6. Will the First Minister make a statement on the terms and conditions for supply teachers working in Wales? OAQ53827

I thank Hefin David for that. The Welsh Government recognises and values the work of supply teachers. We have supported the work of the National Procurement Service, which is in the final stages of a new framework for the employment of temporary and supply teachers here in Wales. 

I welcome that recognition and also the news announced on 6 April that supply teachers in Wales were going to be boosted by a Welsh Government mandated minimum daily pay rate. I think that's very much to be welcomed.

I think it is, in part, a tribute to the hard work of Sheila Jones, who is a Caerphilly constituent, a former supply teacher, and is now the supply teacher representative for the National Education Union Cymru. I spoke to her earlier today and she said that she still has some concerns. She says that a lot of discretion is still left to individual schools as to whether or not they employ supply teachers with qualified teacher status and whether or not they employ supply teachers through agencies. She's got grave concerns about how agencies are going to approach dialogue with the Welsh Government. And it also has implications for pensions for those supply teachers. 

Another constituent has also contacted me concerned that the pay framework won't apply to supply teachers in further education, because they won't have qualified teacher status. So, with those issues in mind, will the First Minister bear them in mind, and also, with the Minister for Education, commit to an ongoing further dialogue with supply teachers in order to address these issues?

I thank Hefin David for those important points. I was very pleased to meet his constituent, Sheila Jones, while I was finance Minister responsible for the National Procurement Service, and it was largely as a result of the very important points that she and colleagues made that we revisited the framework that was then in place. We will now have 30 successful agencies on the framework and 22 of those agencies are Welsh suppliers. Hefin David is quite right, Llywydd, to say that a supply teacher recruited through an agency will have to have qualified teacher status. That's exactly as it should be; it's a requirement of the new framework, as will be minimum pay rates for qualified teachers, as will be the abolition of the Swedish derogation, which was particularly something that Sheila and her group were exercised about. There will be discretion. There's always been discretion at school level for schools either to use the framework or to recruit teachers outside the framework, and I think that that is an essential freedom that we recognise in the framework and want to sustain.

I hear what the Member says about FE qualified teachers, and he's right, of course, that they don't have qualified teacher status and therefore can't be recruited as supply teachers under the framework. But one of the things that the Welsh Government has done and the education Minister has done is to introduce new part-time courses that mean that somebody qualified as an FE teacher who wants to become qualified with qualified teaching status—that within one term, they can now take the actions that are needed to convert themselves from an FE teacher into a full classroom teacher, and then, of course, they will be available to take advantage of all the new things that the new framework will provide.