Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I respectfully suggest to the Minister of Education that she ask the people who write her speeches to perhaps mention a little bit more about the bill being debated rather than talking about all of the other things the Government is doing that are not actually in any way connected to the bill currently before the House. The question that the House should turn its attention to in any debate on education is twofold: first of all how will this improve learning or impact on students' learning and what does research tell us about whether it is going to work or not? I want to go through several of the provisions of the bill and pose those two questions as we go through. So first of all in terms of enabling a principal to manage more than one school the question has to be: what impact will this have on student learning and what does research tell us? I will deal with the second one first—what does research tell us? It tells us that we have already got provisions in law to allow a board of trustees to manage more than one school and to employ a principal to manage that group of schools. It has barely ever been used. So we have an existing provision that allows the Government to do exactly what it wants to do and it is barely ever used. So what is the demand for having a principal managing more than one school and how would that work? That is where the question: How this will impact on student learning?" comes in. Well what is the role of the school principal? Any school principal will tell you it is more than a full-time job. Running one school is more than a full-time job. They are not only the supervisor and mentor to all of the teaching staff and all of the support staff working in their school; they are the curriculum leader for their school. They set the tone of the school. They set the culture of the school. They provide leadership to the students. That is more than a full-time role so how would a principal doing their job effectively manage more than one school and what would happen if things started to go wrong? Those were the questions that we rightly asked at the Education and Science Committee and those are the questions that many of the submitters who came to the select committee also asked. No answers were forthcoming. Officials were unable to say whether the principal would report to more than one school board of trustees. So if there were several boards involved and a principal is managing more than one school who would the principal's ultimate accountability be to? Well the officials told us that one board would ultimately be the employer. What would happen if other boards in the employment arrangement had a problem with the principal? Would they pull out and then what would happen to the principal when their job effectively was disestablished? Would they express that concern to the board of trustees that was the employer and what would happen if the employing board of trustees did not agree with those concerns that were raised? None of those questions could be answered by the officials who attended the select committee. So if this is a good provision how is it going to work and what is the impact going to be on student learning? We could not get answers to those questions. I am open to the debate about it. I am absolutely open to debate about whether or not this is a good idea. I have not yet seen any evidence to suggest that it would work or that it is a good idea. How would changes to school opening hours impact on student learning and what does the evidence and research tell us? Again this is a debate that I am completely open to. For example I have seen some research that suggests that young kids—very young kids—learn better in the mornings and older kids learn better in the afternoons. The teenagers prefer to stay in bed in the mornings and their concentration span is better in the afternoon. I am open to that debate but let us consider the obvious implication of that for families if they have got kids of multiple ages attending different schools. What happens to those families if those kids are all attending school at different times during the day? What are the implications for their parents of their doing so? What happens if the primary school decides in consultation with its community that it wants to open earlier and close earlier in the day and the secondary school where the other kids go wants to open later in the day and close later in the day? What are the implications of that for parents? How are they going to be able to juggle that and what are the implications for their participation in the labour market—i.e. their jobs? Nobody can answer that question and the Government does not even seem to have considered it. When we put those questions to the officials they sort of said: "Oh well communities can manage it and we are not going to force any schools to do it." But that is not the point. The schools can consult with their communities and still come up with arrangements that will be a nightmare for parents to juggle and there is not really any evidence to support them doing so. So then we come to the issue of enabling tertiary institutions to sponsor partnership schools or charter schools. How will this impact on learning and what does the research tell us? Well the research tells us of course that this is an admission by the Government that its partnership schools policy has failed. Let us go back to the very first debate when the Government proposed introducing partnership schools. This was not necessary at the time because the whole notion behind partnership schools was that there would be these external sponsors who would put their own capital into establishing them. Well let us do a fact check. Not one of the existing charter schools has had a significant injection of capital from its sponsor. They are almost exclusively reliant on 100 percent taxpayer funding and they have not had enough applications. The Partnership Schools Authorisation Board as the glorified name suggests has constantly come back to the Government and expressed its disappointment at the calibre of applications. This is the board that was set up by the Government to champion the policy and it is saying that it has been disappointed by the calibre of applications. So what is the Government's solution to that? It is to say that polytechs should now go setting up charter schools. And what are the implications of that? Well ultimately some of those polytechs are struggling to run their own institutions. Many of them are in deficit. The Government—Steven Joyce—has serious concerns about the financial viability of them and now the Government is saying that it wants them to set up partnership schools or charter schools. But it gets even better than that because if they do set up a charter school they will be exempt from the Official Information Act and all of the public accountability that goes with it in respect of the operation of the partnership school. Despite the fact that it will be a 100 percent taxpayer-owned organisation establishing them using 100 percent funding from the taxpayer there will be no scrutiny of them. That is absolutely wrong. There is no evidence to suggest it and if there was the Government would have produced it but it has not. Then we come to the issue of partnership schools dual provision. That sounds like a fairly innocuous term. What does that mean? Again it is an admission of failure. What it is is the Government saying that charter schools should be able to go along to the local State schools and say: "Oh by the way can you teach our kids because we don't have the ability or the subject matter knowledge or the resources to teach the kids?". Despite the fact that they are getting significantly more funding than the local State school they can now palm their kids off on the local State school. Talk about double-dipping—they can claim the money and then get the State school to deliver the education. There is no evidence base to support that. But let us come back to my first fundamental question: what will the implication of that be for student learning? Well not so good for the State school that now has to teach not only its own kids but the kids who are attending the local charter school as well. There is no evidence to suggest that is a good idea.Then we come to the next provision in the bill which is to enable home-based early childhood education services to offer out-of-school care. This is an interesting one because there are some good arguments in favour and some good arguments against but let us just look at some evidence. Why did the Government cancel the review into home-based early childhood education services when there are concerns about the quality of some of the home-based services? I have had home-based service providers come to me and say "We want this review to be resumed because we are worried that our reputation is being dragged through the mud by some of the services that aren't delivering good quality." and yet the Government cancelled the review because it did not like where it was going. It was going to highlight that there are serious and legitimate quality issues with the standard of some of the home-based early childhood education that the Government is currently funding and now it wants to compound that problem by extending that to include not only early childhood education but out-of-school care or after-school care for kids who are currently in schooling. There has been no evidence base produced to suggest that that is going to be good for kids' learning. The final thing I want to talk about is the decision that Hekia Parata and the Government made to create trainee teacher positions—introduced after public submissions had been heard on this bill. We basically had to beg to get them to allow us to open public submissions for 2 weeks. There are some good arguments in favour of a much greater on-the-job component to initial teacher education. Some of the initial teacher education providers would say that and some of the schools would say that. But there was no opportunity for us to have a proper robust debate about how to do that whilst maintaining the quality of teaching graduates. What the impact of that is going to be on student learning we do not know because no evidence base was produced to support the amendments put forward by the Government. On those two measures what does the evidence tell us and what is this going to do for kids' learning? This bill fails because it does not produce the evidence base to support the changes that it makes."