Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Those are again all very fair questions. We know that we've got a challenge around Māori and Pasifika early childhood education (ECE) participation and one of things that I'd been doing some work on before COVID was looking at what our participation measures are and making sure that they're quality measures because I think—as the member will be familiar—the measures that we've used previously are a pretty blunt survey of early childhood education participation by kids prior to them starting school. So we've ticked a box and said Have you participated in ECE before you started school?" We got up to about 97 percent on that. You could say "Well that's amazing. That's really good." but when you get underneath that and you say "OK but at the ages of three and the age of four for how long? On average at the age of three and on average at the age of four how many hours a week did those children attend?" that really highlights the difference in ethnicity. So Māori and Pacific students—yes they got the box ticked that they'd attended ECE. So they're part of that 97 percent we could pat ourselves on the back about and say that's good but they had attended for a lot fewer hours than other children and so that meant that as they arrive at school they haven't had that advantage of ECE. That's a longstanding problem I think. It's one that subsequent Governments have been working on over a period of time but I think we've still got quite a way to go there. With regard to early childhood centre viability we know that particularly small community-based ECE services have been really struggling for a period of time. If I could just be frank about this there is a group in the sector that believe that community-based services are naturally better and provide naturally a higher quality than privately owned ECE services—particularly the larger corporate ECE services. I wanted to test that and so I got the Ministry of Education to analyse over a period of three years early childhood service closures and where small community-based services had closed because of increased competition what was the nature of that competition and it was completely counter to the claims that some in the sector have made. So what it tended to show was that if a small community-based service had closed the service that had replaced it tended to have a higher proportion of qualified teachers than the centre that had closed and it tended to be opening longer hours—i.e. it tended to be supporting parents' labour market participation for greater hours but also that it tended to cater for a broader range of age groups. So the notion that some of these small community-based services are struggling because of the for-profit services coming in and sweeping up their students and offering a lower quality service isn't actually borne out by the evidence. I looked at that very closely and you might think that's interesting—a Labour Minister arguing that—but I wanted to test whether the view being put forward was correct and the conclusion I reached from that was that the view being put forward was not correct. Some of those small community-based services have been struggling and that's again longstanding. One of the issues for them which I have been working through is that whilst they continue to receive their Government education subsidies they haven't been receiving things like the Ministry of Social Development child care subsidy and the centres that are most affected by that are the ones in the poorest communities. Those are also the ones that we most need to keep because we know if we lose those services actually those are the most at-risk kids because there might not be another service that will pop up to take its place and those kids would miss out. So I've been doing some work on that and I'm very close to being able to say more about additional support that those services will get to make sure that they can remain viable in the context of COVID. But I guess the final point that I want to make to the early childhood sector is I understand their nervousness about COVID but in their public comments they have to think very carefully about preserving the confidence of their parent communities once we're out the other side of this. Some of the comments that have been made in most recent days including things like saying that parents are playing Russian roulette with their kids' health by sending their kids to ECE—those memories will linger long after we have come out the other side of the COVID situation. So I'd just say to all of the sector leaders: think about the fact that we're going to want kids in ECE and back participating when this is over."