Upston Louise; Hipkins ChrisEducationHon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): I've got a number of lines of questions that I would like to take in this Estimates debate. The first one is really looking at what evaluations have taken place into the impact of the COVID lockdown last year and in the last financial year as well on student learning and student achievement and what changes have been made as a result in preparation for the lockdown that we are in now. Do you want me to keep going with some questions? OK. So the first line of questioning is exactly around that: what did you learn? What did the ministry do differently this time that is learnt from evaluations from surveys from evidence and from research that has then been built into planning and preparation for this lockdown? The feedback Minister that's been received from some schools is that it was no different than it was in March last year. In terms of access to devices for example that's been a significant barrier for some students' learning and just at a time that they get that up and running those schools have dropped down to level 2 for which they are grateful. For those in Auckland it's not as successful. The other question around that was on the clear examples of enormous disparities amongst schools and students in the lockdown last year and how were those being mitigated and the risks to those students being mitigated in how the ministry has responded and the changes that are being made in advance of this lockdown. Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I'll just quickly run through those issues. In terms of student achievement the Education Review Office the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and others have done various evaluations around student progression and student progress using the data sources available to them and have indicated that actually student progress was about the same or better last year in key learning areas like literacy and numeracy compared to the years prior. We do acknowledge though that COVID-19 creates the challenge around attendance and re-engagement in the end of a lockdown period and the longer that that goes on for the bigger that challenge appears to be. So we do have an attendance challenge. We had an attendance challenge going into COVID-19 but there's no question that that has gotten worse and that's something that we've focused our energies on. We've put about $50 million last year into re-engagement initiatives. Much of that spending actually is still in the pipeline at the moment so it will help with re-engagement after this particular lockdown. In terms of the access to learning whilst people are locked out we did get a lot of devices out last year. One of the challenges in Auckland in particular was because the lockdown happened very quickly a lot of young people's devices—at the end of the last lockdown the ownership of those devices reverted to the school. So we weren't just giving the devices to the kids; we were saying These devices belong to your school." So at the end of the lockdown last year they took those devices back to school and because it happened quite quickly—the lockdown this time—we had a lot of devices just stuck in schools that were there but the schools couldn't get access to them. So we worked to make sure that schools could get access to them. In the case of a couple of schools that were locations of interest where we didn't want them going on to school sites because there was concern about infection spreading amongst those school communities we sent more devices out to those schools. In terms of the hard packs of materials we had quite a few of them in the store. The ones that we were short of were the NCEA pack so extra printing work was done. They were dispatched pretty quickly but we did have to print those ones whereas below NCEA level we had the hard packs there and we have produced more as we've been sending them out so that we're prepared and so that we keep the flow of hard packs going. But these things do take a little bit of time."