Ms Mary McGrath:

I thank the Deputy. One of our remits is to provide teacher professional learning.

To give a sense of the scale of this, we provided professional learning to over 16,000 teachers in 2019. In 2020, this was somewhat impacted by Covid-19 and we provided training to 5,000 teachers. We have looked at and redesigned some of the elements of our programme of training to provide it online during the current school year to ensure we continue to reach teachers, as required.

We also provide our in-school support service, where schools can identify specific needs that they may have within their own community and we will provide bespoke tailored learning to that school, be it for whole-school staff, small groups of teachers or individual teachers. That, in particular, can help to embed the teacher professional learning across the school community, as referred to by the Deputy. In 2019, we responded to over 2,200 requests from schools to provide that type of in-school support and we continue to provide that service online currently.