Belich CamillaCAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Talofa lava Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to stand to do a short speech on the report that the Education and Workforce Committee did into non-attendance at school. I'm a member of this committee and I actually found the experience to be really really positive despite the huge challenges that we face in relation to attendance in New Zealand.In reflection of what the previous speaker—the Hon Paul Goldsmith—was saying about attendance I actually didn't hear excuses from the principals and schools that came to talk to us; what I heard was solutions. I think the answers to non-attendance in New Zealand are already known I think they're known within the sector and I think what we were able to do in the select committee was really examine the issue look at how widespread it was look at best practice and look at how things are working in certain schools and in certain communities to really increase attendance. So I actually found it really positive and I did find that the people that were submitting were providing very very useful solutions to what is—and I think we all accept around the House—a very serious problem that we're all taking very seriously.This inquiry was actually initiated as part of the select committee and it was genuinely initiated from both sides of the House because I think we do agree that there is value in looking into this problem. What we found was that there's not a single reason for non-attendance in New Zealand; there's a myriad of reasons why children might not attend school. Some of those reasons are to do with the design of the schooling system itself. The other reasons that we found were things that people might not assume were included in non-attendance—for example if you go on holiday you get permission from the school that's still included as non-attendance and is still included in the statistics. Obviously there's the really obvious thing that we've dealt with through COVID which is sickness which has definitely been exacerbated through the period of the pandemic. And there are equity issues and I think we all accept that there are serious equity issues within the education system as there is in society itself that should be addressed as well.So why did we end up in the situation where we had attendance that is lower than what we would expect in this country? I think we can look to relatively recently when we had a decentralisation of the Attendance Service under the previous National Government in 2013. Now the problem with this was that it meant that the problem of school attendance was taken away from the communities that know the students and actually put into a centralised form with people that didn't necessarily know the communities they were working in and didn't necessarily know the students or the families or the issues that they faced. Since that time we've seen that school attendance has been declining since 2015 and as we know and we can expect COVID-19 has made those statistics worse. So what we found was that all of those were contributing factors to the situation we are now in where we would like to increase our school attendance. The reason that we want to increase school attendance is not because we want to punish students. We want students to be at school because we know that high attendance is likely to lead to better academic success and better academic success is likely to lead to success in the future and we all want that I think for our students.So in this inquiry we did a few unusual things. We did engage with the Parliamentary Engagement team. We had responses from school students—we really wanted to hear from them. We had I think submissions from students who are actually at school who were reflecting on what their fellow students had said were the reasons they weren't attending which was really really important and valuable feedback to have. We had interest from colleagues around the House. I'd like to acknowledge my colleagues Barbara Edmonds and Shanan Halbert for attending the committee because they had a particular interest in this area and also supporting submitters from their areas. So we had a really positive as I reflected earlier in my speech experience.The reasons we found for non-attendance as I have mentioned earlier were bullying health-related absences disabilities lack of household resources—a huge range of issues including things like a lack of access to period products which this Government has tried to address; and food insecurity.In the brief time I have left I just also want to mention another initiative that my colleague Ingrid Leary has been working on with the Human Rights Commission which is the new school uniform guidelines. They were launched last week by the Human Rights Commission and the Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon described them as huge. They will help increase inclusivity and that feeling of belonging within schools.Now we are expecting the Government's response to this report early this month and we really look forward to seeing that and I hope that it includes a lot of the recommendations that we made. Thank you.