Annual Review Debate — Education

The Minister of Education is now available for 30 minutes to respond to members’ questions relating to education. Please note that members will have the opportunity to ask questions on the COVID-19 response once our time with education has ended.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to lead off the committee stage of this annual review debate for the education sector, being the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee. I acknowledge the Minister in the chair and I look forward to contributions from my select committee colleagues across the House.

In order to ground the debate, I’ll start with an outline of the process our committee followed for this review. We met between 8 December 2021 and 30 March 2022 to consider these annual reviews and, just as we did in 2021, the education sector annual review was made up of seven annual reviews for different Government entities, and that allowed us to report on the sector as a whole. In the interests of time, I won’t go through all the seven entities, but I will add that we separately considered an annual briefing for Te Pūkenga and, in line with the decision of the Business Committee, we are also debating that review and that particular sector debate today. In reviewing the entities mentioned, we conducted a briefing with the Office of the Auditor-General, a hearing with the Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Hipkins, and the chief executives of the entities. We also received a briefing paper for the overall education sector.

As a committee, we asked well over 1,000 written questions of the entities, and also of Te Pūkenga. Unsurprisingly, the dominant topic of our annual review was COVID-19 and, as we noted in our written report, COVID-19 has had pervasive effects on the education sector, impacting NCEA exams, student and staff wellbeing, and much more. We asked the Minister of Education and the ministry about the impact of closed borders on the supply of teachers, and we asked about the equitable access to digital technology because, with the disruption of COVID, widespread adoption of online and hybrid learning had to become necessary. The ministry informed us of the work that they were doing in that regard, and that included hooking up 40,000 households to the internet, providing 50,000 devices to students, and providing hardcopy materials where that was appropriate.

We also asked the Minister about the work under way on improving student achievement, including numeracy and literacy rates, and reducing the disparities. The Minister noted that the decline in numeracy attainment has been 20 years in the making and that, due to the 10- to 15-year horizon that curriculum changes can take, it will take some time for improvements to be seen in the numeracy outcomes. When asked about ongoing work, the Minister told us of the focus needed on professional development and initial teacher training, and the creation of new standards to be piloted in 2022. We also considered the reform of vocational education and the progress made in the establishment of Te Pūkenga and the workforce development councils. We heard about the record number of people going into apprenticeships, with more people training in areas where the skills are in hot demand, and we also heard about the difference that that free trades training has made.

As a last point, I’ll note the ongoing work on pay parity in the early childhood sector. We noted the Minister’s announcement in May 2021 of $170 million to help achieve pay parity for early childhood education (ECE) teachers, with 62 percent of ECE centres having opted in to access that particular new funding available. We also discussed the introduction of network management in more depth with the Ministry of Education.

I want to acknowledge the officials from across the education entities for feeding into this process and supporting us, as a committee, to provide parliamentary scrutiny to the sector as a whole. I want to thank my committee members for their involvement in this review. It has been a comprehensive and collaborative inquiry, and, of course, even more so with the recent increase in ministerial accountability. By participating in this new style annual review debate, Ministers in this current Government are subjecting themselves to parliamentary scrutiny in a way that hasn’t been seen until these changes were made earlier, when we started this term. I’m sure that the Minister, through questions, will have more to share with us. Thank you, Mr Chair.

Well, we’ve just had five minutes of searing parliamentary scrutiny of the Executive from the Labour backbench MP and Chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, Marja Lubeck, so it’s really good to see that this Government is very focused on that.

My pleasure to speak in this debate—unfortunately COVID has ravaged our education spokesman and -woman line up, and so I’ve been asked to step into the breach, and it is a great pleasure to do that because there is no more important topic facing this country long term than the education of our children. We’re familiar with the concerns that have been raised many times about New Zealand’s slide down the international rankings in terms of literacy and numeracy, and there’s been a lot of debate had as to whether that’s important or not, or relevant or not. In my time as education spokesperson, I was surprised by the number of principals of schools who didn’t think that was an issue.

