Goodhew JoHon JO GOODHEW (National—Rangitata): I rise to speak today on the annual review of the Ministry of Education. I do want to concentrate particularly on the Ministry of Education and the appearance of the ministry before the Education and Science Committee to answer our questions. I want to begin by congratulating Hekia Parata on a stellar time as Minister of Education completely driven to change achievement—we asked in the committee a number of questions about achievement; I will go into that little further—and welcoming the Hon Nikki Kaye to the role. It is a tough role but it is one that really matters. I go round the schools in my electorate and they are talking about the same things that our committee asked in this annual review. They tell me that they understand that what we want is the best education for the students who are going to school. We want the most young people engaged in education and that in fact again was one of the questions that we put to the committee.I was a little disturbed to hear other committee members talking about the total budget and the apparently shrinking budget—when we on the side of the House know it is simply not shrinking—but also alluding to perhaps a separation of where the money is spent. It is just incredible to think that members cannot take the whole of education as one and understand that there needs to be a ministry and there needs to be school buildings that the children are taught in that they experience education in. So to suggest that we should look at those parts of education aside just seemed incredible to me. Buildings did not matter and the ministry staff did not either—so policy advice. Well that is an interesting one.In terms of some of the areas that I particularly want to touch on one is the COLs—this is the communities of learning kāhui ako. What we have seen and what was reported to the committee is that now 67 percent of schools—roughly 67 percent of schools—are engaged in COLs. I know in my own electorate there are a number of COLs and in fact I am starting to hear the stories about that really working. The engagement by the leading principals—what we have across the country is 52 leaders and we asked why it had to be principals and we were told that largely they were the best people to be the leaders. In fact there are two COLs that have people other than principals as leaders. There are about 1500 schools we were told now involved in COLs and of course a significant investment on the part of the Government—or the taxpayers of New Zealand really—in the COLs and in what that can mean. The stories that I am hearing and that we were told were around the leadership that is addressing the specific issues within those schools. I did also want to mention while I am on my feet something that again seems to have been lost in translation when other members have stood to raise these issues. There was an extra $15.3 million spent in this last year on helping an extra 1250 students get extra teacher-aides. Those are the facts not the rhetoric from the comms. Those are the facts.The other thing is that the operations grant has gone up by 16 percent and this last year we listened to the principals who said: I've got tough kids in this school—really needy kids in this school—yet you're just giving a blanket increase to the schools where they don't have anywhere near as many of those tough kids." So that is why the operations grant went to the schools where the students had been identified as the most needy. One third of the schools went up. One third of the schools stayed the same. Because they had fewer of those students one third went down; so 15 schools actually missed out altogether. Now those are the facts about the operations grant this year. So to hear it represented as anything other than that from the other side of the House—oh well maybe that is the comms and research on the other side of the House. However what we know is that principals say to us: "Please recognise there are students in our schools who need more help than other students. Please focus extra funding on them." And that is the way it was done during this last year. So that is why.At the same time we hear complaints and we did talk very briefly about early childhood education in the committee. We talked about the revisiting of the curriculum and that has now of course come to pass. The draft was out for consultation at the time. So that is what happened in the annual review.Reports noted."