Hipkins ChrisDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure to rise and take a call in this Estimates debate and the first time I've had this type of format in the Estimates for the committee of the whole House so really good and I want to thank the Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Hipkins for appearing before us.Look as was noted in the select committee process for this Estimates the Minister talked about the response from the ministry to the COVID response and how schools coped with that. I've gone out there and spoken to a number of schools in my electorate and what is quite clear from the schools that I've spoken to and the principals I've spoken to is that the way schools have handled COVID and the ability for them to handle it depends by and large around the uptake of technology and the level of maturity that these schools are at with respect to say bring your own devices.So the first question I had for the Minister and in relation to kind of the Estimates stuff that we talked about in select committee is what are the ministry's plans to help reduce the inequalities in some of our schools around the digital divide? Even though I'm on the North Shore and a proud Northcote electorate MP there is a lot of inequality in some of our schools and I want to just get a sense from the Minister around how he's looking to bridge those digital divides so that if we touch wood have to go back into lockdown or anything of such a degree that these schools can cope more adequately. So that's the first question I have for the Minister.The second question I have is around roll growth. I know that the Minister answered a couple of questions that I had around the roll growth and in response to his response really which was around how the ministry calibrates their models in order to make sure that the projected roll growth that the ministry uses is in fact accurate. Now I really appreciate the Minister's answer in the Education and Workforce Committee; however I want to just clarify with him how the ministry calibrates those models. So just giving an example: if the ministry produces estimates for roll growth to 2025 they present them to the school the school flat out rejects them and says Hey we're already actually at 2025 figures." what is the process by which the school directly—dare I say—vetoes those projections? Ultimately it's the schools who know their communities. And we've talked about this and the role of schools and the authority and autonomy that they should have because they know their communities better than the ministry.So I want to get a sense of how the ministry calibrates their models and what level of I guess would I say "weight" that the schools and the principals and the boards have in helping the ministry calibrate their models because the feedback that I'm hearing loud and clear from my community is that the ministry's protections are not accurate and I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall because I can't get the ministry to update their models. So I really would just appreciate some clarification based on the Minister's discussion in select committee on the digital divide and the roll growth and how that's calibrated in our schools.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you Madam Chair. With regard to the digital divide we're still doing work to analyse the success of our initiatives during the lockdown period. So the member will be familiar with the fact that we did send out modems laptops and other digital devices to get people connected during that lockdown period. We did not get them to everybody that needed them. What became very clear during that time as well is that while we had good macro-data our micro-data wasn't quite so good if I could put it that way. So we had a rough idea of how many people weren't connected but actually pinpointing where they lived proved to be a little bit more challenging then we might have thought. In some cases we may have missed some young people who needed to be connected; in other cases we'd identified them as needing to be connected when they didn't need to be connected. Overall we still got pretty good numbers: 45000-odd modems I think got sent out. We're talking now about a couple of thousand of them potentially that have either been redistributed or would be in the process of being redistributed. That work will continue and of course the Government has plans to continue to close the digital divide and that'll be no doubt the subject of future budget debates as well.With regard to roll growth: nothing new in this particular debate. As long as I've been around education it's been a case where schools have hotly contested the Ministry of Education's roll projections for their area. Of course in some cases where it's more immediate their grounds for doing so are very good. It is a bit of crystal-ball gazing the further out that you get though and the ministry use a variety of different sources to make those projects. They'll use census data obviously and data from Statistics New Zealand but they also do use data from local government and that around where extra houses are being built in order to try and forecast where the growth is going to take place. Of course it's going to be very interesting to see how that shakes down in the next 18 months or so given that all of those projections will have been affected by COVID-19 because with the closure of the borders then obviously our population demographics and the projection around our demographics will have changed as a result of that."