Parmar ParmjeetEducation Sector Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (Chairperson of the Education and Workforce Committee): Thank you Mr Chair. As the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee it's a pleasure to initiate this debate on the education sector's annual review. In the education sector we reviewed Education New Zealand Education Payroll Ltd the Education Review Office the Ministry of Education Network for Learning Ltd the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Tertiary Education Commission. As we know during the annual reviews there are broadly—if I can try to put them into three categories—three things that we want to probe into. One is the finance side the second is the human resources side and the third is the policy side and that was the intention when the select committee decided to invite these entities for their annual reviews. I want to thank all these entities for appearing before the select committee and answering all the questions that were asked by various members on the select committee. To give some examples I would like to start with Education New Zealand. For Education New Zealand's annual review of course with a financial overview we wanted to get some more insight into a policy that was put in place by the Government in August 2018. We wanted to know about the policy that is about taking the employer assistance away from the post-study work visa—whether that policy had any impact in terms of attracting international students—and second as the policy was intended to reduce exploitation which happens in that sector we all agreed that yes those workers do get exploited and there is more and more work that needs to be done. So we wanted to know from Education New Zealand whether there had been any obvious impact that they could tell us about. What we heard from Education New Zealand was that there hadn't been any kind of quantitative work around that because they haven't had enough time since the policy came into effect—as the policy came into effect in August 2018—but these are the things which will be of ongoing interest to the select committee. On the same topic we also talked about the reduction in the number of international students. As before the election the parties currently now in Government campaigned on reducing international students in some courses but there hasn't been any policy put in place by the Government. So we wanted to know about the numbers that are reducing in terms of the students who are coming from overseas to study here as foreign students. We were told yes there is a reduction and we were told there has been about a 21 percent reduction in the number of students coming from China. We also heard that it is important that we spread our risk because we don't want to be relying just on the two big markets that we have at the moment—that is India and China. So that is a big focus for Education New Zealand and that has been a focus for some time now. We definitely want to go out to bigger markets to attract more international students to come to New Zealand to do valuable courses. We also talked about sustainability of growth in these sectors which I have just described and then if I move to the Ministry of Education again the questions were around all the areas that the Ministry of Education nearly is responsible for—for example we talked about school property management and development. In that we talked about rebuilding Christchurch schools which is of interest and of course the national education growth plan review of Tomorrow's Schools. We also talked about teacher supply pressures and young people not in education employment or training. In these topics there were of course several questions which related to these topics—like in teacher supply pressures we wanted to know about the current demand and how newly qualified teachers were coming along and also about their retention issues. We also talked about Māori and Pasifika educational attainment because that has been a big focus for the education sector. We want to make sure that Māori and Pasifika students are able to attain educational levels like other students. One thing that we found was that the Ministry of Education has not been able to achieve its goal of 70 percent for regular school attendance which was of concern to the select committee. What we heard in the select committee was that Māori and Pasifika students had the lowest regular attendance rates at 50 percent and 51.7 percent respectively compared with 63 percent in the general population. We were told by the Ministry of Education that they will definitely be reassessing the situation about not achieving their goal of 70 percent of regular school attendance. So we were told that that will be their focus in the next 12 months and we look forward to seeing some improvement in that space. A final point I would like to touch on is fees-free tertiary education. Again this is about the Government's policy and we wanted to see if Government policy since it has been implemented has been able to improve access because one of the things that came with this policy was improving access to tertiary education and making it affordable. So the Ministry of Education told us that yes as students don't have to take debts and loans affordability has been seen to be good for students but on the other hand we did not get full data on enrolment as there was no full-year data available at that point but we talked about withdrawals—the number of students who take advantage of the scheme and later on withdraw from their courses. We were told that up to September 2018 2618 fees-free students—[Time expired]