2. Will the Minister make a statement on Welsh Government support for supply teachers? OQ55916

The Welsh Government continues to work with stakeholders to ensure that support is available for supply teachers. This includes financial support, employment opportunities through the Recruit, Recover, Raise Standards programme, and funding a service to promote mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I'm grateful to you, Minister, for that. I'm aware that the Welsh Government has worked hard to ensure that there is a framework of support available for supply teachers throughout the whole country and throughout the year. But the Minister will also be aware that supply teachers have had a very difficult period throughout the last year with the pandemic and the impact it's had on their ability to gain work. But this reinforces a more fundamental problem with the system of supply teachers. We know that the fragmented system of private agencies means that there is no system for supply teachers to gain adequate work through the year. It may be that the most straightforward way of ensuring that we are able to support and sustain a workforce of supply teachers is to ensure that all local authorities have a local register of supply teachers to ensure that teachers are able to find work and that schools are able to find teachers, and to do so in a more coherent and structured way.

Thank you, Alun. Can I say that supply teachers form a very important part of the education workforce in Wales? But under local management of schools, governing bodies have the flexibility to appoint and deploy supply teachers as they see fit. There is nothing, nothing at all, to prevent local authorities and schools, as the employers of teachers, working together with other key stakeholders—including perhaps regional consortia—to support a co-operative or collaborative model. The decision to operate any local authority list would rest with individual local authorities as the employers of school staff, and as I said, there is nothing to stop them from doing that now. We continue to have discussions with all of our local education authorities to ensure that they—or their individual schools, if they are using agencies—ensure that they do not undercut the framework arrangements we have in place with those agencies to pay the proper wages. I'm grateful for an undertaking by all the directors of education, via the Association of Directors of Education in Wales, that they will be taking action to ensure that schools are made aware of this responsibility and should not be looking to undercut the framework that we have put in place.

Minister, I heard your opening comment about the financial support that you're affording to supply teachers. Could you just give us a little bit more detail about it? Because I've had a couple come to me raising concerns about the fact that if they've been to one school—they may have done a short-term project for a couple of weeks—they've yet to go to the new school, and then they've had to self-isolate, not because they had COVID, but because they've been in contact with somebody who is suspected of having COVID, so they had to go through the self-isolation process—they were really struggling to get any form of financial support, and were worried about what was going to happen to their income. So, if you could either outline that to us now or point me in the direction—because I have looked, and I can't find how we support the people who fall between the gaps there. Then I'd like to go and have a look at it and be able to give it to these constituents of mine. 

Absolutely. The Welsh Government and the National Procurement Service worked with agencies at the beginning of this pandemic to ensure that they were all able to furlough their staff under the job retention scheme. All agencies on the framework confirmed that they were able to access the scheme for eligible staff, and we understand that they did so until the end of the summer. We continue to work alongside our agencies to understand difficulties that supply teachers may be experiencing at the moment, and I will write to the Member with additional details of support that may be available in the current situation.FootnoteLink I should say that we are encouraging those who are willing to work supply to take up opportunities. Some of the enforced closures that we've seen in some of our schools have been because of an inability to find agency staff to keep schools going. I understand that people may be reluctant to take up a position in an area where they feel that COVID transmission rates are high, but we really do need supply staff to work with us and to understand the reasons they may not feel able, at this point, to take up assignments if they are available.

Information further to Plenary