Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I'm happy to address those and can I indicate to the committee that when the House resumes I'll seek leave to extend the annual review debate by another 20 minutes so that we're not cutting into the time for the Ministers who are appearing tomorrow. I'm sure the Opposition will support that particular course of action because I actually think this has been one of the best annual review debate dialogues that I have seen and I want to thank the Opposition for that. With regard to advice on alert level 2 tomorrow we'll be issuing more detailed guidance on alert level 2. One of the pressures I think has been that everybody's wanted access to the public health officials who have been helping to prepare that guidance across all of the different sectors and they're spreading themselves pretty thin. When we moved from level 4 to level 3 we organised some live streams so that the sector could hear directly from the health officials and I hope we'll be able to do something like that again without stretching them too thin. Some sectors will still be working through that guidance after tomorrow whereas I hope with education we'll be able to give them stuff that's a bit more definite tomorrow when we put material out there given that the shift for them—we kind of worked through a lot of that in the shift from alert level 4 to alert level 3. With regard to early childhood education (ECE) participation and the goals around that I think that's a really good question and there are going to be some challenges there. As I said we're going to have to work to rebuild parent trust and confidence in sending their kids into ECE services. We may see a shift in the balance of that. We've seen a shift at level 3—for example more demand for home-based services. Parents feel a bit more comfortable with those and so we might see a shift in participation patterns. In some of the lower socio-economic areas and areas where parents are experiencing economic pain we may see that they change their kids' participation patterns. So for example in three- and four-year-olds where they've been supplementing the 20 hours' free with additional hours that they pay for they may scale back to just the 20 hours and so some of those services effectively cross-subsidise to top up the 20 hours from that extra that they charge for the extra hours. So we're going to have to work really carefully at the financial modelling around how we support services to adapt to different participation patterns but I think that it's very likely that we are going to see quite a shift there. We know that 20 hours is really a desirable number from an educational perspective and so the extra hours on top of that have less educational value but certainly have a significant value to parents' participation in the labour market. So I'm really keen to make sure that we're keeping kids engaged at least for 20 hours but I also recognise that those changing participation patterns will have an effect on services and we'll work through that with them. Like I said I think the immediate pressure that the most vulnerable services are facing is the result of not getting revenue through the Ministry of Social Development childcare subsidy. I've been working through all of that and I will have more to say on that very soon because I think that's a legitimate concern that centres have raised.