Stanford Erica; Tinetti JanERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Chair. Just moving on to staffing issues in the secondary sector. To the Minister I guess the question is: what have been the plans in the last financial year to address the critical staffing shortages in secondary schools? I'm particularly concerned because in 2010 the University of Auckland were training 350 secondary school teachers; last year that was 165; I hear that this year it's about 130. Waikato in 2010 225; last year 160. Victoria in 2010 245; last year 85. The Secondary Principals' Association of New Zealand and secondary school principals across the country are screaming out because they cannot get staff in any areas not just in those usual hard to staff areas of science and maths but actually they can't find physical education teachers English teachers and they are very very worried that this year but also next year it is going to get much much worse. So my question to the Minister is: what planning was done to address this? What do the numbers that she knows about look like this year in terms of the overall numbers that are training and need to be training? Or she could give last year's figures if she likes. But what is the planning that the ministry have done to improve this and what plans has she got going forward?Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): Firstly I'd just like to say that the Ministry of Education's forecasting and how they project teacher numbers shows that as a system we're not too badly off. We know that there are shortages but the shortages are often in locations or in subject areas. Like in the primary system for example we have the number of teachers there because we've had that bubble that have moved through the school. But it's around the location of where people might want to move to. So we do have to do some work around that. But what I will say is that in September 2022 we invested an additional $24 million over three years to fund initiatives to grow teacher supply. This additional investment boosted our total teacher supply spend to $64 million in 2022-23. This was used to provide funding to test new approaches to reaching new sources of potential teachers including funding 100 places in a school-embedded initial teacher education programme. This is something that principals had been advocating and lobbying for. The Secondary Principals' Association of New Zealand had been talking to us about that for quite some time. That has proven to be very very popular. In fact I've had a number of principals who have been involved in that who have come back to me and said that this is a game-changer for them. They see that it is something that we might be able to expand upon and those are discussions that we are having in that—how we can grow some of these programmes.That was also used to expand successful teacher programmes which have experienced strong demand such as increasing the number of Te Huawhiti Career Changer scholarships from 85 to 185 and expanding the BeTTER Jobs Programme which was previously the Beginning Teacher Vacancy Support which I have to say that in my previous role that was something that I took advantage of as well and it does make a difference to the numbers of teachers that you are able to recruit and sustain. That was the big part of that particular part of the programme is that teachers didn't just do a year and move on somewhere else; they actually stayed with us. I think that that's something that many of our principals are really appreciating as well.But I think the big part of this is that we can't just do it from our internal pipeline. We have to make certain that we're looking to overseas recruitment as well and in the short term—we have to grow our pipeline for the long term as well—looking to overseas recruitment. So the money was used to support overseas teachers' recruitment and making it easier to move to New Zealand. And we had—I think it was as of April might have been March—over 1700 visas approved for either work visas or residence visas for teachers. Not all taking up jobs at this stage but we have had them that have come through the borders since the borders have opened. So that has been a big part of it.What I do also want to point out in this space is that two weeks ago I was with the union presidents and vice-presidents in Washington at the International Summit of the Teaching Profession. We are absolutely not alone in this issue. In fact we're probably one of the better-off jurisdictions that were at that particular summit. What I found really interesting in that was that as union heads and as the Minister we were able to get together with those other countries to talk about possible solutions going forward. They were very much looking at our solutions just as much as we were looking at theirs so we need to put into context that this is a global issue and it's something that isn't going to go away overnight but we have definitely used that funding to make a difference in the short term while we're planning out what we're going to be doing in the longer term.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break in the House and this debate will resume at 7 p.m.Sitting suspended from 6.01 p.m. to 7 p.m.