Up until now, it's fair for Welsh Government to say they haven't had all the tools they need to confront teacher shortages, but from next year, Welsh Government will set teachers' pay and conditions. From then, there can be no excuse if we do not see improvement in teacher recruitment.

As well as improving terms and conditions, we need to increase the number of routes into teaching. Darren mentioned further education teachers, overseas teachers, teachers from independent schools. Llyr mentioned teaching assistants. I hope the Cabinet Secretary will join me in commending Teach First, which has been doing excellent work recently with the Central South Consortium. They've offered a new way into teaching, and more recently also applied it to those entering via a career change who may otherwise not have been able to commit the time to a PGCE. We should be looking to spread that model further across Wales, and I trust the Cabinet Secretary will now act to do so.

We also need to look at retention. Far too many teachers leave the profession early in their career and never return, and as Plaid Cymru note in their amendment, a third of teachers are considering leaving the profession in the near future. A recent ComRes survey reported that nearly three quarters of the teachers who said they were considering leaving the profession were doing so because of excessive workload.

Now, the Cabinet Secretary has ambitions, I understand, to reduce class sizes to 25 for infant classes, but how on earth is that achievable in an environment where we have the strains and failure to recruit the quality and quantity of teachers we need? Will it be that these teachers are just taking more classes because there are fewer pupils in classes on average, or where is the money coming from? Perhaps we could see a higher proportion of what is kept in Welsh Government or within the local education authorities going down to the schools to support teaching directly.

I also wonder where we are going in terms of the teaching assistant and the support model. We have this one-to-one ratio that Darren referred to now, yet we have far greater complaints of excessive workload than we ever did before, and it seems to get worse year by year. What is the way to get more teachers into the profession given that? Are these teaching assistants and the teaching in small groups rather than a whole class for more of the time—are they adding to these burdens that teachers are facing outside of the direct class teaching time? And, ultimately, is the way to attract more people into teaching to give teachers a substantial pay rise? But how would we afford that, and what do we see from overseas models, where, actually, the evidence and the academic studies don't especially support the ambition of the education Secretary in terms of class size being a key driver of performance.

There are education systems—Singapore is one that comes to mind clearly—where class sizes may be higher but where you have very high-quality teachers from the top institutions, getting the best grades, being attracted into teaching, often by higher salaries, and in some systems actually having larger classes than we do here. I don't present that as my model I give for the future, but I ask the question: is the way to attract more people into teaching the education Secretary's focus on reducing class sizes to 25 infants, or is it a focus on paying higher quality teachers as much as we need to get them into the profession, even if that means that we don't have the profusion of teaching assistance and support that we have seen develop but doesn't seem to have reduced the complaints from teachers of excessive workloads that continue to increase in volume?

The ComRes survey also suggests that one of the positive actions that could be taken to keep more teachers in the profession is more professional development and more opportunities to enter leadership roles. If we were to focus more funding on improving standards of teaching and improving professional development, we could potentially retain more teachers, as well as making it a more attractive profession for people to enter. In that respect, I do welcome the education Secretary's new academy and obvious passion for it, and the positive response I've heard from educators. It is imperative that the Welsh Government uses its new powers over terms and conditions and takes the action needed to arrest the crisis in Welsh education.