Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. We've received no apologies, although Dawn Bowden is running late. I'll take this opportunity to welcome Dawn formally to the committee but also to place on record our thanks to John Griffiths for his service to the committee. Are there any declarations of interest, please? No. Okay. Item 2, then, this morning is a scrutiny session with a focus on higher and further education. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Cabinet Secretary for Education, Eluned Morgan, Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning, and Huw Morris, who is the group director of skills, higher education and lifelong learning. Thank you all for your attendance this morning. If you're okay with it, we'll go straight into questions. The first questions are from Suzy Davies.
Thank you, Chair. If we can just start with teacher training and teacher training for secondary school teachers in particular, obviously there's been what looks like a trend in recent years in filling the places for secondary school training. Obviously, this is at Welsh teacher training centres. Do you think there's still a problem recruiting teachers into the 300 priority places, or is there a trend where things are getting better?
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?