Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. As I start, I'd like to put on record my profound thanks once again to the entire education workforce for their incredible efforts in supporting our young people through these challenging times. Every one of us here today knows the important role that teachers and other school and college staff play in supporting young people's well-being, but, to do that, we must also support their well-being as well.

Supporting our education workforce's well-being is of paramount importance, and central to achieving this—and I welcome the acknowledgement by the Conservatives of this—is our whole-school approach to mental health and well-being. Yes, this supports learners, but it is more than that; it supports every single person involved in our education system. To help this work, we've commissioned Education Support, an expert organisation that supports mental health and well-being specifically for the workforce, and their project provides a range of bespoke services, including coaching and mentoring support for practitioners. This project will run throughout the 2021-22 academic year and will provide a range of services, ranging from resilience training, peer support groups and telephone support services, amongst other interventions. We've also supported an extension to the coaching and mentoring well-being project, developed by the regions in partnership with the Welsh Government last year.

Alongside our support for well-being, we know how important professional learning and development is to ensuring our workforce feel valued as professionals. Aligned with the professional standards, our national approach to professional learning creates a vision fit for our evolving education system, and integral to that approach is ensuring that professional learning is adequately resourced in terms of both funding and time for teachers, but also teaching assistants and school leaders. We are expecting a profound transformation in the way our practitioners and leaders think about their professional learning in light of the new curriculum and in the way we respond to the challenges of COVID. We will provide support to schools to enable them to make this step change.

To allow time and space for practitioners to work together across schools, record levels have been invested in professional learning since 2018. This has been awarded directly to schools to support curriculum implementation—an example of the funding to the front line that Siân Gwenllian was calling for in her contribution. It's my view that professional learning is an entitlement, backed by Government, that all teachers must have a right to, and I'm exploring ways that we can do more in this area to make this entitlement far easier to navigate, and we'll be updating Members further in due course.

We will continue to invest in a wide range of national programmes, including our professional enquiry programme, the teaching assistants learning pathway and the national professional qualification for headship. Alongside these is support for early career practitioners, our new Master's programme, the Welsh language sabbatical scheme and the national leadership offer. And when we talk to teachers, it's this sort of richer support offer that will help us to continue to increase teacher recruitment. All of this equates to a system where we invest in our practitioners and in their professional development.

We've worked with the OECD, which some Members have referred to in the debate, to evaluate the professional learning progress that we have been making. In recent weeks, they've declared that our focus on teachers' professional learning is exceptional in comparison to many other OECD jurisdictions, and, in their words, provides a strong basis for the enhancement of professional learning in schools.