Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 27 June 2017.
Well, perhaps if you’d had unity on the question of devolving pay and conditions within your own party before now, we might have got somewhere with that. But I’m concerned about your refusal to face reality. I’m not really surprised, but I am concerned. First Minister, the words I used, ‘crisis’, were not my own words. They were the words used by the National Union of Teachers. Back in April, Plaid Cymru warned that teacher recruitment was heading for a perfect storm. We are now in the middle of that storm. The secondary school intake for trainee teachers has dropped a third below the target. That target is based on need—the number of teachers we need in our system. There’s now a gap of around 280 secondary school teachers, and intake for primary school teachers has also now dropped below the target. We know from the Education Workforce Council that one third of teachers intend to leave the profession within the next three years. First Minister, in March, changes to teacher training were announced. How long is it going to take for those changes to stop this downward trend?