Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): If I return to Louise Upston's questions earlier on I was looking to see whether I had the data on NCEA internal assessment submissions with me because I have seen it in the last few days. Unfortunately I don't. I think it might have actually provided an answer to one of her colleague's written parliamentary questions which has been why I might have read it in the last few days but what it does show is that our internal assessments in the first part of this year are above where they were last year but still a bit lower than they had been in the years prior to that. So I think what that suggests is that schools have been acutely aware that this was a possibility and so have been trying to do more of their internal assessments earlier in the year this year than they had been doing last year.In terms of the Ministry of Education's planning around what they would do differently yes of course they've looked closely at what they would do differently and have done some things differently but the reality is that the legwork here does sit with individual schools. Schools do have to operationalise the shutdown if you like caused by level 4 or even level 3 restrictions and so the burden does fall to those schools. And so I want to acknowledge that that's stressful for them but that is one of the realities of the Tomorrow's Schools system where schools are self-governing self-administering they run themselves and so a large part of that burden does fall to them.In terms of the learning recognition credit and the 20-day limit that was a limit that we agreed earlier in this year when we were considering what the appropriate threshold might be. Obviously we are now in a unique position where there'll be a significant number of students—the majority of the students in the country in fact—who will only be two days shy of that so I can indicate that that is something that I am having another look at.In terms of ECE and the issues around pay parity the Government has made a three-year commitment around pay parity. That will be a three-year process to get to that point. In part some of the friction that we're experiencing at the moment is a reflection of the very different employment models that exist across the sector and the very different operating models that exist across the sector. For larger chains of ECE services where they've got a bigger workforce the ability to spread the unders and overs in pay parity is easier than it is for some of the smaller centres which are often community based or the mum and dad operations for want of a better term and they are finding it more difficult and that's certainly clear feedback that we've had. I am considering some changes to the requirements for next year in light of the feedback that we've been getting from the services and I would indicate again that this is a three-year process and the money that we put in in this year's Budget is not the only money that's coming for pay parity.In terms of relief teachers we have guaranteed ECE services that they will continue to be funded as if they were still open and therefore we are asking those ECE services to continue to pay people as if they were still open. And many of those services are providing financial support to the relief teachers that they otherwise would have been using had they still been open which is something we should encourage them to do because they are getting all of the funding from Government that they would get if they were still operating.