Lubeck MarjaEducationMARJA LUBECK (Chairperson of the Education and Workforce Committee): Thank you Madam Chair. Just changing the mode a little bit here. As chair of the Education and Workforce Committee I'm delighted to kick off the annual review debate on the education portfolio. I'm sure there will be many interesting contributions and I'm looking forward to hearing from the Minister of Education. But first I'm going to give a brief overview and an outline of the process that our select committee went through for this particular review. The education sector annual review was comprised of seven in-depth annual reviews for different Government entities. They were the Ministry of Education the Education Review Office the Tertiary Education Commission the New Zealand Qualifications Authority Education Payroll Ltd Network for Learning Ltd and Education New Zealand. We conducted a briefing with the Office of the Auditor-General; a hearing with the Minister of Education the Hon Chris Hipkins; with the chief executive of the education sector entity; and we also asked many written questions of them all. There were some key themes that came out of that deliberation and that was shown in our annual review report.One of the main outcomes of our review was the varied level of preparedness for lockdown conditions amongst schools and kura. The Education Review Office report provided a useful outline of the experiences of different schools in responding to the lockdown and how they continue to provide learning resources to their students. The Education Review Office led the work to set up the Home Learning TV / Papa Kāinga TV to support learning at home for those with poor access to online learning. It was actually quite interesting: we heard that apparently at the launch they had more viewers than a Super Rugby game so I would say that's probably quite a big success.We heard from the sector about the lessons learnt from lockdown—what worked well and how certain schools responded—and the report also spoke to the benefit we could see if these practices would have been more widely adopted. The Minister noted his concern regarding school attendance rates during last year's lockdown. A priority for the Government was to set up a means to measure the speed at which attendance rates improved post-lockdown. The Minister took us through how the process is managed and we had a discussion about what could be done to actually improve the attendance rate at our schools and kura.In our report we also asked about the ministry's measuring of students' progress and the Minister spoke to the curriculum-wide approach that the ministry is taking as opposed to an approach that very narrowly focuses on the content of students' tests. The Minister also spoke to how teaching professionals will take part in the curriculum changes that occur with a programme that enables teaching professionals to take temporary leave to work on the design of the curriculum changes. The Minister also talked to us about how teachers and school leaders will be supported through the transition and changes to the wider education system to reduce strain on teachers and the capacity of our schools and kura.The committee also asked the Minister about what is being done to address disparities for Māori and Pacific learners. Work on cultural competency in the education system and on Māori and Pacific attendance rates as well is under way and the Minister explained to us that the Fruit in Schools programme has had a noted improvement in learning outcomes for the students and it has also gotten students more involved in their learning.I would like to finish by saying a big thankyou to those working in the education sector for responding to the unprecedented challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic brought and all the challenges that the sector had to work through under very challenging circumstances—running everything continuing and responding to the challenges as well. This has been a very robust review and I'm satisfied that we've covered many of the overarching themes that our report brought up.Talking to the new-style debate and a new-style format as well I think it's a real tribute to this new format that we can have a more robust debate on the holistic future of education and the education sector in New Zealand and at the same time that will provide for a stronger level of scrutiny in Parliament. So thank you Madam Chair.