Peachey Allan: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Peachey Allan: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2657] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I am pleased to be able to speak on the Education Amendment Bill. I just pass the observation that for the first 5 minutes of the former Labour Minister of Education’s speech I thought it was positive supportive and actually what I would have expected. So it was disappointing to hear that he chose to finish his speech not on a positive note but by failing to acknowledge that when he did not get his legislation through the House last year the electorate had the opportunity to pass judgment. One of the things the electorate wants is greater flexibility in legislation around the schooling system. That is what this amendment bill provides. It also tidies up a couple of areas that need correcting or cleaning up in existing legislation. Nobody could be concerned about that. 
As chairperson of the Education and Science Committee I am looking forward to the cooperation of Labour in doing what is best for the children of New Zealand. I mentioned the introduction of greater flexibility. I will refer for a moment to the police vetting provisions. It is my view that large numbers of schools—and particularly principals—will welcome these changes. The intention is to do something that this Government is very very strong on which is to reduce compliance costs—in this case to reduce compliance costs associated with police vetting—and to minimise needless vetting. I think back to the time when I was leading schools. One of the great frustrations was having to pay money to in effect a third party which was the Teacher Registration Board in order to get a vet that the police would do for me for nothing. It is entirely sensible to remove the middle person the middle organisation out of that process and to let boards of trustees and principals deal directly with the police. It was my experience that far too often the registration board did not get these vets in a manner that was sufficiently timely and reliable for schools. There are a number of schools around this country that took a bit of stick from the Education Review Office over the failure of teachers to be registered or to have their registration renewed when in actual fact it was a timing issue. The bottleneck was within the teacher registration system. So I as a former school principal certainly welcome the greater flexibility that the Education Amendment Bill will bring. 
It is important to acknowledge that all non-teaching staff employed in schools and in early childhood centres will continue to be police-vetted. But it is not necessary in my view that contractors coming on site on a casual basis who will have no contact with children at all go through the bureaucratic business of a vet. I can tell this House—and the members opposite might like to listen—that large numbers of contractors have worked and I am sure continue to work in schools without having been vetted. That is just how it is. So this amendment is a logical sensible extension of flexibility in the way that schools do their business. 
I want to make some comments about the changes that are being proposed around the way that boards of trustees operate. They are very simple changes not hugely significant and no extra child will learn as a result of them but they make the system a little bit more logical and a little bit more flexible and they provide greater clarity. For example there is no point at all in a board of trustees of a school whose closure is imminent holding a triennial election. There is no sense to that. In actual fact if one thinks about it one realises it is a nonsense. So the greater flexibility that is being built in by this amendment must be welcomed. 
Circumstances in some parts of the country would necessitate the need for a combined school board. If one thinks about for example— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: He’s been going to the “Paul Quinn School of Elocution”! 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: I hear Mr Mallard squawking over there. I believe he was Minister when a number of new schools were initiated in the Botany area of Auckland. How logical and sensible it would have been to develop a coherent community approach to the nature of schooling in that community through something like a single establishment board. Of course that did not happen. That did not happen because that former Minister had his own agenda and it was going to be driven through regardless of the interests of the children in that community. This proposed amendment actually hands a bit of power back to the people who know best and that is the parents of the children who will be going to those schools. 
One of the great difficulties behind schooling in New Zealand and one which I do not believe we handle well is what we do with a school that is failing. If one looks at the statistics one will see that 29 schools currently have commissioners. That means that their boards of trustees have been deemed as not capable of running the school to the standard required—29 of them. Another 42 have limited statutory managers. 
Simon Bridges 
: How many? 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: Forty-two of them. That means that there are aspects of those schools’ operations that are not being handled competently by the board or the principal. It might be the financial management or it might be the personnel management. It is a significant number of schools and the range of options and the amount of extra options that are available to assist those schools is seriously limited. The opportunity to have for example a greater range of intervention alternatives must be welcomed. I would have expected the Labour members opposite to welcome that opportunity because right at the fundamental base of this bill is what is best for children. 
I want to make it very clear that under this Government the days when schools are protected because their principal has mates in the Labour Party or they are tied to unions—so the failure of their schools is not addressed—are shortly to be over. And all the parents and their children who are stranded in schools that are failing say thank you.