The vast majority of people and organisations who made submissions to Parliament's Education and Workforce Select Committee spoke out against the bill. Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller
Multiple submitters, some representing teachers, principals and parents, have urged MPs to stop what they say is a ministerial power-grab that will deprofessionalise teachers.
Thirty individuals or organisations made submissions to Parliament's Education and Workforce Select Committee on Wednesday and nearly all spoke against the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill.
The bill proposed changes including putting teacher regulatory body, the Teaching Council, under the control of ministerial appointees, giving the Education Minister the power to change the curriculum at will, and speeding up intervention in failing schools.
Principals' Federation president Jason Miles told the committee unprecedented ministerial over-reach ran throughout the bill.
"This bill represents a coordinated shift of decision-making power away from educators, communities and Māori and into the hands of the minister and ministerial appointees," he said.
"This bill assumes that unfettered political control can replace our schools' professional expertise and their partnerships with communities."
Te Akatea spokespeople Tracy Fraser and Ronald Nolan-Waaka said the organisation was in "absolute opposition" to the bill.
"To be blunt this bill is a project of recolonisation. It trades decades of progress in equitable Ti Tiriti-led partnership for a model of centralised Euro-centric control that marginalises Māori authority and reverses decades of progress toward an equitable system." Fraser said.
"This bill promises reform but delivers marginalisation. It is an unsafe piece of legislation that ignores what has worked in the past - local solutions, Te Mataiaho [the curriculum framework]... professional independence and treaty-led partnership."
Nolan-Waaka said the bill's transfer of standard-setting powers from the Teaching Council to the Education Ministry was a power grab that politicised teaching.
"This move risks turning teaching into an ideological tool," he said.
"No other profession would accept such direct political interference in their standards of practice."
Researcher and teacher Fiona Ell told the committee the proposed Teaching Council changes would deprofessionalise teachers and have long-term negative effects on the school system.
"Instead of teachers defining their own professional standards and deciding how new teachers will be educated, the Ministry of Education will decide what teaching is, what good teaching consists of, and how people should be prepared for teaching - this is a massive shift and it effectively deprofessionalises teaching," she said.
"The international research evidence is clear - if we deprofessionalise teaching teacher expertise will decline and so will recruitment and retention."
Secondary school teacher Kate Halls said the government's changes risked making New Zealand's schools like those in her home country, the United Kingdom, and that would be a mistake.
"I feel that if I don't speak up now I will regret it forever," she said.
"The proposed changes alongside the curriculum and qualification changes signal a shift in New Zealand education away from this responsive and high-trust model that I have seen work so successfully, to the rigidity and micromanagement and repeated experience of failure for teachers and learners which drove me and all of my adult students in the UK into the ground and ultimately drove me out of the country," Halls said.
The president of Te Whakarōpūtanga Kaitiaki Kura o Aotearoa - New Zealand School Boards Association, Meredith Kennett, told the committee the government had lost the trust of many in the education sector by failing to consult on many of its proposed changes.
"Our education professions know what they are doing and to simply be ignored or gone around and have all this stuff come out, it's concerning and people are now just really losing trust and really becoming suspicious of anything even it is good."
Kennett said a survey showed 82 percent of its members did not support an Education Minister deciding what should be taught in the school curriculum.
Multiple submitters were worried that the bill would allow the government to turn schools of serious concern into charter schools, but did not define "serious concern".
Teacher Jessie Moss said it could see schools scape-goated for wider social problems beyond their control.
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