Thank you, Presiding Officer. Developing a high-quality teaching profession and creating inspirational leaders to help raise standards are among the aims of our new national education plan. One important element of our reforms to support this is the work that we have undertaken with our higher education partners and schools to plan for the transformation of initial teacher education.

As I said earlier on this afternoon, an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, and our new national curriculum cannot be delivered without a well-supported aspirational teaching profession. To do that, we will require a high-quality education workforce that is vibrant, engaged and committed to the continuous learning of all.

Since the Education Workforce Council has already been granted the powers to accredit initial teacher training from September 2019, it is appropriate that they should also take on this additional function that has been identified through our discussions with the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. This Order is a minor amendment and was identified as part of our ongoing engagement with HEFCW. It merely sets out a further function on the Education Workforce Council to have regard to the Welsh Ministers’ forecast of demand for newly qualified teachers, when exercising its accreditation of initial teacher education function.

Members will be aware of the fact that the Welsh Government does not directly control what courses are offered at particular institutions. However, it does manage initial teacher supply through the setting of overall intake target allocations for the recruitment into ITE. HEFCW’s last year of allocating trainee numbers to institutions will be in 2018-19. HEFCW has confirmed that it would be more appropriate for this function of allocating intake targets to move to the EWC and I hope that Members will be able to support this motion this evening.