Thanks to the Conservatives for bringing today's debate. We in the UKIP group agree that there is a problem with both recruiting and retaining teachers. To some extent, the issues relating to this problem are common to both England and Wales, but there are also some issues that are peculiar to Wales. 

In some ways, the Welsh Government has made life harder for itself in terms of recruiting teachers because of an over-reliance on particular qualifications. Yes, we need to ensure that we have the right people entering the teaching profession, but we also know that you can't measure things, and certainly you can't measure people, by qualifications alone. Now, we have an education Minister who has frequently made the sensible point that we can't just look at statistics all the time; we have to look at everything in context. We have to see the broader picture. And I think we can actually apply that mindset a little to the recruitment of teachers. So, hopefully, the Minister will apply her own maxim to this issue. 

In our view, an over-reliance on qualifications means that many life-experienced people, some of whom at least would be suitable for the classroom, can't get into the teaching profession because they don't have the relevant qualifications, and it would cost too much time and expense for them to retrain. We could actually relax the rules a little to make it easier for people to retrain. 

Looking at today's motion in a bit more detail, we support the idea of the Welsh Government and the Education Workforce Council working together to develop a school workforce plan for Wales. We would add the caveat that there needs to be input from people who have experienced problems in entering teaching, or who entered the profession and then left it prematurely, so that any such plan is tailored to the needs of suitable potential teachers who have been unable to get into teaching or remain in teaching. We want to make it easier for schools to recruit teachers, and we think that a lot of common abilities are obviously going to exist with college tutors and with teachers at independent schools. So, it should be made easier for this group of people to get the required accreditation so that they can bring their skill set into the school classrooms.

The Conservatives also mention a route into teaching for teaching assistants, or TAs. I've raised the issue of TAs in previous questions to the education Minister. I think there is sometimes a problem with TAs in that once they've been on the relevant courses and have got their qualifications, they find that they've theoretically moved up a level but they don't automatically get upgraded to that status in terms of their pay, and we end up with TAs of a certain level not being able to get jobs at that level, and that leads to some of them becoming cynical and wondering if they were only sent on these courses so that the companies or organisations running these courses got something out of it rather than the people who were being trained. TAs can be a valuable asset to a school. Sometimes, they could be as effective as some of the already qualified teachers, but they lack that basic thing: that piece of paper that says they have a certain qualification. So, I think a career path for TAs that allows them to enter the teaching profession more easily would be a very good idea.

So, we support the Conservative motion today. We also agree with the Plaid amendment, because as Plaid state in their amendment, we do also have to look at the churn rate in the teaching profession, and I'm sure they're right to link problems with staff retention to the stresses of the job. In our view, this stress could be caused by many factors, but there are some that are quite common, including class sizes, and we agree with what the education Minister has said in the past—that we do need smaller class sizes. We also need to get away from too much of a focus on targets and assessments. Ultimately, when you have too many of these, they just become an objective in themselves. In other words, we end up with teachers training pupils to pass tests and exams rather than teaching them something useful. So, a final point is that it would help matters no end if educationists now spent some time thinking about writing curriculums, that, rather than being totally focused on getting pupils to pass exams, actually sought to teach those people something useful. Diolch yn fawr iawn.