Martin TraceyTRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): I will just pick up on some of the answers that the Minister in the chair Hekia Parata just gave—thank you very much—around 14-year-olds. That is absolutely right—no child can be left at home. When a sibling is at the age of 14 they are considered a responsible adult. I do not believe that members of this House believe that having a 14-year-old supervise a 5-year-old or a 6-year-old in online learning is appropriate. I do not believe it. If the Minister believes that is appropriate then she can stand up and say so but I do not believe that that is appropriate. And therein lies the question: why primary school children? Again Minister we have not been given a real reason and that is all we are asking for.What one can hear across this Chamber is a consensus that online learning is real it is here it is now and it needs to be supported. It came out of the digital literacy inquiry that I sat on with Nikki Kaye. There is no argument here about online learning. It is about the private providers inside that environment and again Minister all we need to know is: why open it up to private providers? We have the Network for Learning which could be amended and could become a conduit for programmes that have been certified and approved. We have got the Virtual Learning Network and other things that came out that the sector had to create because there was not this capacity inside the sector. All that is being suggested is that we actually keep it inside the sector for now.With regard to the comments around Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu that was in the regulatory impact statement. That was one of the justifications for communities of online learning in the regulatory impact statement from her officials—that te kura was overloaded because it is at 24000 or something students. I mean 16000 of them are over 16 years old—something like that. So they could actually be other learners. There is no need for them to be in te kura. This Government has put in many other opportunities for 16-year-old-plus learners to be inside an education system and they could be 100 percent online through a tertiary institution a polytech or a university.So what is this actually about? Let us keep it within the sector. That is all that the Opposition is suggesting. We are not arguing that this is not the future we are not arguing the fact that—and those were the Minister's words out of the report she read: Done well this is a plus." Absolutely. At Mahurangi College we have something like 17 students at year 13 currently Skyping out into other courses because we are a semi-rural school and we cannot provide art history or Greek or whatever. We want to widen the capacity that our students can study. We have no argument with the concept of online learning but why primary school students why 100 percent online learning for primary school students and why open it up for private providers?I want to touch on what Catherine Delahunty talked about and it is the crisis of anxiety that is going on in our schools. The Minister will know because I am sure she is talking to the sector and to the counsellors who are inside our school sector that we have a crisis of anxiety—students who are too anxious to come to school. There is a huge variety of reasons for that and often it is not that the school is the issue; it is what is going on at home. If we add to that their capacity to opt out of a face-to-face schooling environment would they take it? Yes they would and that is what the health schools and the young woman and others who came to testify said. The young woman said: "My parents would've done anything to stop the pain that I was in when I had to go to school because of my anxiety." She thanked the health school for one. That was a choice. It is part of the flexibility of the system that we applaud. That health school was able to step in and support that young woman with her education at the same time as she was under medical care and medical attention. She then transitioned back into mainstream school and she has transitioned back into the real world. She said of communities of online learning: "If I had had this option I would never have come out of my room."The Minister says that there is no compulsion. People cannot be excluded because quite rightly there is reporting around expulsions and exclusions and it will be watched if mainstream schools try to do this. But the Minister knows just as I know that people are strongly encouraged. When your child when your student comes home constantly upset because they are running into ructions with the school and a school principal or a school counsellor or careers adviser or somebody suggests to you that there is another pathway that would make this easier then you might just take that pathway.So those are our concerns and all we are saying is: let us keep it inside the sector let us not open it up for private provision and let us look at widening the scope of Network for Learning now that we know that we have got the portal there for all these other things. That is one of the things that Network for Learning did now that broadband is out and fibre is through to all our schools. Let us widen its capacity to start to certify and start to organise these online programmes so that our schools through that portal can go straight there and start to deliver out wider. Let us look at the schools instead of using the current percentage of their staffing that they give to their e-learning networks actually creating digital mentor teachers. One of the side effects of what is happening is that those students who are doing online learning inside our schools are having to fit with the current timetable. That means they are often having to go to the library and study alone. There is quite a high drop-out rate or quite a high fail rate among those students. You must be very focused very literate and very self-driven. So instead of having our schools use their staffing percentage right now to try to fund the e-learning networks they have got let us get the Network for Learning to do that and let us use that component of staffing to create digital mentor teachers inside our schools. There is a way to deliver this that is better than actually just deciding it will go private.Before I sit down I am going to ask the Minister directly: will her Government support Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 293 SOP 297 SOP 298 SOP 306 SOP 296 and SOP 295? Will the Minister and will the Government support those SOPs? If we could just have a yes or no—and if not why not—that would be great. Thank you."