Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you Mr Chair. Happy to work my way through the list of questions that we've had so far this evening. I'll start with the international rankings and my comments that have been badly distorted by Mr Goldsmith on the international rankings. I know that would be an entirely new thing for him to do. But I will say that I did differentiate in my comments in select committee between the decline in the mean scores of New Zealand students which is something that we should all be concerned about and the presence of additional countries in the overall international rankings. Bearing in mind that when these started about 25 or 30 years ago there weren't as many countries involved in the studies as there are now and we should welcome the fact that there are more countries participating in these kind of comparative studies and also that some of those studies particularly some of the developing countries are actually doing better. I don't have a problem with that. I welcome that. I celebrate that. But I do have a problem and I think we all in this House should have a problem with the fact that the performance of New Zealand students even if you forget about what the rest of the world is doing has been going down. That trend has been evident ever since we started participating in these studies about 25 or 30 years ago. So I think we do need to take that very seriously. So in terms of literacy and numeracy it's worth remembering that the most prominent of all of those studies is the Programme for International Student Assessment study and that measures the reading literacy among other things of our 15-year-olds. So these kids have already been in our education system in our schooling system for 10 years at that point and then if you add early childhood education on before that they could have spent about 13 years in the education system. What do we know about that? Well we know that the kids who participated in quality early childhood education actually do better by the time they are at the age of 15. So there's one area where the Government has placed quite a significant amount of attention. We do know that we can do better when it comes to those core basics like literacy and numeracy. It's one of the things that we've been investing in since we have been in Government. Mr Goldsmith raised the question of what's the magical answer when it comes to teaching kids to read. Well here's the cold hard reality: there isn't a magical answer. Those who grab at phonics and say This is the way you should do it and you should only do it this way."—they are wrong. But those who also grab at the reading in context theory they are also wrong if they think that that is the only solution because actually you use whatever solution is best for that individual child. Some kids learn by looking at pictures and interpreting the words. Some kids learn by sounding things out. The Ready to Read series that has recently been released combines all of those elements so you can use what is best for the child. I read every night when I'm at home with my 5-year-old using the Ready to Read books that he brings home from school and I can tell you that they are a brilliant resource and the newer Ready to Read books are even better than the original ones because they give you such a rich set of materials that you can work with in teaching kids to read. But we've got to invest in teacher professional development because that is how we're really going to turn things around. When we talk about the quality of teaching people say we should raise the standard for beginning teachers. That's all very well and good but 10 years from now the majority of teachers in our classrooms will be teachers that are already in our classrooms today. So we've actually got to focus on making sure that those teachers who are in our classrooms as of now have the opportunity to improve their skills and to upskill.In terms of masks in schools and when they will be removed: when the country moves to orange. Not giving anything away when the country does move to orange then the mask use in schools rules change. They move from a requirement to an encouragement and therefore people can expect to see some change there. Teanau Tuiono raised some very good questions about COVID-19 and winter. Winter is coming what's planned? Well around ventilation if I could talk about ventilation because this comes up all of the time I have looked very closely at the comparative effectiveness of those portable air cleaners versus opening the window. A portable air cleaner will change the air in a room about three times in an hour. Opening the doors and the windows will change the air in the room between 15 and 30 times in an hour. So opening the doors and the windows is still a better solution than putting in a portable air cleaner. Now you come to winter and you say "OK but it's colder in winter and therefore you don't want to have all the doors and windows open in winter."—fair point. Opening the window by about 1½ centimetres is going to change the air in a room about the same as a portable air cleaner. If you open the window 3 centimetres which is still going to preserve most of the heat in the room that will change it at roughly double the rate of a portable air cleaner. So our focus on portable air cleaners has been putting them in those places where there isn't natural ventilation but where there is natural ventilation that is going to be by far the best thing that we can do from a COVID-19 perspective. In terms of free N95 masks the science at this point supports making freely available the medical-grade masks—the ones with the blue outers—and that is exactly what we have been doing. In terms of increasing the vaccination rates for our Māori and Pacific children that is one of the major focuses of our health providers. But I do want to note that vaccination of children is voluntary and therefore the effort that all of us need to make—and all of us can play a role here—is ensuring that parents feel confident in having their children vaccinated."