Labour says early childhood centres are unsafe

In Parliament today:

Chris Hipkins: … but I am concerned about students’ safety from being in classrooms with unqualified, unregistered teachers …

Hon Nikki Kaye: Is the member saying that children in early childhood centres are unsafe? Is that what the member is saying? Is that what he’s saying to every single child in an early childhood centre.

CHRIS HIPKINS: Yes.

Go read the full transcript but Chris Hipkins clearly says he believes early childhood centres are unsafe because they also can have unregistered teachers.

Is there no end to the scaremongering?

What is especially appalling is to make such claims when we’ve just had the case in Northland of dozens of kids abused by a registered teacher.

Hipkins would have you believe that charter schools will be staffed with pedophiles who have been sacked from state schools. Nonsense. The law allows them to negotiate a proportion of their teachers to be unregistered with the Ministry of Education – if there is a good reason for doing so. There will be the odd exceptional person who can be of great value who may not be a registered teacher. I expect once charter schools are up and running, the number of unregistered teachers will be very low.

Also worth recalling that organisations such as Teach for America send tens of thousands of top graduates into schools in low income communities to help inspire and improve learning outcomes. Their graduates are basically all “unregistered” yet many studies have shown they achieve better results.

Anyway back to the main point – Labour is telling parents that their kids are unsafe at early childhood centres. What horrific deplorable scaremongering.