Absolutely. We are seeing growing collaboration. The noble Lord is right that we are looking at teacher training on a year-by-year basis because we believe that schools should be at the heart of thinking about where they want to get their best training. The best universities will be extremely attractive. They are still the only organisations that
can award PGCEs, which remain extremely popular. While we think that the school-led system is the way we want to go, we see that the collaboration is working within the system.
This year we hit our primary recruitment targets. We made good progress on secondary and are ahead of last year in some key subjects, such as English, maths and physics. The noble Lord also mentioned STEM subjects. Again, we want to attract the best graduates into teacher training, which is why we are looking at generous bursaries from next year, up to £30,000. We are also looking at some of the issues that teachers tell us worry them most once they are in a job, such as unnecessary work-flow and poor pupil performance, so that we can help to ensure that when teachers are in the profession, they stay in it. Again, teacher retention remains good and has remained pretty stable for the past two decades.
I hope that the House realises that we take the issue of recruitment and retention very seriously. As the Minister has already said, high-quality teachers are absolutely crucial, and the impact that they can make on young people is huge—so we take this seriously, and we believe that we are already taking steps to support schools when this impacts on the progress that pupils make. I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
4.30 pm