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.
Sure. Again, data for recruitment for the 2018-19 cohort is not yet available and we are, as I said, keeping in touch with our ITE centres to keep a close eye on them. I think an important thing to recognise is that there is a difference between the number of people who are on courses where there is a specific designation that enables them to teach through the medium of Welsh and those people who have linguistic ability and Welsh ability but don't necessarily do a course that allows them. So, there is a difference. We do think that, for the 2016-17 cohort, there were an additional 130 qualifiers that, actually, were fluent in Welsh and who could have gone on to teach in Welsh-medium schools, didn't necessarily do a course that gave them that designation. But, clearly, we've got three academic years now to get to the targets that we've set ourselves. The evaluation of Welsh-medium provision in ITE reported at the end of last month, and the Minister and officials are busy working now to implement the recommendations of the report that was published, I think, on 28 September, to be able to move this agenda forward. Again, we've got new incentives, this year, both for people starting their course and then for teachers who complete their QTS after a year. So, we've added in new financial incentives this year to try and address some of those issues. But, clearly, these are ambitious targets and we will need to have a step change over the next three years if we're to meet them.