Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): I rise to speak on the annual review documents particularly as they relate to the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office (ERO) and in particular as those relate to the early childhood education sector. What these reviews laid bare was that the early childhood education sector is one that is under pressure and one where the Government has some significant promises to deliver on and it has failed to deliver on it to date—in particular as they relate to increasing funding to allow for 100 percent qualified teachers and increasing funding to reduce group sizes and ratios. Those promises were not delivered at all in these documents. When we dig into the detail of these documents we also see that there are going to be big expectations for the coming Budget if we're just to keep up with where we are now. When we look at the Ministry of Education for 2017-18 the first thing we can ask is how many children actually attended early childhood education. The Ministry of Education told us they had a target that 98 percent of children would attend early childhood education. By its own admission the ministry failed to reach that target. Only 96.9 percent of children did participate. This is a small drop but it is significant because it is a trend that we would expect to be arrested in future years because we are talking about children who are sometimes the hardest to reach and who may have the most to gain from early childhood education and it would be expected that that gap would be covered in the next Budget. We also looked at the proportion of qualified early childhood educators. Despite the rhetoric of members opposite and the Labour Party who in its campaign talked a lot about qualified educators the ministry was clear with us in this annual review process that the number of early childhood educators who are qualified has not increased. It's roughly constant at about 70 percent. We asked at the Education and Workforce Committee what was being done to address the shortage of early childhood teachers. I've visited dozens of early childhood centres across the country and they consistently tell me it is very difficult to find qualified early childhood teachers. We were told that there wasn't anything underway but that the early childhood advisory committee was working on ideas. So there is another area where we would expect delivery in the upcoming Budget because the pressure to find qualified teachers is there and there's currently not enough happening to arrest that. We then looked at the Education Review Office. Of course the Education Review Office plays a very significant role for the early childhood sector because it really is the independent arbiter of the quality of services that parents receive. When mums and dads leave their children in an early childhood centre—when they close that door and wave goodbye—what they expect is that a Government-funded licensed centre will provide quality care and ERO is the check on that. So it was disturbing to hear in this annual review process that the total number of staff at ERO has not increased in line with the increasing number of children in early childhood education; in fact quite the reverse. The number of staff at the Education Review Office has dropped significantly. It's down to 196 down from 200 the previous year and down from 209 in 2013. More significantly as a proportion of that the number of actual reviewers—that is the people who go into the early childhood service and check whether it's delivering high-quality services—has dropped back too. It's down to 132 having been 137 the year before and having been 149 in 2013. Now that is a degree of detail but it's important because what we saw in our committee as we examined these numbers was that we have a sector that's under pressure. In fact our view was backed up by the Office of the Auditor-General who suggested—and I quote—ERO would probably need more resources if it is to maintain current review schedules and focus more closely on struggling early learning centres. ERO admitted that while their target to return to a learning service is currently three years they're only making it back every 3.6 years." What that tells us is that ERO is struggling to keep up with its obligation to review early learning centres. That matters to every mother and father in this country who expect quality for their child. We would expect that that pressure would be addressed in the upcoming Budget along with delivering on the Government's large promises around qualified teachers and around group and ratio sizes for early learning services. Thank you Mr Chair."