Luxton JoJO LUXTON (Labour): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Well I for one am pretty happy to be standing here and taking a call on what I believe is actually a really effective bill. It is going to address a few things that I don't think were thought-out that well previously. I want to talk firstly about the requirement for private schools to be safe places for students. I don't think that there's any underlying evil here that—as we're hearing from across the House—it's going to be the start of having the ability to close these private schools down if they don't adhere to this. I actually think that in this day and age when we know that our teen suicide rate is one of the highest in the OECD it's really important that we ensure that our students feel safe physically and emotionally at school. I note that one of the members opposite said previously—I think it might have been Denise Lee—that there is no evidence to say that whether you're in a private school or a State school means that you're more likely to be bullied or not. I think that regardless of that it's really important that our schools—regardless of whether they're State or private—have to ensure to the best of their ability that our students are kept safe from physical and emotional harm particularly with the rate of bullying. I was actually really surprised when I read that private schools weren't required to have something in place that ensured the safety of their students and I'm not too sure how many parents out there would be aware of that too. So yeah that is something that was quite a surprise to me.I want to move on to the communities of online learning (COOL). Now we know that it is really important to have really high-quality online learning and I do acknowledge that there are those who might live in remote places that do need to participate in some form of online learning or correspondence schooling. But I think the risk here if we went to these I'll call them COOLs—and it was raised by several educational professionals—is that we run the risk of having students who have additional learning needs who perhaps have ended up being pushed out of public schooling or private schooling ending up having to participate in these COOLs and depending on their situation it's not necessarily the best place for those children. So I think that by repealing this it does allow us the time to consider what the future of online learning systems might look like in New Zealand. I think that we need to be really careful in that space and take a good look at it so that we do take a pragmatic approach to ensure that when we do provide these sorts of options for schooling for our children that actually they are the best and will stand up to any sort of criticism. I want to talk about the cohort entry for children over five years. By repealing this again we're not—there is no underlying evil here. I think you know it goes against best practice actually to allow children under the age of five to start school. And I still think that by the change in this legislation it does still give schools the ability to have a choice by allowing cohort entry twice a term. So it's still allowing choice for parents and schools; it isn't taking it away. I think it does help those children develop friendships and keep their friendships from early childhood education or prior to schooling moving through. So it's not actually taking that choice away just ensuring that the age stays at five for children to start school. I commend this bill to the House.