Stanford EricaHon ERICA STANFORD (Minister of Education): This Government is aspirational and ambitious for our nation's kids and academic achievement will be at the heart of everything that we do to ensure that we have a world-leading education system. Because all Kiwi kids—including tamariki Māori—deserve a world-leading education to be literate and numerate and to have the knowledge and skills they need to take on the world or be great iwi leaders.Education is the key to change lives and alter the course of one's future to break cycles of intergenerational poverty and dependence but our current educational results are failing too many kids in this country. Nearly 10000 students in 2022 left without a qualification and 40 percent of those year 10 and 11 learners who sat the foundational literacy and numeracy assessments were unable to pass last year. These results show that kids from low socio-economic homes—overrepresented by our Māori tamariki—are well overrepresented in these statistics. The equity gap is worse here than in any country that we compare ourselves to. These are the very kids who need access to a world-leading education to change their circumstances the most and in New Zealand our great egalitarian society your means determine your destiny; 42 percent of our kids at year 8 are at curriculum for math. For our tamariki Māori that's 20 percent and for our Pasifika kids 14.5 percent are at curriculum for maths at the end of intermediate. This very much reduces their ability to experience success at high school.I want every single child in this country to experience educational success academic success and the confidence and self-esteem and self-belief that goes along with that success. We have to get at least 80 percent of our kids at curriculum by 2030 and we will hold ourselves to account. Yesterday I announced my six priorities to lift student achievement and better support our wonderful teaching workforce: a clear concise and knowledge-rich curriculum that lays out the knowledge and skills that should be taught each year; implementing evidence-based structured literacy maths mastery—approaches that are grounded in the science of learning about how the brain learns; implementing consistent methods of regular progress monitoring so that teachers and parents know where their students and kids are at; we will develop the workforce of the future including leadership development pathways because we know the single most important thing in our education system is our teachers and our leaders; we will target effective learning support interventions for students with additional learning needs; and key to all of this is data and evidence to drive improvement. Make no mistake; this represents a fundamental shift in education that our kids deserve. It represents more support for teachers and importantly a shift back to explicit teaching of knowledge and skills in a consistent manner. And this combined with the magic that the teachers bring in how they contextualise the content of the curriculum to engage the students that are in front of them will mean that no matter where you go to school no matter where you live no matter the resource that your family have our students will get taught the basics brilliantly so they can go on to live the life they want. We have a moral social and economic imperative to get this right. Generations of kids and their families are depending on us to be bold and to be effective and let me tell you this is a Government that's committed to delivery.But I want to take a moment to address the previous speaker Mariameno Kapa-Kingi's speech. At the heart of everything that we are doing in education is to raise Māori achievement. The results over the last six years under the previous Government have let our poorer communities down our tamariki Māori down and our Pasifika students down. The results speak for themselves: 20 percent of Māori students at the end of year 8 at curriculum for mathematics 14.5 for Pasifika students. Everything that we are doing in our policy is ensuring that those kids who need that support the most are going to get it. Let me tell that member something: structured literacy—how the brain learns to read. In Maramarua School after two years of structured literacy—they had 37 percent of their Māori kids at curriculum for reading after two years: 67 percent. Those are the evidence-based policies we will be putting in place to make sure our tamariki Māori are getting every single opportunity they need to succeed in this world and it will be a National - ACT - New Zealand First Government that will achieve it.