No. I think what you will find is that this isn't a uniquely Welsh issue. I think they are suffering quite acute problems across the border, which proves to me that money isn't necessarily the entire answer, because, despite higher financial incentives to join ITE courses, they're not able to do that in England either. So, that proves to me—what the research does show—that it's not money alone that will get people onto these courses. Interestingly, I don't even think it's a UK problem. Recently, as you'll be aware via my written statement, I attended the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory, which is a system-to-system conference. If you talk to education systems in different parts of the world, the one common factor that we are all grappling with is teacher recruitment and retention. In the USA, they have seen a 40 per cent drop in the number of students training to be teachers. So, in the Californian system, significant teacher shortages, and in Oregon, Washington. I met with New York state—significant teacher recruitment and retention problems in New York state, and in Finland, Australia. So, this is a common issue across the globe, really. That's why we set up the advisory group under the chairmanship of Professor John Gardner—it's to understand what the issues are exactly that are preventing people or putting people off. One of the things that we have got strong performance in, and I think this is perhaps something that we're trying to follow up on, are employment-based routes into qualified teacher status—so, those are people who are training on the job. Those remain strong. There's high demand for those places, so much so that we've increased those places to 90 last year and 90 again this year, which says to me that—there's definitely a place for the traditional, 'Take a year off, do a postgraduate certificate in education in a university for a year'—actually, that type of course suits some students but it might be preventing other people from pursuing a qualification in teaching, which is why, of course, from next year, we will have our unique part-time PGCE route into qualification. So, that allows people to perhaps combine some of their employment opportunities, so they can earn while they learn, or maybe they've got caring responsibilities that prevent them from going to do a full-time course. I think that will give us an alternative route that people can take to gain qualified teacher status and work in our schools. So, there's no one thing, I think, that we can do that will solve this issue. But it is an international issue, I agree with that.
Okay. Well, that's what I was after finding out, and, actually, what you've just said about the part-time PGCE is pretty interesting as well, because if you can bring your outside world experience into teaching, that's got to help, hasn't it?
Can I just agree with you? I think that is really, really important—that we have a diversity in our teaching workforce. I think the different dynamic that brings to a school and the experience that brings to children is really, really valuable. I was up in the Deeside Sixth just last week, talking to the A-level chemistry teacher. She had been a teacher for a while, she'd gone into industry, worked in industry, and now had come back into teaching. She said that she felt that that made her a better educator and she could talk with knowledge and experience about the opportunities outside of teaching that the students in front of her could pursue. I'm very keen to increase the diversity in our teaching workforce and I'm very keen in looking at career changers, who perhaps have different life experience and work experience, coming into our teaching profession.
Thank you for that. Part of that diversity, of course—it would be great if you had more people interested in qualifying to teach through the medium of Welsh. Great aspirations; the trend's going the other way. No-one can solve this in 280 characters, I get that, but can you give us some indication about why you think this is proving still such an unattractive option when it's clear that there's a policy for this country to improve the number of Welsh speakers? You'd have thought there'd be a pretty good carrot for this.