The Minister of Education in our session earlier made the point that—spun it in a rather strange way, I thought—our relative slump from New Zealand was “probably a good thing” because it shows that other countries are improving their performance, and maybe we should be celebrating their success rather than bemoaning our demise. And I suppose the question that I have for the Minister is: does he, on reflection, think perhaps that wasn’t a wise comment? And indeed, when it comes to the ability of New Zealanders to thrive in the modern world, to compete internationally, and to be able to reach their fullest expression—whether in work or in their general lives—in terms of understanding the arts and literacy and all the wonders that come with education, surely our ambitions should be to retain and regain the very high levels of relative education performance that we have delivered in the past and can in the future, so that New Zealanders are well equipped to thrive globally, as we have in so many endeavours in so many ways. And so I just give the Minister an opportunity to recalibrate that, and raise his ambition and the Government’s ambition.

In particular, on the issue of literacy, we note that only 35 percent of 15-year-olds are passing basic proficiency in numeracy and literacy, and the Government has recently released its literacy and numeracy strategy. The concern that we have is that it lacks any specific details on what exact strategies will be implemented. In fact, a very vague outline leads to the final conclusion that the literacy section explains that there will be an “evidence-based approach”. So the relevant question that we have is, well what evidence will it be based on, and what approach will be followed? And what we’d be asking the Minister, specifically on the literacy side, is—there’s lots of debates about these things. We in this country have followed, particularly in years 0 to 2—the very start of learning to understand, and to read and to write—we’ve been using what’s called the “balanced approach” for many decades. There’s a very, I think, compelling argument that it has failed us, and it has failed our children, and is a big part of the reason why we’re going backwards. Will he adopt what’s called the “structured literacy approach” or the “phonics-based approach” as the standard approach to try and turn that around? I’d be very interested in his views on that—some specificity, or are we just going to rather vaguely say we’ll carry on with an “evidenced-based approach”? So there’s a couple of questions to get the Minister started.

One final question, of course, he might ask his colleague the COVID-19 Response Minister, when—and I ask this on behalf of two teenage girls at school—will they not have to wear a flaming mask all day? Because there is nothing more frustrating and irritating for students to have to do that, particularly adolescent ones with pimples. In terms of just restoring a bit of fun, and life, and relaxation, and the ability to interact freely, when are we going to get rid of those masks?

Thank you, Mr Chair, and tēnā koutou e te Whare. My question is around COVID in schools, and I know a lot of parents around Parliament and also parents around the nation will be wondering about what’s planned to come out for winter as well. Schools have been the hotbeds for COVID, with large outbreaks in schools. In fact, for tamariki and whānau in the last 10 days, we’ve had over 25,000 cases in schools alone, and vaccination rates are low as well.

So my question to the Minister—and there’s a series of questions, and I’m hoping he’ll get to all of them—is how’s the roll-out for the mechanical ventilation infiltration going? Will schools have this in place by the start of term 2, before winter kicks in, and also is the Minister concerned about the wellbeing of children and their ability to focus and to learn in cold, draughty classrooms as well, because that’s really important. We’re knocking on the door—winter’s nearly here as well.

On the back of that as well, when will teachers and students have free N95 masks, and if they won’t get them, then why not? Also, what is the Government doing to increase vaccination rates for tamariki Māori and Pasifika children in kura as well.

So if the Minister could work his way through that. I’m especially interested in what’s going to happen around ventilation infiltration, air filtration—particularly as we move into winter. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Happy to work my way through the list of questions that we’ve had so far this evening. I’ll start with the international rankings and my comments that have been badly distorted by Mr Goldsmith on the international rankings. I know that would be an entirely new thing for him to do. But I will say that I did differentiate in my comments in select committee between the decline in the mean scores of New Zealand students, which is something that we should all be concerned about, and the presence of additional countries in the overall international rankings. Bearing in mind that when these started about 25 or 30 years ago, there weren’t as many countries involved in the studies as there are now, and we should welcome the fact that there are more countries participating in these kind of comparative studies, and also that some of those studies, particularly some of the developing countries, are actually doing better. I don’t have a problem with that. I welcome that. I celebrate that. But I do have a problem, and I think we all in this House should have a problem, with the fact that the performance of New Zealand students, even if you forget about what the rest of the world is doing, has been going down. That trend has been evident ever since we started participating in these studies about 25 or 30 years ago. So I think we do need to take that very seriously.

