Over the past 18 months, the changes to normal working patterns and the disruption in school have been unprecedented. The education profession has responded to these challenges, showing an incredible level of flexibility and resilience and continuing to show excellent levels of professionalism. May I help Laura Jones with some confusion in her speech? It is entirely unacceptable that the UK Government has decided to freeze public sector wages at a time when so many of our workforce have been working under these challenging circumstances. However, the point is, we as a Government have decided to provide £6.4 million towards the cost of the pay award in schools and sixth form colleges this year. Now, many argued against the devolution of teachers' pay and conditions, but, in the brief period since those powers were transferred to Wales, we have already shown that we can make a difference here. For example, since 2019, new teacher salaries have increased by 15.9 per cent—perhaps James Evans wasn't aware of that. We will build on that work to continue to develop a national system that is more unique, fairer and more transparent for all teachers.

The Conservative motion and the Plaid Cymru amendment note that the number of teachers is in decline, but that is incorrect. In 2020-21, we saw an increase of 40 per cent in the number of students who accepted places on initial teacher training courses, as compared to the previous year. According to early figures, recruitment levels for initial teacher training courses for 2021-22 will continue to be higher than the levels recorded in 2019-20. Indeed, the data published in January of this year suggested that we had 435 more teachers than we had in 2019-20.