Matt Rodda

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. Thank you for fitting me into this important debate. I want to take a few moments to elaborate briefly on the concerns I raised earlier about recruitment and retention in the Reading area and Berkshire for school teachers and other school staff, but also staff in other parts of the public sector and our public services more generally. The basic problem in our area is that house prices are very high, but sadly national pay scales do not always reflect those additional pressures. That is a particular issue for a small number of areas; I am certainly aware that parts of Oxfordshire have similar problems to Berkshire, and there may well be other scattered issues across certain parts of England. Now that I have raised the issue, I hope the Minister might be able to look into it for me. I know that the Government are working extremely hard to raise standards in education and invest in the education system. I wanted to give the example of a local comprehensive school whose former headteacher told me recently that it had had issues with recruitment and retention with certain subjects. That issue occurs across the country with certain shortage subjects, possibly in the case of science, technology, engineering and mathematics or English teaching, and maybe one or two other disciplines within large secondary schools. However, because of the increase in house prices and the cost of living pressures more generally, the situation has changed over the last few years and got progressively worse while the last Government was in office. Last year, things reached a point where it was extremely difficult to recruit any teachers. Often, there was only one applicant for any advertised vacancy. That is a challenge for any leader in any organisation, and particularly for teachers and heads under extreme pressure. I appreciate the work that the Government are doing; I thank Reading borough council for its work on council house building, which I mentioned earlier, and the University of Reading for its excellent teacher recruitment work, but it would be wonderful if the Minister could look into this issue.