Stanford Erica; Hipkins Chris; Salesa JennyERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Chair. I want to move now to the pilot that's been done recently for the literacy and numeracy corequisites. The Minister knows that last year only one-third of those students who participated in the pilot passed the numeracy and literacy corequisite.I understand the second part of the trial was done last term. I want to know has the Minister seen those results? Were they any better? Can he enlighten the committee? I know that they were due out this week; we have been able to find them. I was wondering if the Minister could tell us what the results have been for term 2 pilot. The question is: what will he do moving forward given these results are so dire? Is he looking at adjusting the level of the test down for a number of years and ratcheting it up? Or is he looking at a programme of getting those high school students up to standard for numeracy and literacy? And how will he be implementing that? That's the first question.The second question is around the number of unenrolled children—there's 8500 unenrolled children and we note that in the latest Budget round the Attendance Services only got a yearly increase of $1.5 million which isn't enough to even start to look at it when you take into account inflation. Those are the services that help to get these unenrolled kids back to school so my question to the Minister is: what are we doing about these kids the 8500? I think he knows very well that number is probably a lot larger given that schools have been asked to stop unenrolling students when they get to the 20 days so that they don't get lost out of the system but for all intents and purposes they are actually unenrolled because they're not showing up at all. What programme is being put in place to get those unenrolled kids back to school?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you Madam Chair. In terms of literacy and numeracy it's a topic that I could spend a lot of time talking about so I'll try and keep my answers as brief as possible.One of the reasons that we introduced the concept of the literacy and numeracy corequisite was that I was of the view—and it was backed up by the review of the NCEA—that the thresholds around literacy and numeracy in NCEA were insufficient that young people were gaining NCEA without reassurance that they had the appropriate levels of literacy and numeracy.There was a change to the way a young person could achieve NCEA's literacy and numeracy requirements during the tenure of the last Government. That meant that a broader range of credits were regarded as sufficient to satisfy the literacy and numeracy requirements. I think that the overwhelming feedback we had during the review is that that pendulum had swung too far and in fact there was insufficient focus on making sure that the very important foundational learning around literacy and numeracy was being appropriately credentialed by the NCEA. That is why we started to move towards something that was more specific.In terms of the trialling of that it is important that we pitch that at the right level but it shouldn't be in my view adjusted because students aren't meeting that level. If we determine that the requirements are at a certain level in order to have basic foundation skills in literacy and numeracy and young people are not reaching them then we need to make sure they reach them; we shouldn't lower them simply because they are not reaching them.Erica Stanford: How are you going to do that?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: And that is the fundamental job of schools. You know we need schools to be making sure that young people leave with the skills and with the qualifications that they require to be able to thrive in the world outside of school.I'd point out to the member there's a lot of politics we could trade about this. The 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds that are being assessed at the moment as potentially you know—this was the generation that went through primary school with national standards. National standards were supposed to fix this problem; they didn't. In fact the problem got worse during that period of time. There's a lot of politics we could play with it.In reality I don't think the solution is a political one. I don't think national standards are to blame for it—I don't think they fixed it but I don't think they are to blame for it. I think the drivers behind our literacy and numeracy problems in New Zealand are many varied and complex and those who aim to have the one magical solution to them are generally providing people with this false promise that will never be realised because there is a lot more that sits underneath that.In terms of unenrolled students and the work of the Attendance Services I think the Attendance Services have an important role but what we've seen in recent times is that the work of the Attendance Services has moved further away from schools. So yes Attendance Services and increasing resources to them is important but the extra work we're doing to move resources closer to schools so that they can follow up on non-attendance is also important.The Urgent Response Fund and the flow-on from that—the title we gave it just suddenly escapes me but the continuation of the Urgent Response Fund which provides up to $10 million a year for the Ministry of Education's regional offices to provide direct resourcing to schools to deal with issues like attendance will mean that they can have attendance officers in school on their school sites following up and they can gain extra funding to do that. That's one of the purposes of the fund. So it is about making sure that we get resources closer to schools to follow that up.There are other things that we can do in terms of an across-Government basis to support the attendance challenge. Police for example in Auckland ran Operation Attend where they worked with schools to follow up on non-attendance. It actually had some very positive results. Other Government agencies can play a part here as well.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Before I call Erica Stanford again I just want to say that the Labour Party has about seven minutes or so left but that other parties also still have minutes left to go.