Peachey Allan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Peachey Allan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Volume:664;Page:12331] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I welcome Mr Mallard’s indication of support for the Education Amendment Bill (No 2). I am looking forward to chairing the Education and Science Committee’s consideration of the legislation. I suspect that there are a number of areas in the bill that will become the subject of some quite considerable robust debate and I look forward to that. It can only be healthy. I am not sure whether Mr Mallard was praising me in his comments about my standing as a principal but I will take as a compliment his acknowledgment of my ability to use the system that politicians presented to me in the best interests of the children in the community that I was serving. 
I will talk about enrolment schemes and enrolment scheme provisions because I had the privilege of leading schools through three steps in this process. I will begin with the introduction of Tomorrow’s Schools by the previous Labour Government of which Mr Mallard was a member— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I wasn’t quite a member of the Government; I was just a backbencher. 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: He was a backbench member of the Government. I thought he might have been a whip actually. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I was a whip. Whips are not part of the Government. 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: Whips do not count. OK there we go I say to Mr Tremain whips do not count. 
Basically it was left to schools that needed an enrolment scheme. A school had an enrolment scheme only if it was overcrowded or in danger of being overcrowded and that school determined whether the scheme was based on a defined geographical area or on other criteria. Many schools like the school that I led always had a clearly defined geographical criteria because it was important for the board and the community that it was a community school. Towards the latter part of the 1990s the legislation was changed and schools were required to have a geographical zone. It did not matter all that much at the school I led because it had one anyway. 
We begin to get into difficulty when we start defining geographical areas. Members should remember that it is only in respect of schools that are oversubscribed—in other words schools whose style of education is keenly sought after by the community—that those schemes are put in place— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Or areas of rapid growth. 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: What tended to happen of course was that property in those areas took on a premium. It then became really important to look at the criteria that a school had for taking youngsters from outside that geographical area. Schools had to make individual choices as to what those criteria would be. 
We move to 2001 when the Education Standards Act introduced the criteria and it is those criteria that this bill proposes to change. Mr Mallard is right: whenever new criteria are introduced new opportunities for loopholes to be exploited are introduced. It was no different with the 2001 legislation. I could tell this House about a whole pile of ways that people operated but I will not as I do not have the time. For example parents in particular—and who can blame any parent for wanting to get their child into a top school—use sibling relationships to get their child into a top school. So working around the system is by no means new. However I will keep my personal views on what shape this should take for the select committee process. I am expecting the debate in the select committee to be robust and exciting and for something good to come out of it on the issue of enrolment schemes. At the end of the day the objective has to be to ensure that the maximum number of youngsters can get to the very best schools that are available. 
One of the subtle shifts that I saw over time as a consequence of the 1989 legislation passed by a former Labour Government was that parents were less willing to accept the notion that they could send their kids to a school up the road the intermediate up the road or the high school down the street and they would be happy with that. Those days have long since gone. I believe we face a major challenge in ensuring that good schools are available to the maximum number of youngsters possible. 
I will make a couple of quick comments on the secondary-tertiary interface in terms of technical education. I think it would be fair to say that over the last 20 years New Zealand has not done this very well. I can think back to the early 1990s when there was a huge amount of talk of an interface between secondary schools and the tertiary sector. There was variable performance. One thing that it is very important that people get their heads around is that the nature of an education in technical subjects has changed hugely. The qualities abilities knowledge and skills that youngsters need to succeed in a technical education have changed greatly. I am not sure that our system has changed sufficiently quickly to keep up with that. It is my hope that the provision now to have trade academies and the interface with the tertiary sector will enhance that process. I am bound to say that on a number of occasions in other countries particularly in the United States I have seen schools doing quite a stunning job of the provision of technical education. New Zealand has been well behind that not just in its provision of technical education but also more important in the way that it has thought about technical education and what sorts of youngsters should have access to it. I look forward to that change. Again I believe there will be room for the select committee to debate some of those issues. There are a number of other provisions in the legislation but other members have more than adequately covered those. For the moment I shall confine my comments to those points. Thank you.