Well, Llyr, I don’t disagree with your analysis of the impact of days lost to teaching. The issue is what to do about it. As I said in my first answer to you, we have a variety of work streams looking to try and avoid that problem in the first place—i.e. not to be reliant on supply teachers, but, actually, to keep teachers well, resilient and in front of our children in the classroom. I, in conjunction with my Cabinet colleague for health, are looking at plans for what we can to do support resilience and support the mental health of teachers by giving them tools to address their own issues around stress management and workload management, as well as being able to teach those then on to the children.

With regard to the task and finish group on the supply workforce, I have to say I was somewhat disappointed with the conclusions of that report. If we had hoped that the task and finish group would come up with a silver bullet to solve this problem, then I’m afraid the report has not been able to do that. We continue to discuss ways in which we can work not to diminish but to limit the reliance on supply teaching, and that is tied up with our work on policy development following the devolution of teachers’ pay and conditions.