Hipkins ChrisDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): Thank you Mr Chair. And thank you to the Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Hipkins for being available to answer our questions. I want to go now to something that I've had a lot of feedback on in my community in Northcote since I was elected just over two years ago. This issue of course came out actually while I was consulting them on the Tomorrow's Schools review and what they thought about it but it's been a consistent theme whenever I've spoken to a principal or a teacher which is the bureaucracy that they face dealing with your ministry. Whether it's property issues whether it's zoning whether it's staffing matters whether it's resource matters the level of frustration amongst our schools dealing with your ministry is at its all-time high I think. It's led quite frankly to a number of my principals leaving the sector—really good principals. Principals if you were to rank them would be certainly in the top quartile of leadership in New Zealand's schools.So I guess my first question to you Minister is that a lot of these changes that you're proposing seem to me like they're actually strengthening the bureaucracy rather than reducing it. So the question that I have is for you to please explain to me—but also to all the principals and the teachers who feel a sense of frustration with dealing with your ministry—apart from just amalgamating several Acts into one simple Act where does the reduced bureaucracy come from? I would appreciate it if you can address that for the sector. Thank you.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Sure. I thank the member for his comments. I think this is another one of those intractable challenges that we face in education because when we are talking about the Ministry of Education we're talking about the delivery arm for the Government of the day if you like. So the Ministry of Education are always going to be focused on implementing the policies of the Government of the day and those policies will change. And then that creates you know some interesting challenges for schools when the policies of the Government change and the ministry ultimately has to implement those. So the ministry does I think sometimes find itself the meat in the sandwich frankly between schools and the Government. I think sometimes some of the criticism that's directed to them should better be directed to us all of us collectively actually because we make decisions that the Ministry of Education then have to implement on our behalf. The bureaucracy issue is a challenging one. It's always been thus. I think if you go back to before Tomorrow's Schools it was a challenge and looking at it post - Tomorrow's Schools it's grabbed a whole host of new challenges. Through the COVID lockdown period the Ministry of Education have never communicated—I think since Tomorrow's Schools—with schools in the way that they did during that lockdown period and the feedback that we heard from schools was incredibly positive during that time. So I've spent some time just listening to them and saying Well what made the difference? What was different about the way the ministry worked with you during COVID-19 lockdown compared to what they had done before?" I think there are a few key things—one is we gave the Ministry of Education some more discretion and that's something different that Governments don't generally tend to do to Government departments. We tend to be quite prescriptive about what they can and can't do. So we said to the Ministry of Education "Find out what schools need and make sure they get it during that period of time." So we gave them some more discretion at the front line and schools really welcomed that and I think the ministry welcomed that because it helped to strengthen their working relationship with schools. Of course that comes with risks. But actually I think the Ministry of Education handled it incredibly well. The frequency of communications was really really important. The Ministry of Education was sending out daily updates through the beginning period of that COVID19 lockdown because the information was changing all the time. The schools just wanted one credible source of information where they knew they could trust that as being the truth and the ministry worked very hard with public health officials to make sure they got that. So I think the issue isn't a structural one; it's a relationship one. I think we've still got some work to do to improve the relationship between the Ministry of Education and schools regardless of what the policies of the Government of the day are. There is some further structural change that Government is considering and the Opposition have been involved in the discussion around that around the establishment of an education support agency to put more of that support directly to the front lines. I mean actually to give that front-line level a bit more discretion in the way they work with schools so that they can be more flexible and nimble in responding to the needs of individual school communities."