Stanford Erica; Hipkins ChrisERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Chair. I just wanted to go back and talk about the zoning issue and I just wanted to ask the Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Hipkins some further questions based on the answers that he gave to Nicola Willis' question—the first question this evening.I note the Minister said that the extra time is for the ministry to gear up" and I'm just keen to explore that some more. I'm interested to know what "gearing up" means—extra staff extra resources systems IT systems; I'd be really keen to know what the cost of that is. I mean bearing in mind that you have boards of trustees who give collectively thousands of hours of free time and they're all very very good people who know their communities providing that time free of charge I'm very interested to know what the ministry are doing to gear up and what the cost of that is. I know that the Minister in his answer said that there are some schools that don't want to have the burden of deciding on school zones. I certainly know from my electorate—I haven't spoken to a single principal or a single board chair who would want to relinquish that task. They feel very strongly about the knowledge of their local communities and their ability to go out and listen to the community and make those decisions themselves.So I'm really keen to know not just only about what gearing up means in terms of staff resources systems and cost I'm also very keen to know practically how this would work. I've been through it recently with Albany Primary School in my electorate which is about to hit a thousand students and I do note—and I'd like to put on record—that the Minister promised me a new primary school in Albany. I know they haven't purchased any land yet but just as an aside I remind him that that's really important—just get that in there. But I went through that process because they were told they needed to relook at their zone and so I went through that process with them and all of the consultation that was undertaken the public meetings the feedback—I went through all that with them. I went to all the public meetings and spoke to the board chair and spoke to a lot of the angry parents and watched that process happen. So I'm really keen to know practically now how that process will be undertaken by the mother ship so to speak. Will there still be that same level of community consultation? Will it be lines on a map? Who will be consulted? School board chairs local boards for example—they know where all of the infrastructure and housing is going to go often before the Ministry of Education in many cases I've been involved in—principals; what will that level of engagement with the local community be? Currently we know that that level of engagement is undertaken with the community by the school board and I'm really keen to know will that be completely gone away from or will there be something that replaces it by the ministry with this gearing up process I guess.I have very strong concerns about this knowing the level of concern from my principals and board chairs about giving up this thing that they've been doing for a very long time and all of that knowledge that they have of their local communities. I've seen it happen where they know their communities so well and if you draw lines on a map it looks like that would make sense but when you understand the communities and where they live work play travel things look very different and I'm just wanting to know how practically this will now work with the ministry taking care of it but also to remember I would like to know about what this extra gearing up means as well. Thank you.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you. I'll just run through the issues raised. But first in the jovial spirit in which Tim Macindoe started his contribution a word about the Christchurch spade.I was very excited when I became the Minister of Education to go down and do my first sod-turning in Christchurch and I got handed the Christchurch spade and I looked at the front of it and there were all these dignitaries listed down and all the schools where they had turned the sod and there were all these distinguished names and every now and then one of them would pop up a second time and then I turned it over to the back because they'd run out of space and there were all these distinguished names and then there was this big block that just said "Tim Macindoe Tim Macindoe Tim Macindoe Tim Macindoe Tim Macindoe Tim Macindoe" and I looked more closely at it and I discovered that it was all on the same day. He must have just gone from one school to the next school to the next school just sort of a run in turn the sod and run out again because he went through all of these schools on the same day—so I think that's cheating! Anyway he did raise some important issues. In terms of the minimum eligibility requirements for principals I think what this speaks to—the bill doesn't actually define what the minimum eligibility requirements will be it puts in place a process by which they can be developed but I think what it does define is that the difference between a school that thrives and a school that doesn't often comes down to the way that school is led. I think we can probably all agree on that; there's very clear evidence on that and actually you can have schools that are functioning brilliantly and then after a change of leadership it can change very quickly. Similarly in a school that's really struggling a change of leader can change it very quickly the other way. So it's a question of trying to remove some of the luck from that equation and say "Actually we've got to do a better job of supporting aspiring school leaders so that they can move on to those very important leadership roles better supported." It shouldn't just be pot-luck. You shouldn't just be able to take a great classroom teacher put them into a principal role without properly supporting them to do that because actually that's the way you lose your brilliant classroom teachers because they just get overwhelmed and burnt out. This has been a persistent problem since Tomorrow's Schools was introduced. Amazing teachers just get burnt out by the overwhelming demands of being a school principal.On the other hand I don't think any of us would want to go back to the old point system that we had before Tomorrow's Schools where you only got a certain principal's job if you had enough points in order to qualify to get that and school communities ended up having school principals inflicted upon them that they didn't actually want. I don't think any of us want to go back to that so school boards will still be the people appointing their school principal but there'll be more of a process around that to support them to make sure they get the right person. I think by and large the single biggest decision a school board of trustees makes is who their principal should be. They get it right the school will go well; they get it wrong it will be very bad for that school. So it's about getting more support around that.With regard to NCEA offshore you'll see that we've changed our position on this. So initially the concern was that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority would have difficulty maintaining the quality standards for NCEA if it was delivered offshore. The reality is in the COVID period actually we are delivering NCEA offshore to some of those international students who can't get here because of the travel restrictions. So that will be an opportunity for us all to see how that goes and to make sure that there can be good robust quality control around that. Then the future Government whomever that may be can look at that and say "Do we want to continue with that or do we want to keep NCEA just as a New Zealand - based qualification?" So COVID-19 provides us with an opportunity to actually see how that works in terms of the quality controls that can be put in place there.In terms of Erica Stanford's comments about what is the gearing up involved and why delay the commencement there's a very practical consideration in here as well that shifting that function to the Ministry of Education in the middle of a school year when schools may be in the middle of consulting already on a process to change their enrolment zone would potentially get quite messy. So allowing schools to finish any consultation periods for this year that they've already started gives them time to do that and it gives the Ministry of Education time to effectively have a good quality hand-over of those processes to the ministry where they're required.In terms of the resourcing the Ministry of Education is already very engaged in this process with schools. In terms of consultation school communities will still be consulted to the same degree that they are now. School boards of trustees—the law as members who have read through the bill will see that it's very clear school boards of trustees are consulted at least twice in the process leading up to consultation and during consultation as well. So the Ministry of Education won't be putting out draft zoning changes for example without consulting with school boards first and I think that's a really important part of ensuring that there can still be confidence in the robustness of that process."