So, in terms of literacy and numeracy, it’s worth remembering that the most prominent of all of those studies is the Programme for International Student Assessment study, and that measures the reading literacy, among other things, of our 15-year-olds. So these kids have already been in our education system, in our schooling system for 10 years at that point, and then if you add early childhood education on before that, they could have spent about 13 years in the education system. What do we know about that? Well, we know that the kids who participated in quality early childhood education actually do better by the time they are at the age of 15. So there’s one area where the Government has placed quite a significant amount of attention.

We do know that we can do better when it comes to those core basics like literacy and numeracy. It’s one of the things that we’ve been investing in since we have been in Government. Mr Goldsmith raised the question of what’s the magical answer when it comes to teaching kids to read. Well, here’s the cold, hard reality: there isn’t a magical answer. Those who grab at phonics and say, “This is the way you should do it and you should only do it this way.”—they are wrong. But those who also grab at the reading in context theory, they are also wrong if they think that that is the only solution, because, actually, you use whatever solution is best for that individual child. Some kids learn by looking at pictures and interpreting the words. Some kids learn by sounding things out. The Ready to Read series that has recently been released combines all of those elements so you can use what is best for the child. I read every night, when I’m at home, with my 5-year-old, using the Ready to Read books that he brings home from school, and I can tell you that they are a brilliant resource, and the newer Ready to Read books are even better than the original ones because they give you such a rich set of materials that you can work with in teaching kids to read.

But we’ve got to invest in teacher professional development because that is how we’re really going to turn things around. When we talk about the quality of teaching, people say we should raise the standard for beginning teachers. That’s all very well and good, but 10 years from now, the majority of teachers in our classrooms will be teachers that are already in our classrooms today. So we’ve actually got to focus on making sure that those teachers who are in our classrooms as of now, have the opportunity to improve their skills and to upskill.

In terms of masks in schools and when they will be removed: when the country moves to orange. Not giving anything away, when the country does move to orange, then the mask use in schools rules change. They move from a requirement to an encouragement, and therefore people can expect to see some change there.

Teanau Tuiono raised some very good questions about COVID-19 and winter. Winter is coming, what’s planned? Well, around ventilation, if I could talk about ventilation because this comes up all of the time, I have looked very closely at the comparative effectiveness of those portable air cleaners versus opening the window. A portable air cleaner will change the air in a room about three times in an hour. Opening the doors and the windows will change the air in the room between 15 and 30 times in an hour. So opening the doors and the windows is still a better solution than putting in a portable air cleaner. Now, you come to winter and you say, “OK, but it’s colder in winter, and therefore you don’t want to have all the doors and windows open in winter.”—fair point. Opening the window by about 1½ centimetres is going to change the air in a room about the same as a portable air cleaner. If you open the window 3 centimetres, which is still going to preserve most of the heat in the room, that will change it at roughly double the rate of a portable air cleaner. So our focus on portable air cleaners has been putting them in those places where there isn’t natural ventilation, but where there is natural ventilation, that is going to be by far the best thing that we can do from a COVID-19 perspective.

In terms of free N95 masks, the science at this point supports making freely available the medical-grade masks—the ones with the blue outers—and that is exactly what we have been doing. In terms of increasing the vaccination rates for our Māori and Pacific children, that is one of the major focuses of our health providers. But I do want to note that vaccination of children is voluntary, and therefore the effort that all of us need to make—and all of us can play a role here—is ensuring that parents feel confident in having their children vaccinated.

If opening the window is up to five times more effective than having a portable air cleaner in a classroom, why did the Government bother ordering so many portable air cleaners, when did the Minister find out these facts, and isn’t it convenient that he’s only saying this now because the Government’s bungled getting those portable air cleaners delivered?

The portable air cleaners were ordered before the latest science was available. There’s no question about that. But there are a lot of classrooms in our schools which don’t have natural ventilation, and there are spaces within schools that don’t have natural ventilation. So we will make use of the portable air cleaners that have been ordered.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Just in terms of the other issue, of course, when we think of how do we improve our educational outcomes, obviously, we need to have world-class teachers. We need to have a world-class curriculum which prepares our students to foot it with the best in the world—not just what we think is maths or science, but what the rest of the world thinks is maths and science—and equipping them well to succeed.

