Thank you to Llyr for his questions. With regard to the professional learning offer, I simply don’t think that, in the past, we have been able to offer our teaching profession the professional learning opportunities that are truly useful to them. There’s a balance to be struck between a national approach, making sure that every teacher, regardless of where they are in Wales, has access to a suite of professional learning opportunities that reflect national priorities, whether that be around introducing the digital competence framework, for instance, or behaviour management, or new curriculum changes, but also recognising that, for each teacher, their own professional learning needs and expectations are going to be very different.

We have to move away from the old-fashioned professional learning that we’ve done in the past, where we require teachers to come, usually to Cardiff, and listen to a sage on a stage for the day and go back and simply do that in that school. That simply is not inspiring for professionals themselves, nor does it have an impact in the classroom. So, we have to ensure that there are national overarching professional learning opportunities, but also to be responsive to the individual needs of individual teachers. Professional learning can happen in lots and lots of ways, and our job is to ensure, as a national Government, that that is available to everybody, it’s properly funded, and what is available is of good quality.

Llyr, you’re absolutely right. One of the challenges that we’ve got is that, if you’ve got a bright, sparky young teacher, that person is whipped up through the ranks and often taken out of the classroom. It’s not true in all cases, but sometimes the professional qualities and talents you have that make you a fantastic classroom teacher aren’t necessarily the leadership qualities that are needed to run a school. So, we have to recognise and we have to provide career progression for those people who want to remain in the classroom. Their career opportunities and their earning potential shouldn’t be stifled because that’s where they excel. That’s where we need them to be, and, of course, the devolution of pay and conditions gives us a perfect opportunity to look at these things in the round.

The national professional qualification for headship, it does need to be—we do need to improve it and we’re in that process. We certainly take feedback from those people who have gone through. But there are two things that we do need to address: (1) why is it that, if somebody goes through the NPQH process, they then don’t go on to apply for a headship position? I know a very talented teacher in my own constituency and we had this very conversation. She said to me, ‘Are you kidding? I’ve seen what my headteacher has to do and I quite like my life, thank you very much’, which brings us on to the very real question that you talked about: workload. We often talk about workload for teachers, but workload for heads can often be extreme.

So, what we’re doing on workload for heads, we have got a piece of research going on at the moment where we’re actually looking at what headteachers spend their time doing and what we can do to alleviate some of that. I want my headteachers—our headteachers, sorry; that was very proprietorial of me, ‘my headteachers’—I want our headteachers to be concentrating on teaching and learning and curriculum development. I do not want to be worried like I was for one headteacher who spends most of her time worrying about how she’s going to get the doors open in the morning, because the school building that she’s working in is falling down around her ears. She should not be worrying about that; she should be worrying about teaching and learning. I don’t want the headteacher who I met recently spending time looking at how she can save an extra 10p on the paper order or the toilet roll order; she needs to be thinking about teaching and learning. We can delegate those tasks to other people. So, just like we could be looking at federation, we also need to be looking at business managers actually taking some of those tasks off headteachers and giving them to people who’ve got the skills to do that and the time to do that, so that headteachers can concentrate on what we want them to concentrate on, which is raising standards and providing great educational experiences for their young people.

The other issue is about having a benchmark for headship, and having some assurance about the qualifications and the readiness for headship, but let me be clear: what the academy will also be about is simply not getting somebody through an NPQH that they have quality assured; it’s also about creating the mentorship and the support that is ongoing. And one of the things we do do to new heads especially is, ‘Congratulations, here’s your new headship, off you go’, and we leave them alone. That is a terrifying prospect—a terrifying prospect—for those professionals. So, what the leadership academy is about is nurturing people’s careers throughout the entire journey and not simply saying, when you get to be the headteacher, 'That’s it, now you’re on your own, good luck with that’, but providing new mentoring and partnership arrangements, so supporting headteachers to do that.