Erica Stanford: National's Education spokesperson on the party campaigning on requiring students to finish Year 11

Very good morning to you.

Good morning, Kerry.

How are you?

Well, you know.

You know what it's like.

The backwards and the forwards and different reckons.

All I can think of is those poor teachers who are teaching year 11 stuck with kids who just don't want to be there.

At 16, some people are young men and young women.

And if they haven't got a job to go to and they don't want to be at school, that's going to make the teacher's job hell, isn't it?

Well, we already have an early leaving exemption if you're going into further study or if you're going into work.

We sign out about a thousand young people a year on that.

So that will remain in place.

It is quite a process.

You've got to have all the documentation and the ministry have to sign you out, as it should be, because we don't want children going nowhere.

The key thing for me, though, Kerry, is we have put in so much resource into making sure children are doing well at school, whether or not it's the mass acceleration programme or the writing acceleration programme, all of the maths resources in year 9 and 10, not to mention all of the work we've done in primary school around structured literacy, structured maths, the resources, the teacher training, the assessments to make sure kids are on track and then intervening early.

So we are building a world-leading education system where every child will have the confidence in their ability.

So that's the first thing.

But the second thing is, where is the best place for a 16-year-old who feels like that? In our school where we know where they are, we can wrap around supports, we can put those things in place where we can have the guidance counsellors and the careers counsellors talking to them and getting them through their literacy and numeracy as best we can or disappeared from the system because then we don't know where they are, we don't know what they're doing, we can't wrap supports around them.

The best place for them to be is in schools and we are resourcing schools to make sure that they have all of the tools to be able to make sure those kids have some great outcomes.

So in terms of resourcing, what are you going to do? Have specialist careers advisors working with these young people so that the last half of the year at school in year 11 is spent honing marketable skills?

The thing is that high schools already have those people working on their staff.

The reason that they're not enjoying school is because they're not succeeding.

And that's what we've built in this country over the last 30 years is a system in decline where we've got more and more children feeling like that.

you know, if they were at curriculum, if they were doing well, if they had confidence in their ability, they wouldn't be feeling like that.

And that's what we are turning around.