But the most fundamental thing that’s required is that the kids are actually at school, and we still—four years into this Government—have very poor attendance rates. There are, overall, so many children not attending regularly, and I want to know what progress he has made, if any, on that. There has obviously been a real tension over this COVID period, where many families have been so frightened that they haven’t wanted to send their children back to school. I’ve heard comments from the Minister that they should be going back to school, but I’d like to know how big an effort is being made, and I’d like to challenge the Minister to say that there should be no area that is more important and more of a focus for his ministry and his team to focus on getting those kids back to school.

Finally, just a couple of questions in the tertiary space around particularly the reform of the technical training. I want to know why Te Pūkenga has not yet finalised its operating model, and does the Minister still think he’s on track for it to be self-sustaining by the end of 2022? Does he think it’s acceptable that the CE of this new institution, when questioned by the education select committee, didn’t know how many staff he had employed at the head office and didn’t know which subsidiary Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics of New Zealand were operating at a deficit? Does he think that a Te Pūkenga head office of approximately 200 staff is meeting his intentions of a lean, nimble head office that’s not an additional, bloated democracy sitting on top—an additional layer of bureaucracy sitting on top?

And the final question is, when is he actually going to focus on getting the international students back en masse to New Zealand and resuscitating—which is going to be a very long task—an industry that used to be our fourth-largest export earner?

Kia ora. Thank you, Mr Chair. Just to follow up on one of those questions: I was wondering if the Minister could also tell us about guidelines that will go into schools and kura as well. One of the things I’m mindful of is that it’s hard work being a teacher, but expecting them to be health workers as well is a pretty tough call as well. So making sure that support is there, I think, is really important.

Also, some reflections on support for those that support our kids—learning support staff as well. What is going to be happening in that area as well? All of the situations that we find ourselves in with COVID also puts pressure on them, so what’s going to happen with making sure that that support for support staff is there? So some comments around that would be useful and helpful as well.

Also, what’s happening with the high needs review—if the Minister could talk to that. And what has been achieved in the learning support action plan so far? Could he reflect on some of the comments from the Disability Rights Commissioner about the Government spending on residential schools for disabled kids compared to the support for schools and communities in general, and how that balance will be struck to make sure that families that want to have that community support are supported to do so. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Does the Minister stand by his statement he just made that he’s only recently found out the science on high-efficiency particulate air filters versus windows. Does he agree that the time taken to replace the air in a room by opening the window or having a filter inside the room is a function of the flow rate of the filter or window and the volume of air in the classroom? And can he tell us about the new science where that calculation recently became available after he’d ordered the filters?

In answer to the member’s question, the work around schools has been looking specifically at a classroom environment and those classrooms that do or don’t have natural ventilation. So no, that information was not available, but information around the benefits of natural airflow have been available from the beginning. It is one of the reasons why I’ve stood in this House many times over the last six months and explained to Opposition members who have been demanding to know why we haven’t ordered more air cleaners that we haven’t because they’re not actually justified.

In terms of Mr Goldsmith’s comments around attendance, I would note that attendance in New Zealand schools had been trending down since about 2015, but had actually started to stabilise before the COVID pandemic hit. Now I’m not saying that stabilising was good enough, in fact we want to see attendance improving, but it had started. We had arrested the decline and then, of course, the global pandemic hit and that changed everything. The last couple of years have been so up and down that I don’t know that the numbers comparison in the pre-COVID environment to now isn’t necessarily a fair comparison. As we come out of the other side of the global pandemic, we’ve got a big task ahead of us to get kids back to school. I think it’s something that everybody in the Parliament should unite behind, that cause. I agree with Mr Goldsmith in raising it regularly, it is something that we need to raise the national consciousness of. I do believe that parents need to take a responsibility here for getting their kids back to school. But we also need to make sure that things like the attendance service are properly resourced so that they can do their part, and that schools are properly resourced for their part of that equation.

In terms of Te Pūkenga, the draft operating model for Te Pūkenga has been publicly released, it’s available on their website. When it’s finalised, of course, is up to them. In terms of the head office, I would note that they are in a point of transition at the moment and many times you do expect to see some increase in numbers before a decline in numbers when you’re doing a big project like that.

