Willis Nicola; Hipkins ChrisNICOLA WILLIS (National): I rise to ask the Minister a few questions and they principally relate to Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 544 because as you'll appreciate this introduces new content to the bill that we didn't have the opportunity to analyse at the Education and Workforce Committee. So in this contribution I hope that Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Hipkins will be patient. I will ask a couple of questions and then I'll rise to take another call in future. The first question is in relation to the changes around school enrolment zones. Members of the House will be aware that it is this particular part of the bill that National takes particular issue with. We think the current system whereby communities via their boards of trustees are in charge of consultation engagement and the initial setting of school zones is a good one and we are concerned and sceptical about what will happen when the Ministry of Education takes over those responsibilities. So with that in mind it leaps out at me that this SOP pushes out the time line under which the Ministry of Education will take on that responsibility until 1 January 2021. It is described in the SOP that the intent here is to provide adequate time to transfer responsibility … from … boards to the Ministry of Education." And Minister it seems to me that this must be a huge amount of responsibility that the Ministry of Education is getting ready for if it's going to take them this many months to prepare.We had been led to believe in previous contributions by Labour members that this was just a simple administrative change. This would indicate that there is some preparation that needs to go on at the Ministry of Education that hasn't occurred while this bill has been moving through the stages in the House and I would like some explanation of what it is that they are going to be doing over the next few months in preparation. My second question on the SOP relates particularly to the clauses around "physical restraint" which of course is new language because the bill initially talked about "physical force". I like the Minister have been petitioned and engaged by many parents who have real concerns about the way these provisions might have worked particularly for children with additional needs and equally I've heard concerns from teachers about what steps will be taken to make sure that they feel that they can operate within the law in a way that does keep other children safe and that keeps themselves safe in their workplace. I appreciate that there is a difficult balance to strike here between ensuring that no child is put at undue risk of physical discipline and equally that teachers are able to keep children safe. So these are detailed changes and I think it would be useful to the House if the Minister could give us more background on what consultation has led to these changes whether affected stakeholders will be happy with these changes and why they are better than what was in the bill that came out of select committee. Thank you.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Sure. I thank the member for her questions. In terms of the school enrolment zones the delay to 1 January 2021 is largely a resourcing issue that the Ministry of Education have to work through. Schools do put a lot of time and energy into managing their enrolment zones and into the consultation with their communities and the Ministry of Education need to gear up to be able to better participate and to better lead that process. Schools aren't all of one mind on this. There are some schools that definitely want to keep control of their own enrolment zones but there are also others who will very happily see the back of having to do that consultation process. They don't enjoy doing it. They do see it as a source of division with their parent communities and they don't enjoy having to lead that consultation process. So yes I absolutely concede there is a divided body of opinion within the schooling community about who should best manage the consultation with their communities around enrolment zones. The delay though which I think was the member's question is really just about making sure the ministry can get the systems in place to be able to do that work instead of schools doing it. With regard to "physical restraint" or "physical force" this has been one of the most difficult issues in the bill to be frank and it was a very difficult issue when the last Government grappled with it. I think they had a really good go at trying to get it right—didn't quite land perfectly. I don't think this is absolutely perfect either. If you like on the continuum of views you've got the teaching community at one end and the disability community at the other end and I think what Parliament has been trying to do for the entirety of the time—and I don't think it's a particularly party political matter—is to find the right balance in the middle that says "Yes teachers need to be able to exert some control where it is required to keep everybody safe but then there are very legitimate concerns raised by the disability community about the fact that children with disabilities are often on the receiving end of that—disproportionately so." Very real concerns have been raised about that. So we moved away from the use of the words "physical restraint" based on the feedback from the teaching community because of the feedback that things like by way of illustration a teacher hugging a child while their parent left—and anyone who's dropped their kid off to a school or an early childhood centre where the kid doesn't necessarily want to be left behind will understand that this happens every day—that teacher is restraining that child by giving them a forceful hug while their parent leaves. The teaching community read the "physical restraint" provisions as that they couldn't do that and I don't think anybody would say that that's not something that's a legitimate thing for a teacher to do. They do it every day and we don't want them to feel that they're being criminals when they do that. They're providing comfort to a child by giving them a good strong hug while their parents leave. But then on the other hand by moving to "force" what we heard from the disability community was that they thought that that was going too far the other way. So we've come back more to the middle ground. The teaching community preferred the word "force"; the disability community preferred the word "restraint". What we've tried to do in the middle is actually improve the consultation requirements around the guidelines because actually the guidelines are where the real meat of the issue is resolved and a better consultation process—taking some time out to do that really well and really thoroughly and get everybody on board—I think will be the key to getting this right. The second part of it is of course training. It's all very well to say to the teaching community "Here are some new rules; now you've got to follow them." Actually if we want to do a better job around restraint and force in schools then actually really good quality training is the answer to that. There are things around non-violent physical intervention—good training that is available in those circumstances. So we've got to do a better job of making sure that the teaching community can access those. So this is by no means the final solution to this problem. This is going to continue to be a challenge for all of us. Whoever is in Government there's going to continue to be concerns on both sides and I think we're all going to have to continue to navigate our way through that."