Tinetti JanJAN TINETTI (Labour): It's a delight to have the opportunity to stand here and talk to the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill particularly in the education area being a member of the Education and Workforce Committee. Being a new member it was wonderful to have the reviews of so many education entities but the entity that I would particularly like to focus on is the Ministry of Education and the review that the Ministry of Education undertook with us.As a new member of this Government it is so obvious that we inherited a number of problems in 2017 when we took over as Government in the education workforce. Those problems were more than obvious to me in my previous life as a principal and as a teacher and as an educator. I have never in my time witnessed such a low morale in the teaching workforce: high levels of teacher and principal burnout and the lowering of the ability to be able to teach the way that teachers know how to teach really well because we had a narrowing curriculum due to the national standards that were put on us back in 2009. In fact it's the national standards part of the review that we had with the Ministry of Education that I'd like to focus on a little bit here because that is the area that I believe caused great burnout great stress to our teaching profession and actually rather than an increase in achievement levels led to a very very worrying decrease in achievement levels throughout our children in this country.National standards were introduced under urgency in the first sitting week of the 49th Parliament and I just want to read out a little bit here about what the Prime Minister the Rt Hon John Key said at the time. He said As many as one in five students are being left behind. We need to identify those students early. The Government is providing $36 million and national standards will lift achievement levels for the New Zealand children." In fact in that time achievement went backwards—$36 million invested for achievement to go backwards. In the review we heard about the declining levels of our foundational literacy and mathematics skills. In the review process the Education and Workforce Committee heard all about those decreasing levels and since 2009 there has been a drop in 10-year-olds' reading skills in our Progress in International Reading Literacy Study or PIRLS the acronym it's known by.While principals who know and understand education in this country so well pointed to national standards the Opposition in the review report have said that they consider that while there are international data sets the removal of the requirement for schools to report centralised progression information means that there will be no comprehensive individual school-level picture of achievement. So we've changed our rhetoric around national standards. We have an Opposition that's grasping by their fingernails to actually justify why we had national standards in the first place. It went from the fact that we had one in five students who were failing to then "Oh now it has to show individual school level of progression." I'm confused. I'm not sure it shows any of those things. In fact as I said all that national standards led to was low morale in the workforce teacher burnout leading to the lowest numbers of teachers and the biggest teacher shortage that we've seen in many years.This Government got rid of national standards. We are about improving children's and learners' achievement by focusing on the whole curriculum. We want to see our teachers having the time to teach and our principals having the time to lead. That is really important. So the fact that we got rid of national standards is an absolutely wonderful wonderful wonderful thing for our education system. It is fantastic. National standards were rushed and flawed. They were an experiment that had absolutely no backing in evidence whatsoever. This Government is about putting the evidence-based curriculum back. We're about showing how wonderful our curricula are in this country. We have world-leading curricula right from early childhood through to the schooling sector. We by getting rid of national standards are able to showcase those curricula in a wonderful way. I'm looking forward to seeing the achievement levels that our schools and our teachers are able to achieve with their learners in the future. Thank you Madam Chair."