Thank you, Suzy. I think, for this year's intake, although we're in touch with our providers, we're not in a position to be able to give figures for this year's intake for a couple of months. But what we have seen over recent years is that we are only recruiting to about 65 per cent of those targets. So, there is still a job of work to do to understand and to respond to those needs. So, what we're doing is first of all making sure that our ITE provision is world class, so that, actually, Welsh centres are the place to go to train to be a teacher. You'll be aware that we've recently been through an accreditation process for new ITE provision that will start in the next academic year. We have looked at financial incentives. It's not the whole answer, I think, to these issues, but it's part of a mixture of things that we need to do. You'll be aware that, for priority subjects, with graduates with the very highest levels of qualifications, those financial incentives are now £20,000 a year. We're also embarking on our first ever national ITE recruitment marketing exercise. We have initially done some work in the last year specifically targeting Welsh students in studying for priority subject degrees, e-mailing them, sending them materials to ask them to consider (1) becoming a teacher, and (2) crucially coming to do that training here in Wales. We are now part of a full national programme of ITE recruitment, giving people that idea that you can serve your nation and your community by training to be a teacher. So, there's a whole package of things we need to do. In January of this year I set up an advisory board on the recruitment and retention of teaching staff, and we are awaiting some reports from that advisory group on what they feel that we should do next.
Thank you for that answer. I can see there's a lot of activity, but what exactly is it responding to? Presumably, some research has been done about why people don't want to become teachers so that the answers you come up with are appropriate answers. I can't believe it's just about ITE, although this is very valuable, what you're talking about. Is there something that's running through our younger learners at the moment that makes them think that teaching isn't a profession they want to go into? Is that something that's happening just in Wales or is it happening elsewhere as well?
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?