Salesa JennyHon JENNY SALESA (Associate Minister of Education): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker for this opportunity to speak on the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill. Can I first of all congratulate Erica Stanford for having her bill drawn. The member has had much more luck than I have; I've been in this House for a few years and I have not ever had one bill drawn so congratulations on that.I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the Hon Nikki Kaye as well as Nicola Willis who has just spoken—two of the members of the National Party who attended both of the conversations that we had over in Christchurch for two days as well as in Auckland just last weekend. Can I say that those two conversations where we had over 800 people in both locations are part of what it is that we're doing as this coalition Government to move forward the work that we're trying to do in education. Yes there are several reviews that we're doing but we're also reaching out and listening to people. As well as those conversations we're also having online conversations with folks where over 9000 people have written—told us what it is that they would like to do.Can I just also remind members of the opposite side of the House that nine years was a long enough time for them to have actually put through a decile system—if they were wanting to fix this decile system in education they could have done it within nine years. We acknowledge that the decile system is not perfect—that is something that we do acknowledge—but we also know that there is not a level playing field in education. We know that so many of our children when they enter primary school—when they go to school they do not actually have the same kinds of schools. Many of them in my electorate in South Auckland—many of them miss a lot of things. Some of them don't even have school uniforms. Some of them do not have access to stationery.We do have low-decile schools though in South Auckland and I'll give you one example from my electorate. It's a decile 1B school but what that school does is it tries to level the playing field. Yes they get extra funding because of their decile but what the principal and the school and the teachers do is they try to level the playing field every single day. How? By providing school uniforms; by helping with school stationery; by helping to pay for some of the fees that these children don't have. We must be cautious with whatever system we come up with to replace the decile system that we're not creating a system where there is even worse stigma than what we have already. We know that the decile system we have has stigma that is stigma for the schools. However the system that this amendment bill is proposing would actually be needs based but it's proposing that it's tagged to an individual child. So instead of actually having a system that has the stigma for a whole school one of the flaws of this particular bill is that it would actually stigmatise individual students.So again I appeal to the member Erica Stanford as she develops this bill that the system we need to go through with in the future needs to be a much better system. Yes I agree that we need to develop and design the future education system for the next 20 to 30 years. We need an education system that is fair. We need one that is inclusive for all of our students. Currently we do not have an education system that acknowledges the impact that socio-economic disadvantage has on all of our students' outcomes. We need an education system that not only acknowledges that but addresses the fact of some of the disparities that our students face on a daily basis as something that they take into school. Our current schools right now—some of them don't actually acknowledge that some of our students do not even have a house that they live in; that they live in a garage. That has a big effect on when they actually enter school. This new system needs to address that. Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker.