Salesa JennyHon JENNY SALESA (Associate Minister of Education): Thank you Madam Speaker and I'd like to first of all acknowledge the Minister of Education the Hon Chris Hipkins for his huge amount of work and leadership in this space. I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the Ministry of Education the Tertiary Education Commission and all of our education agencies who have spent months and months to ensure that we have this Education and Training Bill in front of us.I'd like to say that this bill establishes and regulates an education system that ensures New Zealanders have lifelong learning opportunities so that our people are able to engage fully in society. This bill is a very important step forward in ensuring that we improve the success for all of our learners.Thirty years ago under the Rt Hon David Lange Tomorrow's Schools which is what we have today was brought in under Labour Government. We know that it is an education system that is no longer fit for purpose. We only need to look at the educational outcomes of our Māori learners our Pacific learners our learners with disabilities and our learners with learning support needs—as well as those from disadvantaged backgrounds—to know that this is an education system that does need to be changed. And it is not surprising to me that members on the opposite side of the House are not (a) acknowledging that the education system needs to change or (b) even agreeing that these are changes that need to be made.We are a Government that when we see issues that need to be addressed we actually address them. We don't bury our heads in the sand and hope that it will just magically fix itself. This bill will implement the policy changes that the Government has agreed to implement from the education work programme which is our response to the independent Tomorrow's Schools final report.The Education and Training Act is one that will be more simple. It will be modern. It will be less prescriptive than the current legislation. And we have legislation that goes as far back as 1964 and it is time to make changes. The Education Act of 1964 and the Education Act of 1989 underpin the operation of early childhood education of compulsory schooling of tertiary education as well as our vocational education. But some of those provisions are now pretty dated. When Tomorrow's Schools was implemented they thought that they would address inequality of educational outcomes. However when we look—and I'd like to discuss our Pacific people in particular. We know that two-thirds of Pacific people live in Auckland. We also know when we look at the numbers of Pacific students that we have that in 2018 we had just over 27000 Pacific students in our secondary schools and we know that over 50 percent of our Pacific students in those secondary schools attend only 26 secondary schools across Aotearoa New Zealand. But when you look closer at that number 25 of those schools are in Auckland. Only one of those high schools is outside of Auckland and it's Porirua high school.So when we look at some of the effects of Tomorrow's Schools we see that not only are some students including Pacific students concentrated in certain areas—in this case Auckland—but when you look at where they currently attend schools we know that close to 70 percent of our students attend decile 1 to decile 4 schools. And when we look at the educational outcomes of our students this is one of the reasons why we are making these changes. We also need to ensure that we do right by our tangata whenua—our Māori. This bill makes significant changes that are aimed at giving better effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi to ensure that we have equitable outcomes for our Māori learners. At the school level boards are going to be required to give effect to Te Tiriti by working to ensure that their plans—their policies and local curriculum—reflect local tikanga Māori mātauranga Māori and Te Ao Māori to ensure that they are taking all reasonable steps to ensure the instructions are available in Te Reo Māori and tikanga Māori and to achieve equitable outcomes for our Māori learners.At the system level this bill also enables the Minister of Education and the Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti to jointly issue and publish a statement of expectations specifying what agency serving the education system must do to give effect to Public Service objectives related to Te Tiriti. This is a wonderful piece of legislation the Education and Training Bill and I strongly support it.