In terms of international students, I think we’ve made provision for 5,000 to be guaranteed to be able to have their visas processed before October. After that, processing goes back to normal again and students will be able to apply. So I think the summer school period and the academic year of 2023 is looking pretty promising for international education, and I certainly intend to be promoting the value of an international education in New Zealand.

Teanau Tuiono raised quite a range of issues, and I won’t be able to do them all justice in the space of a minute or two. But in terms of the guidelines for schools around COVID-19, we will provide revised guidance to them. We’ve been trying to do that in a more consolidated way. In the early phases of the pandemic, we were providing schools and early learning services with near daily bulletins, updating them on the guidance, and we’ve been trying to bring that back to a more reasonable level so that they can actually keep up.

In terms of learning support, that’s been an area that the Government has put a lot of focus and a lot of investment into. We’ve seen the wait times for all of those learning support interventions coming down. Having said that, there’s no room for complacency there and we need to keep leaning on that. In terms of the Learning Support Action Plan, we’ve seen things like the learning support coordinators rolling out—that’s making a difference, it’s one of the things that’s helping us to bring those wait times down.

Finally, just in terms of his question about special residential schools and whether those students are better off in special residential schools or in the community, in their local community school, in most cases it is going to be their local community school that is going to be the best place for them. The intensive wraparound service provides the level of support that they need to be educated and supported at their local school. But where—in a very high threshold—there’s a need for some support from a residential school, we want parents and the school communities to have that as an option.

Thank you for those answers, Minister. My next bunch of questions is around Māori education. I was wondering about your engagement with Te Rūnanga nui o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori, because I have heard calls for the establishment of an independent Māori education authority. It makes sense, with the Māori Health Authority, and we support that as well. But I want to understand your thinking around there—given that the inequities that exist in health also exist in education as well—and, if possible, to talk about how he can reconcile that with our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Kia ora.

The members will note that the Government’s made a lot of progress around Māori-medium education—a significant expansion in our kura kaupapa and so on. What we have to acknowledge is that the majority of Māori students are learning in an English-medium environment. My colleague the Hon Kelvin Davis has been leading the work in that space, and those questions are probably best directed to him. But it is something I’ve been working very closely with him on. I do believe that we should celebrate the fact that students in Māori-medium education actually are often doing better than the students in English-medium education, and so we should be looking at Māori medium to see what we can learn from that. I don’t disagree that there’s more that we can do in that area, and that’s something the Government continues to work on.

Why is the Ministry of Education proposing to ban primary and intermediate State schools from charging intermediate fees? How much has been spent on this project to date? And does the Minister of Education realise that the only net effect is that kids will go to private schools like King’s School instead of State schools like Remuera Intermediate School next door that are using their international fees to pay for things such as te reo Māori classes? How is that possibly a good use of the Ministry of Education’s time to investigate such a crazy proposal?

As the member indicated, there was a consultation document issued. One of the drivers behind that, of course, was concern around the pastoral care for very young international students in an environment where there was significantly limited movement at the New Zealand border. We’ve had a lot of feedback on that. The Cabinet will consider that in due course, and decisions will be made.

So if New Zealand is reopening its border, will Cabinet dump this proposal to ban international student fees being charged by primary and intermediate State schools?

As I indicated, the Cabinet has not yet considered the feedback that has been received, but it will do so.

But if the border and pastoral care during a time of a closed border was the rationale for the policy, and the rationale has disappeared, why would the Cabinet continue to consider it? Or was there some other rationale behind the policy that the Minister’s not telling the committee about right now?

Because when you ask people what they think it’s generally a polite thing to then consider the feedback that they give you.

What would the Minister have to hear to continue the policy? Because if there’s no possible rationale remaining for it, wouldn’t he be better to dump it rather than subjecting the principals of primary intermediate schools, who rely on that revenue, to ongoing uncertainty? Not to mention many people considering coming to or remaining in New Zealand, who are seeing their educational options put in jeopardy by a Minister who continues a policy that he just admitted has no continuing rationale, but curtly says it will be polite to keep listening and keeping those people in uncertainty?

I envisage that the Cabinet will make a decision on that within the next month.

I understand we have Teanau Tuiono.

Thank you, Mr Chairperson. Actually, I asked my questions in the last round, so that wasn’t me.

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