saying that New Zealand was too immature for Tomorrow’s Schools when it was introduced and that we needed to get rid of primary schools a long time ago. She said that in a public meeting. 
It does not give a great deal of confidence when the next thing you see is a clause in here saying that schools can be merged but there is a removal of the requirement to hold a democratic process to elect the board of trustees to a school. That means that the Minister could actually merge primary intermediate and secondary schools into an educational hub decide that the secondary school board was going to be the governing body and that is it. Nobody else in that community for a 3-year period gets an opportunity to actually participate in the governance of their school. And what boards of trustees do—let us now go to section 75 in clause 16—is that they are elected representatives of their parental communities who set the direction after consultation with their communities through their vision statement through their charter and then through the management with the annual plan. That is actually the first rung of the democratic process and this clause is another attack on it. This clause looks like another attack on that process. 
Also inside the charter schools provision I do not see any provision for that communication—for that partnership shall we say—with those communities. There is a sponsor and there is an owner—a private owner of a school. I do not even see it in here actually. I am happy to work with the Education and Science Committee and be proven wrong but even under private schools when a body is appointed by the owners of those schools that is not mentioned in here either. So it looks like the sponsor rules. 
If ever there was a clause that shows you that this is just a business then it is clause 23. “Partnership school” is another term that has been taken and unfortunately manipulated by this Government. There is no partnership in here—there is no partnership in here. Tomorrow’s Schools created a triangle of support for our students. It brought home and school together for the benefit of the student. There is no elected board. There is a sponsor that runs the school. There certainly is a contract that nobody can see but there is also now a business leader in charge of the school—not a teaching professional and not a person who necessarily has any idea about teaching. How can that person judge the educational outcomes? By what criteria can they judge the educational outcomes or the quality of teaching and learning that is happening there? They cannot. They are a business leader. They can tell you—and I was going to use these dreaded words—how much profit they can get from the bulk funding that is going to happen inside these schools by saving on non-registered teachers or by cutting back on this that or the other thing but they will not be able to adequately report on the teaching and learning and the quality of it inside those schools. 
This is me just scratching the surface. We need a long time at the select committee. We need to hear this and maybe we might get something right.