Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:29 pm on 14 February 2023.
I thank the Member for those questions. I know that she will welcome the work that's already being done to increase the numbers able to teach the sciences, maths and computing, including through the medium of Welsh, and that includes financial incentives, which can be substantial, and other initiatives to attract people to the profession. She finished by asking what we're doing to ensure that more and more pupils choose these courses too, and the question of perception and stereotyping is extremely important in this regard. She will know about the work that we're doing investing in coding and in organisations such as Techniquest, as well as a number of other STEM interventions, and those are particularly focused at attracting girls into the sector for the reasons that she outlined. She talked about skills and how important it was to work with the private sector to meet the need in this regard, and also to provide sufficient professional training for the workforce, so that they can deliver these skills, which are so important.
She will know that we've recently enhanced the individual learning accounts, which have a particular focus on digital skills. That has happened over the past few months. There are also a number of ICT courses available at levels 2 and 3 and 5, and degree level too. So, there's a lot of provision, including cyber security, which she mentioned in her question, which is so important as a growing sector here in Wales, and opportunities do come about as a result of that. In terms of collaboration with the private sector, we've also funded knowledge transfer programmes, so that further education teaching staff can maintain their skills in collaboration with the private sector, and have exchanges with the private sector, so that they can keep their skills up to date, which is so important, as she said, particularly in a sector such as this, which is changing and developing so quickly.
And finally, in terms of professional learning in terms of the post-16 sector, we have commissioned purpose-made training provision from Jisc, in response to the Estyn recommendations to improve the quality and availability of online and remote learning. So, there is a corpus of training already available, and we are adding to that regularly.