Hipkins ChrisDr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you Mr Chair. My question that I want to ask the Minister in chair Chris Hipkins is in Part 3—it's clause 95. This is about physical force at registered schools because during the select committee process we had a number of submitters that wanted to discuss this change of term. I believe that because of this this discussion has come up again because before it was sitting in the legislation as restraint" but people knew how to operate and how to use that term or how to use physical restraint in schools. But with the "physical force" term coming up this discussion has come up again and my fear is that this will imply that somehow physical force can be applied in a way which we don't want it to be applied.I know in clause 95 in subclause 2(c) it says that "the physical force used is reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances" and also in the select committee we did define what physical force actually means but we know that children have different kinds of strengths especially children that have special needs. So how will a grown-up understand what reasonable and proportionate force means for that child? We are talking about children that are of a very young age from year 5 to older ages in schools. So I have a concern about this because we have anti-smacking legislation in New Zealand and I know this is not smacking but parents cannot use force which can be seen as smacking. But here I know that the force is only to be used to stop any—as we have defined in the select committee process—bodily movement that can cause any kind of harm to that student or anyone else but it's a fine fine line.So I want the Minister to clarify to me why actually we need physical force. We could have done without physical force in this legislation in our education system. Why do we need this kind of physical force because to me it seems it can be interpreted in a way which we don't want? What kind of training will be there for teachers to understand what physical force actually means? Thank you Mr Chair.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you. Just running back to the issue around police vetting for home-based early childhood education (ECE)—I think a very legitimate issue there. Why would adults who are not normally present or young adults in some cases who are not normally present in the home require police vetting? That's because they can be present in the home. It is ultimately someone's home.So someone can be home sick for example when the children are present in the house and it is important that children are kept safe—bearing in mind that we could have up to five children under the age of five under the care of one adult in a house. If another adult who is not police-checked is at home if there was a concern then that actually significantly increases the risk for those five children who could be in that home. Home-based is the least supervised part of our early childhood education system. As I've indicated before I believe in it as a part of our ECE system. I believe that home-based environment is a really good one for some kids but we've just got to have really good robust quality controls in place to make sure those kids are being kept safe.With regard to the comments from Parmjeet Parmar the member was working off the bill as reported back from select committee not the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) and those are provisions that have been changed. So the word "force" is now no longer used; we've gone back to the use of the word "restraint" after some further consultation with the sector. But the key issues I think the member raises are legitimate ones which are around guidelines and training. So the bill now with the SOP puts some pretty rigid consultation requirements in place around the development of the guidelines to ensure that all of these issues can be carefully worked through with everybody involved from the disability community through to the teaching community and everybody in between and also that we can then develop and make sure we've got in place good training for teachers. There's no question at all that that's actually the key to making this whole thing work."