Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you Mr Chair for this opportunity to discuss the Appropriation (2015/16 Confirmation and Validation) Bill for the education and science sector. As a mother of two young daughters—one at primary school and one who has just started high school—I would like the best education for both of them. But can I say that as an MP and as all MPs in this House we have a responsibility to ensure the best education for every single child in Aotearoa New Zealand regardless of where they live regardless of the socio-economic status of their parents and regardless of their ethnicity. But as a result of National's approach to education all of our children in this country are not getting the education that they need and deserve.The best indicator of a country's economic and social success is its investment in education. However when we look at the compulsory education sector there is a real disconnect between the rhetoric we hear from this current National Government and facts on schooling. As my colleague Chris Hipkins discussed earlier on when we look at our international test scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) we have continued to decline. When we look at the 2006 results for reading maths and science and we compare it to 2015 we are at the lowest lowest level for PISA test scores.I agree with a lot of the comments that my colleague Tracey Martin said about funding. We keep on hearing that there is a lot more investment in education but when we look at per child funding for each child in this country for education we know that it has decreased. We also know that over the last weekend the outgoing Minister of Education did not deny that the per student cost in education in this country has actually decreased.This National Government tells us that it invests a lot more in education but with a huge growth in population we expect there to be more investment in our children. But if you were to ask a teacher a principal or even a parent from schools from across New Zealand many of them will tell you that they are struggling to make ends meet at school and parents are struggling to make ends meet to ensure that all of their children actually have school uniforms and school stationery.Last year National made this even worse when it froze the operational school funding for every school; 1300 schools across Aotearoa were affected by this and can I say that for South Auckland and especially for Manukau East so many of my schools were affected by this. We are told that this new way of funding is supposed to be better but how can it be better when we heard NZEI Te Riu Roa eloquently say that—and if I can just go back—this cut-price in funding is worth just half a sandwich per child" a week. It is less than $2 a week per child. It is an outrage that this is what we are told is better funding for our children.The consequence of the current funding is actually under-investment in education and I will give you these three examples. When we look at teacher supply we have a teacher supply crisis. Let us look at Auckland. Many of the schools in Auckland are struggling to find teachers and many of the teachers in Auckland are now looking to move out of Auckland because they can no longer afford to live in Auckland and teach at the same time. When we look at support staff—we know that just yesterday a lot of members of Parliament shadowed support staff and they saw face to face the struggles that our support staff are facing. Because support staff are supposed to be funded from operational grants the very same operational grants that have been frozen many of the schools are struggling to be able to afford to hire support staff or even to pay them what they are truly worth. When we look at parental contributions Statistics New Zealand tells us that parental contributions across New Zealand have increased by 44 percent since this National Government took office. We must do better for every child across Aotearoa New Zealand."