Davis KelvinHon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister for Children): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I'm pleased to take a call on behalf of the other four education Ministers we have in this Government and I'd like to the committee who participated in the inquiry for your work. I'd like to also take the opportunity to respond to three points that other speakers have made.I'd like to acknowledge the contribution of Erica Stanford. She spoke about schools setting expectations in terms of achievement and then following up on those expectations. If I could tell a little anecdote about my time as a school principal the last school I was principal of had average attendance of about 85 percent and I said that wasn't good enough and I set an arbitrary figure of us having average attendance of 96 percent which was two days of term that I said was acceptable that a child could be absent.All we did—and there's some real low-tech things that schools can do. [Member's phone rings]. Sorry about this. There's some low-tech things that schools can do. What we did was we actually employed somebody who was on a benefit and topped up their benefit by $30 to $40 a week and their job was to collect the rolls every day and then to ring up the parents whose children were absent. We found that although they hated it—because we sort of did harangue them a bit—it actually did make them accountable. We got the attendance up to about 93 94 percent. That was a very low-tech solution.I'd also like to acknowledge what Chris Baillie mentioned about bullying. Bullying is an issue and it is something that drives children away from school. Now I was told when I became the principal of Kaitaia Intermediate that the whole school was feral that you know it was just terrible that the misbehaviour was atrocious and that all the kids were bullies. So what I did another low-tech solution was put a piece of paper in front of each of the children in the school—there's about 300 in the school—and I asked them two questions: Have you been bullied in the last month; and if the answer is yes write the name of the bully."We found that out of those 300 kids there were six that were bullies and we focused and targeted the behaviour of those six children. The Ministry of Education did a bit of a survey at the start of May of the one year and then they came back in May of the next year. They found that there'd been a 90 percent reduction in bullying at the school—a very low-tech solution.Thirdly I'd just like to address the issue that Rawiri Waititi raised about Māori-medium education. Now only 10 percent of our Māori children actually attend either kura kaupapa or bilingual units in mainstream schools. That's not good enough; just 10 percent. We know that children in those kaupapa Māori settings actually achieve better and attend better.That's why we have said that we would like to raise or triple the numbers of Māori children attending kaupapa Māori schools from 10 percent to 30 percent. That means there's about 20000 Māori young people now in kaupapa Māori education; we'd like to make that 60000 by 2040 which means 250 more kura which means 3500 extra fluent kaiako. That means you know obviously resourcing of those kura and resources to support those teachers to teach bilingually. So there is work going on that the Government is trying to do to make education more attractive.I'd also like to acknowledge the comments of a mentor of mine or a principal when I was a young principal starting at Kaitaia Intermediate School. An older principal at Carmel intermediate school by the name of John Smith said to me "Kelvin what you need to do is make sure that school is the best adventure in town." So if young people are excited about what they're going to do each day in school—if they're looking forward to what they're going to do—then they'll be there at school.So we've got to make sure that schools cater for—are relevant; the curriculum that we teach in schools is relevant to the children. So Māori children need to have the kapa haka there needs to be the sport there needs to be the outdoor education the camps the science experiments—all those sorts of things that really excite our young people and get them into school. We can't sort of just narrow down the curriculum to just reading writing and arithmetic because if they're drilled with that then it actually turns them off education. We know that our young people like to—as well as you know reading reading writing and arithmetic is important but it's not the only thing. We need to make sure that we provide a balanced curriculum so that all children will find something that they can be successful at and want to be at school."