Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): If I just work backwards through the questions that the members have raised so far to date the member Paul Goldsmith asked some questions around Te Tiriti—what it means in an educational context. One of the things it does mean in an educational context is recognising the way we've done things in the past has been wrong: that Māori learners have not just been underserved by our education system; they have been actively discriminated against. It was not that long ago in New Zealand's history when Māori students were subject to corporal punishment in schools for speaking te reo Māori and that is the legacy that we all inherit and that we should all be ashamed of and we all have a responsibility to do something about. I have absolutely no qualms in standing up here and acknowledging those things that have happened and saying that they were wrong saying that they have left a shameful legacy for New Zealand that has resulted in generations of Māori not having access to the same educational opportunities as other students and we should do something about that.In terms of what the Treaty means in an educational context I'd encourage the member to read the document that his Government signed New Zealand up to because it talks about the concepts of partnership. It talks about recognising the right for indigenous people to be involved in making the decisions that affect them. That's the document that his Government signed New Zealand up to that our Government is now working through a process of figuring out how to give effect to. Perhaps if he doesn't know the answers to those he should think about why his Government signed up to a document that it clearly didn't seem to understand or value in any way. On this side of the House we believe that the Treaty is an important document when it comes to education; that partnership with Māori is important when it comes to education; that the days when we had to ask Māori students to pretend to be something else some other culture in order to succeed in our education system should well and truly be left behind; and that we do need an education system that responds to their needs.David Seymour asked some questions about school attendance. One of the things that has been challenging around school attendance is that the measure we rely on predominantly is a very blunt one and that is the number of students who are attending school in any given term for 90 percent of the half-days. So the way a school term is structured is the number of half-days that a—David Seymour: There's other percentage breakdowns.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: So the measure is a very blunt measure: the number of half-days—90 percent—that a student is attending school. I've been working through trying to understand the trends because I think it is important that we do understand the trends and I will certainly prepare a greater breakdown and make sure that that is released.Looking at what the justification for those is—the ministry will classify in their statistics the different types of absence. There's a justified and an unjustified absence and there are justified absences. So we saw an increase in term four last year for example in the number of students who were staying home because they were sick; that was probably a good thing. The message got out there: if you're sick stay home. That's what we were telling people to do and we saw an increase in the number of people doing that. We know that about 1 percent of our students are away during term time because of family holidays; they are classified as an unjustified absence in the classification framework but some families will have a justification for what they are doing and they would argue that actually the kids are getting quite an education out of whatever the experiences are that they are involved in. So I think we need to unpack that data a bit more before we can reach any firm conclusions about that. We have put extra funding into schools through the Urgent Response Fund in order to deal with attendance issues to make sure they're re-engaging those kids where truancy is a persistent problem because those are the students that I'm most concerned about. So there is more work happening in that space.Just quickly on maths illiteracy and numeracy—as Paul Goldsmith has mentioned some of the stats that New Zealand faces at the moment are not good. Typically the studies that he will be referring to are the likes that Programme for International Student Assessment tend to be surveying and sampling secondary school students. I point out to him that all of those secondary students being sampled are the national standards generation. They went through the vast majority of their schooling at a time when national standards were there. Without national standards what are our alternatives? More robust statistical sampling is a way of getting good information. We do have those very robust studies available that actually provided genuine national snapshots. National standards didn't; they weren't national and they weren't standard. Different schools were interpreting them differently and the results were not comparable. So the sampling studies that we have are actually more reliable. We have got a big focus on professional development on strategies for how we can improve our literacy and numeracy teaching. Those sorts of things are going to do far more to turn those statistics around than something like national standards which actually did the opposite.