Can I just say, Michelle, that I am absolutely content and confident that the standards that we have provide a very clear baseline for teacher performance? Newly qualified teachers cannot successfully pass induction without demonstrating that they meet all the relevant descriptors, and those descriptors continue to act as a baseline throughout a teacher's career by setting out what is required of them to undertake their role effectively. We should actually make a distinction between these professional teaching standards and issues around competency and how one deals with competency in a classroom. The majority of teachers and leaders will reflect on their practice in relation to those five standards, and for those practitioners who wish to deepen their practice, the upper-level descriptors provide an aspirational focus for professional development going forward.

We do need a national approach to ensure that there is a consistency across our nation, and I hope that, by September of this year, we will be able to be very clear to this Chamber, and to the profession, about what that national approach will look like. It will need to have an element of generic training with regard to the curriculum, but we will need to deep-dive below that for subject specialists and for stage specialists and by September I think we'll be in a position to do that.

John, leadership is absolutely key to that. There is nothing more demoralising for a teacher than to be working in an institution with poor leadership. That adds to your workload and it adds to the stress that you may find in your institution. I was delighted last week to meet the first set of associates for our new leadership academy. I'm hugely inspired by them and the contribution that I think that they will bring. But accrediting training and support for those teachers who are asking to work in our toughest communities is something that I'm very keen that the new academy would look to explore. There are a number of areas where we need those specific skills, whether that's working in some of our toughest communities, whether that's the challenge of running a through school, whether that's the challenge of being an executive head, where maybe you are the head of three or four schools. So, there's a whole set of things that we need to look at in that regard.

Presiding Officer, in the words of the curriculum scholar Lawrence Stenhouse,

'there can be no curriculum development without teacher development'.

I am very clear on that. As far as I'm concerned, the two go hand in hand, and that's why this committee's report is very useful as we develop policy in this area.