SpeechEducationMARJA LUBECK (Chairperson of the Education and Workforce Committee): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to take a call as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee. Our select committee met on 22 June and 27 July to consider Vote Education Vote Education Review Office and Vote Tertiary Education. We heard evidence from the Minister of Education the Ministry of Education the Education Review Office and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We also received advice from the Office of the Auditor-General. Budget 2022 is seeking $20.23 billion for these three Votes. This compares with the estimated $20.04 billion that was spent in 2021-2022. Of this funding $16.172 billion is for Vote Education which funds more than 2400 schools and more than 5000 early learning providers. Four billion dollars is for Vote Tertiary Education which provides funding for tertiary education providers including eight universities three wānanga and Te Pūkenga and its 16 subsidiary companies—former Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics. Thirty-eight million dollars is for Vote Education Review Office. Over the past five years we've seen significant increases both in education spending and in the number of public servants supporting the portfolio. Our committee has scrutinised these trends and asked about the causes of and outcomes from these increases. We've heard there are a number of causes of the increased spending including more learners in the early childhood and tertiary sectors and overall demographic changes. We've also heard that the additional people hired by the Ministry of Education are front-line staff such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists; that the increase in staff is causing observable benefits such as decreased wait times for the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme. I would like to touch on three areas that the committee in particular paid attention to in our review which are the introduction of the equity index student attendance and the reform of vocational education. Budget 2022 is seeking $292.5 million for the equity index which will replace the school decile system in 2023. The equity index is intended to better allocate funding to schools that need additional resources based on information from Statistics New Zealand to assess the socio-economic characteristics of students and their likely achievement levels. There will be an extra $75 million in funding per year under the new system. Although most schools will receive more funding about 10 percent of schools may qualify for less. We asked what checks and balances will be in place and heard that allowing time to adapt no school will receive less operational funding in 2023 due to the equity index and from 2024 any reduction in funding will be capped at 5 per cent per annum. Our select committee completed an inquiry into school attendance in March 2022. A key recommendation in our report was a target of at least 70 percent of students attending school regularly—that is 90 percent of the time that a school is open—by 2024; 75 percent by 2026. The Government has adopted this recommendation. Its attendance and engagement strategy is also targeting reductions in the number of students who are moderately absent missing two or three days a fortnight and chronically absent missing more than three days a fortnight. Schools will lead the response to moderate levels of absence and strategy will see schools receiving more support to do so. The committee has devoted a lot of time to Te Pūkenga which is central to the Government's reform of vocational education growth. We noted concerns from the Auditor-General and heard that the Minister agreed with these concerns and believed that Te Pūkenga has more work to do. We noted that during the consultation phase of Reform of Vocational Education the Minister made statements that Te Pūkenga's head office should be modest and nimble and we heard that the Minister stands by those statements. We also asked how a significant deficit that Te Pūkenga was projected to run would be addressed. We heard that while the Minister considers the projected $110 million deficit for 2022 unacceptable it was better than the projected deficits that would have occurred without the reforms. Both the Minister and through a separate process Te Pūkenga itself were confident the final deficit for 2022 would not be as high as $110 million. This being my fourth call in this Estimates debate I'd like to emphasise this point and acknowledge the new format that we considered these entities within and in particular the increase in ministerial accountability. For many years Ministers' participation in this debate would be limited to taking one or two five-minute calls that would address Opposition members' points infrequently. The Estimates debate has been transformed into 11 hours of parliamentary scrutiny of Ministers in a way that no Minister during previous Governments was ever subject to. Thank you.