Stanford Erica; Salesa JennyERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to speak in the debate on the Prime Minister's statement especially given the fact that there was a glaring omission from his statement and that was around how this Government are going to turn around the decline in educational standards of our kids.In the last five years I would argue that this Government has had an education Minister who has been distracted. We've had an education Minister who has focused his efforts on things like banning fizzy drinks in our schools and investigating getting rid of international students and then backing down. Meanwhile the achievement levels of our kids have been declining.We expected—or the country should expect of an education Minister—to work towards solving the declining achievement of the last 20 years that saw us go from the top of the OECD in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores to amongst the bottom. If you take math we went from third in the OECD to 19th. The horrifying statistic—to put that in context—is that our kids have lost 1½ years of schooling by going from third in the world to 19th in the world. The equivalent is a loss of 1.5 years. What's worse is that when Christopher Hipkins was the Minister of Education he said in select committee around the Programme for International Student Assessment results Well it's OK if other countries do better than us."—true story. "It's OK if other countries overtake us. That's no problem. Good for them."Let's just set that aside for a moment and look at our own data: less than half of our kids are at curriculum by the time they finish intermediate—less than half; 45 percent are at curriculum for math; writing 35 percent; reading 56 percent; and science a very dismal 20 percent. And it doesn't get any better because the numeracy and literacy assessment that was piloted last year showed very similar results. Things have not got any better. Reading a 64 percent pass; writing a 34 percent; and math 56 percent—and much much worse if you are in a high-equity or low-decile school. The system for 20 years has let down teachers and it's let down kids.The numeracy and literacy results of last year should have been a massive wake-up call. And what did we get? We saw over the last few months we've had a quibble between the Minister of Education via the ministry and New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) over the level of the test. And what we saw was the ministry trying to tell NZQA to use easier words to have less questions and to allow kids to use spellcheck in their literacy tests.A month after Jan Tinetti the Associate Minister of Education said that she committed that she would not reduce the quality of those tests the standard of those tests. A month after that Ministry of Education officials were telling NZQA to use simpler words to have less questions and to let kids use spell check. The education system I would argue should be teaching our kids to analyse text to infer meaning from context to understand unfamiliar words. But here we have the Ministry of Education as directed by the Minister telling NZQA to use simpler words.Ironically one of the words that was brought up in the briefing by the ministry was one of the words that shouldn't be used—an example of that—the word "ambitious". Make no mistake: the Minister might need it to use a dictionary to look up the meaning of the word ambitious but for our kids this Minister has absolutely no ambition. She is actively working with the Ministry of Education to dumb down these tests to make the results look better to get more kids across the line when what we need to actually be doing is going "What is the cause of this?" We are flying completely blind. These poor 15-year-olds. We have no idea where they're at through the curriculum we've got no progression monitoring we don't know if they're hitting milestones along the way. Even the Education Review Office in all of their reports for the last 20 years have said that the level of variance of our assessment of progression through the curriculum is highly variable. And we've had five years of a Government that have done absolutely nothing about this. At the point now—we're staring down the barrel of 15-year-olds next year having to sit a literacy and numeracy test that the results are showing they will most likely fail and will not get their NCEA.When the Minister's officials were asked "Have you done any analysis on the number of kids who leave after gaining NCEA level 1 or NCEA level 2 who are likely not to pass this test and not to get their qualifications?"—"Oh no we haven't done that analysis." So we've got thousands of kids who are potentially at risk of not getting an NCEA qualification. And there's been no analysis done by any of the officials to work out how many kids are going to be affected.And as I said we can quibble about the test but the real question has to be: how are we preparing our kids through primary and intermediate and lower high school to be prepared for that test? Because after five years all we've had is an action plan at the end of last year that we might start thinking about how we're going to monitor progression through the curriculum in a few years. Meanwhile we have failed generations of kids—absolutely no ambition for those kids.And as I said we're flying completely blind. The number of parents that say to us "I have no idea where my kid is at in the curriculum. I don't know until they're three years behind." And here's a fact that lots of people don't know that principals tell me all the time: unless a child is more than three years behind the curriculum they cannot access any support.Hon Member: That is completely incorrect.ERICA STANFORD: Well that's what principals tell me and if you want to argue with them be my guest—but three years. And here's the thing the curriculum that we have hides kids who are falling through the cracks. Two-yearly bands and three-yearly bands now in the new curriculum—it's hiding the fact that kids are falling further and further behind. We are building into the curriculum an allowance for kids to fail because of huge bands. And that is something that this Government have not looked at in the last couple of years—in the last five years even.I want to turn now to attendance because what we've heard from this Government over the last few years is that "It's complex it's multifactorial it needs a tailored solution that there are so many drivers to this problem." And then what we had this month was an announcement to this complex multi-factored problem that needs a tailored solution. We got 82 attendance officers—82—for a complex problem. Now what was interesting on the weekend when Jan Tinetti did The Nation is we found out that those 82 officers weren't for the chronically truant kids—the 100000 chronically truant kids going to school less than 70 percent of the time. It wasn't for the unenrolled kids who we have 8000 of now—which is more than more than doubled under this Government's watch. It's not for them; it's for the moderately truant kids.What's even worse is they're not actually for the kids. As it turns out on the weekend we find out that the truancy officers are just for the schools to give them advice. It's another level of bureaucracy. They're not officers to actually go into houses and help get kids to school. "Oh maybe in some circumstances" the Minister said. But actually what we really need is a tailored solution and to trust schools to know what to do. Instead we got 82 officers; not for the 100000 kids not for the 8000 but for a handful of schools because that's all they're going to be able to cover.This Government under both Chris Hipkins as Minister and now Jan Tinetti have firstly not acknowledged the problem they've not taken responsibility and what's worse is all we have now is a culture of excuses and a lack of ambition for our kids. I can guarantee you Madam Speaker—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member's time is up."