3. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the devolution of powers over teachers' pay and conditions? OAQ52771

5. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the outlook for teachers’ pay following the devolution of powers in this area? OAQ52764

Thank you very much, Joyce. Presiding Officer, I understand that you've given permission for question 3 and question 5 to be grouped. So, these powers were devolved on 30 September. The first teachers’ pay and conditions to be set by Welsh Ministers will apply from 1 September 2019. These will be informed by a mechanism including in-depth discussion with a stakeholder partnership forum and detailed consideration by a new independent review body.

I thank you for that answer and I look forward to those consultations coming back. What do you think, Cabinet Secretary, might be the main benefits to teachers and pupils, going forward, now that we do have those powers? 

For me, this is the last piece in the education jigsaw and I'm very glad indeed that we've been able to come to this position where those powers are now formally devolved. For too long, we have seen the teachers' pay and conditions regime respond to an agenda from a different Government to support a different education system. This allows us to tailor-make our teachers' pay and conditions to mirror the values that underpin our education system, and I hope it will give us the opportunity to make Wales the place to be an education professional.

Sorry, Llywydd. Am I saying:

'Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the outlook for teachers’ pay following the devolution of powers'?

Or have we been there?

You need to ask your supplementary.

Yes. What, Cabinet Secretary, do you see as the key opportunities from the devolution of pay specifically? And how significantly do you expect the regime for pay to diverge from that in England, particularly in the early years?

Thank you, Mr Reckless. I've been very clear that, following the devolution of these powers, teachers in Wales will not be disadvantaged in comparison to their colleagues in England. Because of the ongoing nature of austerity, the opportunities for pay are perhaps at this point limited, but I think there are some very exciting opportunities around the issue of conditions. Of course you will be aware of the publication last month of the report authored by Professor Mick Waters, which gives me some interesting pointers on how we can use these new powers. It's a very interesting piece of work, and I shall be responding formally to that report.

Cabinet Secretary, I've served as a school governor since 1992, and I've always been privileged to work with the most outstanding senior management teams. I do notice in the independent review that has given you advice on how these powers may be used that the way headteachers are employed could change radically, so that they're employed on a regional and national basis. Now, I wonder how that might work out. Is the idea behind that to bring up the schools that are achieving at a standard that we think needs to improve, to bring them up to the best, and that you might be putting in new senior management teams to really get them moving?

Well, first of all, can I thank David for his own personal commitment to the national mission by serving as a governor? As I said to Mark Reckless, there are some really innovative suggestions in the report authored by Professor Mick Waters and others. What we do know is that good leadership is key to a successful institution, and he has interesting things to say about how we can deploy our very best leaders in the system to raise standards. Of course, in other countries, high-performing education countries, the human resource management of the teaching workforce is dictated from the centre and, indeed, not just headteachers but individual teachers are assigned schools to work in by the Government. Now, of course, I wouldn't want to set all the hares running this afternoon by suggesting that that's where we're heading, but there are some interesting proposals in Mick Waters's work. Of course, we will be looking to respond to those formally, and any response that we make as a Government will be in collaboration with the sector itself, including both the National Association of Head Teachers, which I will be meeting on Friday, as well as the Association of School and College Leaders and other people with an interest in this area.