SpeechMARJA LUBECK (Chairperson of the Education and Workforce Committee): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to lead off the committee stage of this annual review debate for the education sector being the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee. I acknowledge the Minister in the chair and I look forward to contributions from my select committee colleagues across the House. In order to ground the debate I'll start with an outline of the process our committee followed for this review. We met between 8 December 2021 and 30 March 2022 to consider these annual reviews and just as we did in 2021 the education sector annual review was made up of seven annual reviews for different Government entities and that allowed us to report on the sector as a whole. In the interests of time I won't go through all the seven entities but I will add that we separately considered an annual briefing for Te Pūkenga and in line with the decision of the Business Committee we are also debating that review and that particular sector debate today. In reviewing the entities mentioned we conducted a briefing with the Office of the Auditor-General a hearing with the Minister of Education the Hon Chris Hipkins and the chief executives of the entities. We also received a briefing paper for the overall education sector. As a committee we asked well over 1000 written questions of the entities and also of Te Pūkenga. Unsurprisingly the dominant topic of our annual review was COVID-19 and as we noted in our written report COVID-19 has had pervasive effects on the education sector impacting NCEA exams student and staff wellbeing and much more. We asked the Minister of Education and the ministry about the impact of closed borders on the supply of teachers and we asked about the equitable access to digital technology because with the disruption of COVID widespread adoption of online and hybrid learning had to become necessary. The ministry informed us of the work that they were doing in that regard and that included hooking up 40000 households to the internet providing 50000 devices to students and providing hardcopy materials where that was appropriate. We also asked the Minister about the work under way on improving student achievement including numeracy and literacy rates and reducing the disparities. The Minister noted that the decline in numeracy attainment has been 20 years in the making and that due to the 10- to 15-year horizon that curriculum changes can take it will take some time for improvements to be seen in the numeracy outcomes. When asked about ongoing work the Minister told us of the focus needed on professional development and initial teacher training and the creation of new standards to be piloted in 2022. We also considered the reform of vocational education and the progress made in the establishment of Te Pūkenga and the workforce development councils. We heard about the record number of people going into apprenticeships with more people training in areas where the skills are in hot demand and we also heard about the difference that that free trades training has made. As a last point I'll note the ongoing work on pay parity in the early childhood sector. We noted the Minister's announcement in May 2021 of $170 million to help achieve pay parity for early childhood education (ECE) teachers with 62 percent of ECE centres having opted in to access that particular new funding available. We also discussed the introduction of network management in more depth with the Ministry of Education. I want to acknowledge the officials from across the education entities for feeding into this process and supporting us as a committee to provide parliamentary scrutiny to the sector as a whole. I want to thank my committee members for their involvement in this review. It has been a comprehensive and collaborative inquiry and of course even more so with the recent increase in ministerial accountability. By participating in this new style annual review debate Ministers in this current Government are subjecting themselves to parliamentary scrutiny in a way that hasn't been seen until these changes were made earlier when we started this term. I'm sure that the Minister through questions will have more to share with us. Thank you Mr Chair.