input: Text: Lynne Neagle AM: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. We've received no apologies, although Dawn Bowden is running late. I'll take this opportunity to welcome Dawn formally to the committee but also to place on record our thanks to John Griffiths for his service to the committee. Are there any declarations of interest, please? No. Okay. Item 2, then, this morning is a scrutiny session with a focus on higher and further education. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Cabinet Secretary for Education, Eluned Morgan, Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning, and Huw Morris, who is the group director of skills, higher education and lifelong learning. Thank you all for your attendance this morning. If you're okay with it, we'll go straight into questions. The first questions are from Suzy Davies. Suzy Davies AM: Thank you, Chair. If we can just start with teacher training and teacher training for secondary school teachers in particular, obviously there's been what looks like a trend in recent years in filling the places for secondary school training. Obviously, this is at Welsh teacher training centres. Do you think there's still a problem recruiting teachers into the 300 priority places, or is there a trend where things are getting better? Kirsty Williams AM: Thank you, Suzy. I think, for this year's intake, although we're in touch with our providers, we're not in a position to be able to give figures for this year's intake for a couple of months. But what we have seen over recent years is that we are only recruiting to about 65 per cent of those targets. So, there is still a job of work to do to understand and to respond to those needs. So, what we're doing is first of all making sure that our ITE provision is world class, so that, actually, Welsh centres are the place to go to train to be a teacher. You'll be aware that we've recently been through an accreditation process for new ITE provision that will start in the next academic year. We have looked at financial incentives.
  Question: What was Kirsty Williams' opinion of the decision of not accrediting the University of South Wales with the ability to deliver teacher training?
  Answer:
output: Kirsty Williams thought this process was independent of the Government, and it would not be very appropriate to comment on it. From the very outset of their ITE reforms, they had made it clear that they expected very high standards in the ITE system, but this process was independent of the Government. More specifically with the concern of the impact on students and staff, Kirsty Williams mentioned that this would be a responsibility of University of South Wales itself.