At my local primary school in Auckland, around 50 percent—and I'm not exaggerating: 50 percent—of the new entrants at our school do not have English as their first language; they are mainly Mandarin speakers. Our education system is proving to be brilliant at bringing in kids that are multilingual—or have the potential to be multilingual—and churning them out as monolingual English speakers at the end. That's a real missed opportunity. I can certainly understand why parents of those Chinese-speaking kids would be very keen for their children to have the opportunity at school to continue learning their language in order to bed it in so that they can continue on in life as multilingual or bilingual speakers. There are many other cultures in our city in that case. But apparently that is not to be the case.