Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I'll respond to the arguments that have been raised so far. There's been quite a lot of comment on why extend the requirements out by 12 months for the new strategic plans to be in place. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is that schools have indicated that they'd like more time but one of the other ones that's quite significant is that there is an interrelationship between the schools' strategic plans and the statement of National Education and Learning Priorities (NELPs) which the Government is now required to put in place as well. There are some consultation requirements around that and the Government of course has begun to fulfil its commitments under the requirements to put NELPs in place. There is quite a lot of logic in having the NELPs in place before schools have to adopt their strategic plans so this will allow for a better sequencing of that work to take place. Nikki Kaye asked about why have a principal and a board member having financial sign-off rather than two board members. The reason for that is it simply reinstates the status quo that applied prior to the mistake being made. So basically it isn't making a change; it's reinstating what was the previous status quo. The requirement around two board members applies to other Crown entities so this was intended to reinstate the status quo. Erica Stanford covered a number of issues around charter schools which we have talked about at length already in the earlier parts of this debate but particularly she wanted to extend the charter school plans to apply for five years rather than for three years. There isn't really any good justification for treating one group of designated character schools—which is what most of them will become; some of them will become integrated schools—differently to the others and so I wouldn't support that. Tim Macindoe asked why the calendar year. It is simply because it aligns with the school year and actually it would be impractical for schools to have a year that was based on something other than a calendar year. It does create some accounting challenges for government of course who run a different year and so school years are split across two calendar years but we've been doing that for years. Simeon Brown asked why make this change so late. The answer is we're not actually. We introduced this legislation some time ago. It's been through a full six months' select committee process—in fact longer than six months because the select committee asked for extra time to consider it—and therefore we had foreshadowed well in advance to schools that this extension of time was coming. Then finally he referenced the review of Tomorrow's Schools and asked whether this would pre-empt it. No it doesn't. Actually pushing out the time frame allows more time for any implications from the review of Tomorrow's Schools to be considered. With regards to the powers of the Secretary of Education and the issue around consultation and what's significant there are always going to be subjective judgments around what is deemed to be significant. Ultimately I think if we wanted to set very specific criteria in that it would kind of defeat the purpose of the flexibility that we're trying to build in. We do want to be a little more flexible. If you set really rigid criteria you get absurd situations where a school finds that they are trying to make what is a relatively insignificant change to their strategic plan but because it happens to hit a particular criterion you end up with a bizarre situation where they can't make what are relatively minor changes. So there's going to be an element of subjectivity. Any law change like this does create subjectivity but of course there's a democratic answer to that. If school communities don't feel that their school boards are consulting them sufficiently then they have a board election every three years and aligning the strategic plan with the three-year electoral cycle actually enhances that level of accountability.