Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Chair. I want to speak to my amendment that I have just tabled which in clause 21(13) after new clause 9B(2) of schedule 6 of the Education (Update) Amendment Act inserts new clause 9B(3) which basically states that the strategic plan for a school which has transitioned from a partnership school to a designated character school expires five years after the plan takes effect rather than three which is currently there.There are many reasons for this but I want to go back to the fear that we've always had about the transitioning of charter schools—that is that all of those good things about charter schools that make them so successful will be lost. I had a number of Supplementary Order Papers in Part 1 that I didn't get a chance to speak to today—and it was very sad—where I wanted greater transitioning of these charter schools into special character schools. I didn't get to do that but the only way that I feel that I can now do that is in this amendment by extending out that strategic plan to five years.Now the reason that I want to do that and I want the other side of the Chamber to consider that is because of the learnings that we need to take from charter schools and why they've been so successful: why Māori achievement has been so good; why smaller class sizes why pastoral care have been so good to these students; why for example at Vanguard Military School exercise and discipline has been so good; why respect for your elders—and if we look at their results low levels of truancy and high achievement they have been so successful. If we take a three-year plan and we put that out to five years I think that we will have a much better chance of taking the amazing things that made those charter schools so successful and carrying them on.One of the most worrying things that I and my colleagues have about this transition period is that there are all of these learnings from these charter schools that will disappear because what we're trying to do is take a square peg and fit it back into a round hole by this so-called transition. We keep bandying this word transition" around. The Government are saying "transition" but actually what they're doing is not transitioning at all; it's just squashing something that doesn't fit into something else. If we had a longer period for that strategic plan to take place I would feel better about the fact that some of those learnings some of the values some of the things that make those charter schools so successful will actually be able to be carried on.There are many things that have been stripped away from charter schools that we're not going to get back. There will be changes in staff the CEO won't be there the boards will be different and the unregistered teachers will be gone. So there are a whole lot of things that made charter schools so successful that will be stripped away. All we're left with is the strategic plan. It's the only thing that we have left to make sure that we take the learnings and we take the things that made charter schools so successful and we implement those for as long as we possibly can.I mentioned in many speeches before now that I worry that the Minister and the Government and the ministry won't take into account the learnings from these charter schools. They've had some incredible successes in terms of their successes with Māori students and Pasifika students with achievement with truancy rates and we're never going to understand why that occurred because the model's gone. If we have this longer period of transition with a longer strategic plan I think that the ministry will have a much longer time to be able to take a look at the things that made charter schools so successful and perhaps that can then spill over into special character schools.There are so many learnings that we are not taking and if we had a five-year period under my amendment I feel that the ministry and officials would have a much greater period of time to actually take a look at some of those really amazing successes and perhaps as I say with other special character schools maybe take those learnings and put them across them as well. We've seen the incredible success of many students at charter schools and it would be such a shame for us to waste that. I think a five-year period of transition rather than a three-year period with a strategic plan is a much better idea and I hope the Minister takes that into account."