Young Jonathan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Young Jonathan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Advance Copy - Subject to minor change before inclusion in Bound Volume.] 
JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth) 
: 
 As I came to the Chamber I passed an exhibition about Anne Frank. I am sure that many of us here in this Chamber will recall studying her or hearing about her life. She said that everyone has inside them a piece of good news and that good news is that we do not know how great we can be what we can accomplish and what our potential is. That remarkable young girl lived and experienced utter hardship yet prevailed to be one of the great examples of courage as seen through her writing. She died of typhus in a concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 16. She said: “I finally realised that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant to get on in life to become a journalist because that’s what I want! I know I can write. … but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent. … When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears my spirits are revived! But and that’s a big question will I ever be able to write something great will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”. 
I tell members this story because no doubt many of us have walked past her exhibition on display here in our Parliament this week. She has become great and the greatness we celebrate was already there in the words she was writing as a teenaged girl. 
The education of our young people is incredibly important not only for their success but also I think for the success of our country and its future. We are very committed to the education of young New Zealanders who burgeon with the same promise and potential. The tragedy for many of those young people is that their potential gets buried by a lack of achievement at an early age and they carry through with them that lack of achievement into every following year and level of their education. 
Our Minister of Education the Hon Anne Tolley says that the findings of an international study by the OECD show that more needs to be done in our nation to lift achievement for all New Zealand students. The 2009 results from the Programme for International Student Assessment compared the performance of 15-year-olds in reading literacy maths and science. New Zealand continues to have a disproportionate number of lower achievers and that has not changed in the past 9 years. Further there has been no change in our reading performance since 2000 and no change in maths since 2003. That is grim news and it is what has empowered National’s education policy. 
There is some good news as well. Our top students are some of the best in the world. In reading maths and science we performed well above the average for OECD countries. This is a credit to our teachers students parents and our education system. However we are faced with this challenge to work together to address the issues raised in this report. It is why our Government introduced national standards in education which is not a test but an assessment to discover difficulty early on so it does not become entrenched and so we can see a shift in the disproportionate number of lower achievers. 
I speak to educationalists all the time. They tell me they already know who the people are who are in that failing tail. My answer then is that obviously identifying them has not brought the solution. The solution is to ask what we do next. National standards are a tool to assess where a child is on their educational journey compared with where they could be or ought to be. It is a measure of progress against potential. That is the point. Educational achievement is built upon the foundation of previous learning but if previous learning does not exist or is deficient and if no rungs are climbed on that educational ladder it leaves our young people aspiring for things they cannot reach. We have discovered that one in five students is leaving school without the literacy and the numeracy achievements to take them on to an apprenticeship or to further training in order that they may engage in the modern economy. 
We have also discovered that one in five 15 to 19-year-olds cannot find employment at present. It is an interesting correlation. Twenty percent of young New Zealanders are struggling to learn and struggling to find employment. As the OECD report stated and Opposition members are usually so keen to quote the OECD we have a disproportionate number of low-achieving young people—young children who have intelligence and potential but who for many reasons have been disconnected from learning. It is because we believe that they have intelligence and potential that we have put national standards in place which has relevance in diagnosing those disconnects and which then assists educators to determine the next step in those young people’s educational journeys. 
Our policy regarding early childhood education is very much part of discovering and releasing the potential of young children. We value early childhood education because we know it helps to prepare children for future learning and assists parents to participate in the workforce. Our policy is to broaden our reach to those who are disconnected from learning. In some parts of the country up to 40 percent of our children are missing out on attending early childhood education centres. As proud as members of the previous Government have sounded on this the statistics from both the Education Review Office and the OECD tell us that there are and have been gaps that children have been falling through for some time—for 9 years up to a decade. Under the previous Labour Government’s watch no significant progress was made with those young people who were disconnected from learning. It starts with early childhood education. There are masses of young children missing out on taxpayer investment in their future. This Government is making a significant investment. There is more invested per child in early childhood education than in primary school education or secondary school education. We are now at the stage where the taxpayer is subsidising early childhood education centres at an average of $7600 per child per year. This compares with an average of $5528 for a primary school student and $6733 for a student at a secondary school. Investment in early childhood education has never been higher before. This is the big news: it is reaching more children than ever before. We on this side of the House are proud of that. 
Earlier this year John Key said: “This Government views our education system as one of the fundamental tools for creating an egalitarian society where all New Zealanders have an opportunity to succeed.” That statement was made at the beginning of the year. We are creating greater educational opportunities for more young New Zealanders than ever before to give them the best possible start in life so that they do not end up being a sad statistic in the bottom 20 percent. Under the early childhood education system we inherited from Labour the Government will this year spend a record $1.4 billion up from less than $400 million a decade ago. Despite this the number of children starting school with some form of early childhood education has barely increased at all and in some parts of the country up to 40 percent of children are missing out altogether. 
We have prioritised building a stronger economy and building skills and knowledge in our young people so that children can be future-proofed as they look to their working futures. Thank you.