Why has the Minister extended the existing teacher training incentives into the 2019-20 academic year, rather than reforming them so that more support is offered for students with other skills essential to the new curriculum, such as creativity?
In order to support the ambitions of Education in Wales: our National Mission we need to be able to recruit and retain the best quality teachers.
This in itself requires reform of our approach to Initial Teacher Education and a programme of reform is currently underway. Included in this reform is the use of incentives. The intention is to consider teacher incentives and incentivising teaching more broadly and comprehensively as the new reformed education sector takes shape.
There is a certain timeframe in which we are able to make changes to the incentives ready for the next academic year and to support the recruitment to ITE. We are currently pursuing the relevant, robust evidence that is required to inform any changes that are made. This is not available in the timeframe required to make changes for 2019/20 and it has been decided to continue with the existing incentives scheme for the 2019/20 academic year.
Officials are continuing to work on developments to incentives and pursuing the relevant evidence to support changes in order to introduce these changes for academic year 2020/21.