What is the Cabinet Secretary doing to address the teacher recruitment and retention crisis and what investment has been allocated for this agenda?
I do not agree that there is a teacher recruitment and retention crisis in Wales. The overall teacher vacancy rate in Wales remains comparatively low, although of course there can sometimes be local difficulties in recruiting in certain subjects or phase. The Welsh Government remains committed to ensuring that we recruit and retain the very best teachers with the highest levels of knowledge and skills to support the effective delivery of a new curriculum for Wales. Financial incentives to attract graduates with the highest levels of subject knowledge onto postgraduate Initial Teacher Education programmes have been available for some time. In recent years, the Welsh Government has targeted the highest levels of support toward attracting top graduates with high levels of degree subject knowledge in the secondary designated priority recruitment subjects of mathematics, chemistry, physics, Welsh, foreign languages and computer sciences. For academic year 2016/17, up to £20,000 is available for top postgraduate students who want to train to teach the key recruitment priority subjects in our schools. Eligible Welsh students are also entitled to a tuition fee grant to support their studies. All Initial Teacher Education Centres in Wales actively promote their courses to recruit the very best and brightest individuals into teaching and not simply recruit to meet targets. Ultimately, we seek to ensure that the right people with the right skills are deployed and remain in our schools to provide a high quality and motivated workforce. We are currently consulting on the introduction of regulations which would enable a greater level of information on the school workforce in Wales to be collected. This will help to consolidate and improve the quality of the information we hold on our workforce and support effective workforce planning across our schools.