Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I’m very pleased to move amendment 2 in the name of Plaid Cymru.

I will start by referring to a BBC report back in December that demonstrated that school budgets had declined by some £370 per capita for each pupil in real terms over a period of six years. Now, it’s no surprise, therefore, that some of the teaching unions are warning, as the National Education Union did recently, that there is a hidden financial crisis in our schools, although some would suggest that it isn’t that hidden anymore. Estyn also, in its current annual report, which was published a month ago, points at the direct impact of those cuts, through highlighting that there are fewer qualified teachers involved in the foundation phase in Welsh schools now. But we know, of course, that what cuts to school budgets mean is job losses among teachers, and then, as we find in some of our work as a committee, they have to use other pots of money, such as the pupil development grant and so on, to try to narrow that gap.

But what’s happening, of course, because of these cuts is that there is a loss of capacity within our schools. We’re losing teachers and classroom assistants, who have to be made redundant because of the financial squeeze, and then, naturally, that places more pressure on the remaining staff. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the unions are also telling us that there is a workload crisis among teachers in Wales, and we’ve already heard reference to certain figures. How can you disagree that the situation is unacceptable when the Education Workforce Council says that 90 per cent of teachers say that they can’t manage their workload within their current working hours, or the agreed working hours? And as has already been mentioned, on average, full-time teachers work 50 hours a week, and part-time teachers work 35 hours a week. So, what does that tell us? How can we be surprised, therefore—as we referred to in our amendment—that the 21,000 days lost through stress in 2009 has more than doubled to 52,000 in 2015, with also increasing numbers of teachers leaving the profession prematurely? With the responsibility for teachers’ pay and conditions being devolved to Wales later this year, the time has now come to look anew at how much time teachers have to carry out their responsibilities and to look at that balance between preparation time, teaching time, CPD time and training time. I know that the Cabinet Secretary has started the process of looking at some of these areas, and I would urge her most strongly to take the opportunity to tackle these factors.

So, it’s no surprise, under these current circumstances, that it’s difficult to attract people to teaching, when they see the situation of the profession as it currently exists. We know, of course, that the targets in terms of attracting students to undertake teacher training are being missed substantially. Two thirds of the secondary school teachers that we need to train are currently being trained, which therefore means that there will be dire problems further down the line in terms of having adequate numbers in the teaching profession, and that’s why we will be supporting the central demand of this motion for a national workforce plan. Maths, chemistry, physics, biology, modern languages, information technology, design technology and music are all under the recruitment target for initial teacher training. With the number of Welsh teachers at its lowest point for a decade, what hope is there for us to reach that million Welsh speakers if we don’t have the teachers to teach our pupils?

As the motion notes, it’s worth recognising the increasing reliance in our schools on teaching support assistants—there are nearly as many of them now, as we heard, as there are registered teachers. They are an integral part of the education system, but often work for very small wages and aren’t often recognised as they should be. But we do know that 10 per cent of them—some 3,000 teaching assistants in Wales—are graduates, and there is a need, as we as a party committed some weeks ago in our national conference, to look at the opportunities that exist to give them routes to training. They've already chosen the classroom as their place of work, and one would then feel that there is a strong precedent there for them to contribute to strengthening the workforce and secure sufficiency within the workforce for the years to come. But, of course, alone that isn't enough, and we have to tackle the funding situation and the workload situation or, of course, unfortunately, we will be no closer to the shore.