Roberts Angela; Tinetti JanANGELA ROBERTS (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd just like to turn your mind Minister to some of our students with the greatest challenges with alternative education. There have been some initiatives that we've reflected on like Te Tupu and I'm just curious about how that's impacting on decisions about how we better support our alternative education. Many of us like you said have had experiences with some amazing places. In my own area Ngā Wānanga a Maui Potiki are doing amazing work but they're all doing it on a shoestring and I'm just curious about the resourcing and other supports that are going in as you try and support those students. Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): Thank you for that question. It's something that was actually traversed when I attended the select committee as well because alternative education is another pathway for our young people. It is something that I believe—people will have heard me say this before—that not always does a schooling environment suit all our young people or our young people need further support to be able to access the schooling environment. Te Tupu is a really interesting one because as this member knows alternative education is something that's traditionally started at an older age group and yet we have been seeing increasingly a number of younger people—younger age group children; intermediate and primary school—who were disengaging or who were at risk of disengaging from their schooling environment and that's really difficult if you can't get to them and turn that around. So Te Tupu was set up by my predecessor the Hon Tracey Martin in Napier. I think she called it a prototype rather than a pilot and basically what it did there was from year three up schools came together and they identified young people who might be at risk of disengaging. They came into this programme for a set amount of time but it was a wraparound so it has a whole lot of NGOs and different organisations that are part of the management group. Those young people are having huge success when they're going back into their schooling environment because they're have this wraparound and they've had kind of the pre-teaching in some respects that they didn't get before of how to experience the school environment. So Budget 2023 has put some more funding into extending that. It won't look the same throughout the country because we expect that there will be regional differences and of course the funding won't be for a full roll-out but it is starting to work that through in a co-design in different areas. We've also increased the per-student funding rate into alternative education. Alternative education had had very little funding put into it over time. It was only in the last couple of years that we started to increase that funding and it's gone up to just over $16000 now per student. Now that's probably only bringing it back to where it should have been years ago so there is more work to do in this area and more discussions to be had with different peak body groups particularly iwi—I'm going to say here—because the majority of children and young people in alternative education are Māori and so we've got to make certain that we are getting something that works for them. A lot of work has been done but I think the pandemic has taught us different ways that we might be able to reach these young people as well. So I'm really excited about the opportunities that we have in this space. I think that we have to create a system that works around the young person and not always expect that the young person has to work around the system so that we can actually support that young person to understand how systems work through something that truly works for them. So the money has been increased and the providers are really liking that but we've got more work to do in that space.