Commenting on the appointment of Lynne Neagle to Cabinet Secretary for Education, Dr Patrick Roach, General Secretary for NASUWT – The Teachers’ Union, said:

“We welcome Lynne Neagle as the new Cabinet Secretary for Education in Wales. She takes the role during an extremely challenging time for teachers and pupils alike. We are experiencing unprecedented recruitment and retention issues, and morale in staffrooms across Wales is at an all-time low. The cost of living crisis has had a catastrophic effect on teachers, children and their families, with many struggling to pay bills, put food on the table, obtain healthcare, and travel safely to work and school.

“Teachers dedicate their lives to educating children and young people. To do this work, they must have fair pay, safe working conditions, and a government that is willing to fund and facilitate sustainable change. If teachers thrive, pupils thrive with them.

“We look forward to working together to build the world-class education system that should be the entitlement of every person in Wales.”

Neil Butler, NASUWT National Official for Wales, said:

“We look forward to working with Lynne Neagle to tackle the issues that are affecting teachers in all of our schools: excessive workloads and working hours, stagnating pay, and mounting problems with both poor pupil behaviour and lack of support from senior leadership and local authorities. It is preposterous that amidst a teacher recruitment crisis, we are seeing redundancies due to lack of funding and school mismanagement. It is unacceptable that nearly 40% of teachers in Wales have experienced violence or physical abuse from pupils in the last year.

“We cannot afford to watch and wait as children lose beloved teachers, and teachers continue to leave the profession, whether it is by choice or by force. The new Minister will need to take a proactive approach or we will continue to see rising levels of teacher stress and burnout, fewer people becoming teachers, and more industrial action in schools where teachers simply cannot go on any longer without radical change.”