Stanford Erica; Hipkins ChrisERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Chair. Given that we've only got 15 minutes left of the Minister's time I do hope in the spirit of democracy he'll keep his answers short. I know that he's always been really good in select committee in making his answers short and to the point and getting straight into it so I hope that will continue today.I want to start my questioning around the issue of literacy because we had a question in the House today from Jan Tinetti around the teaching of literacy. I wanted to get some clarification from the Minister on what the view is going forward because there's quite a bit of conjecture out there in the sector about what's going to happen with the common practice model. So I guess what I want the Minister to answer is: moving forward will we have more of a structured literacy approach like the Associate Minister alluded to and actually said on Q+A on Sunday when prompted that the evidence showed that this was the best system—actually her quote was I haven't seen any evidence that shows me anything different." when asked about structured literacy being the best way to teach children to read.What I want to ask the Minister about is his comments earlier in the year where he said that some kids learn to read by looking at the pictures and interpreting the words. That suggests a very different approach which is the three cueing system. What I want to know from the Minister is: are we going to get a hybrid approach where we have a mixture of a structured approach like structured literacy together with the three cueing system which we've had in the past some sort of hybrid which the comments from the Minister and the Associate Minister suggest or are we going to have more of a structured literacy approach and get rid of the three cueing system? So I guess the question is: are we getting rid of the three cueing system; is that his intention or will there be a hybrid?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I'll try and keep my answers as brief as possible. If the member wants to block up a number of questions and then I'll try and address them that might actually help to save some of the time.But in terms of literacy my view on literacy is that the Government will get into difficult territory if it starts to dictate to teachers how they should teach. The New Zealand Curriculum sets out what we expect young people to be learning when it comes to literacy and numeracy. The exact methods that teachers use in order to teach are matters of professional judgment for the teachers. There are different methods and different methods work better for different children. Reading recovery for example has been very successful for some children; we know it doesn't work for all children. I think that those are matters that teachers should make professional judgments around.In terms of the resources supplied to schools though because that does have an impact what the member will see is that the Ministry of Education are refreshing the resources that are available—for example the Ready to Read series has been refreshed and it includes a combination of whole-language learning and a more phonics-based approach. So I think our role centrally is to provide resources to schools. It's teachers' judgments as to how best to teach individual children."