Teachers from Nigeria and India are being offered £10,000 payments to work in the UK as government ministers strive to fill recruitment gaps, sparking fury in foreign countries who are “losing teachers to the UK every day”.
Overseas applications for teacher training have doubled this year as qualified British applicants look elsewhere for work. The poor pay, substantial workload and struggles of working with children, they say, have led many Brits who otherwise would have been teachers to avoid the profession.
One in 12 of those accepted into teacher training programmes for this autumn are from outside Europe, the Times reports – an increase from one in 18 the year before. Courses are understood to be increasingly reliant on staff from overseas to maintain numbers.
The largest rise in applications is in physics. Those who come from abroad are now eligible for £10,000 “international relocation payments”.
Just 17 percent of the physics teacher training target was met this academic year. However, applications have tripled while acceptances have more than doubled for physics teacher training this September.
Universities say this is largely the result of more interest from applicants in sub-Saharan Africa. The government launched its recruitment drive – including relocation payments and a change in rules to more easily recognise key qualifications from Ghana, India, Singapore, Jamaica, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe – last year.
James Noble-Rogers, executive director of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers, which represents universities offering initial teacher training, said: “There’s been a massive surge in international applications, particularly from Ghana and Nigeria, but this includes a lot of serving teachers applying, who need to take other routes to come.”
It has given those “desperate to get out” of poor economic situations in Africa the opportunity to earn a better living in the UK, although furious staff in schools in Nigeria now say they are “losing staff to the UK every day”.
Mr Noble-Rogers added that the system still needs to be “better”, adding that the “real solution is to find ways to boost domestic recruitment”.
Almost one in three of all applications were from overseas this year with 6,920 in total.
Precisely 717 applicants from outside the UK and the European Economic Area have been accepted on training courses this year in a substantial increase from last year’s 456.
Meanwhile, the number of those accepted so far from Britain has fallen from 9,480 to 9,411.
While there was a net gain in the number of acceptances, the surge in applications as not necessarily been matched by an equal increase in acceptances, Emma Hollis, chief executive of the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers, said.
A government website advertising to teachers from overseas says that those who are already qualified as teachers will need to apply for English ‘qualified teacher status’, or be able to demonstrate strong non-UK qualifications and experience.
They will also require a “high standard of written and spoken English”, possess a visa or immigration status allowing them to work in the UK, and will need to pass criminal and progessional safeguarding checks.
A Department for Education spokeswoman insisted that the numbers coming from overseas were small, adding: “We are focused on striking the right balance between acting decisively to tackle net migration, which we are clear is far too high, and retaining and developing highly skilled teachers. Our recruitment and retention strategy will always be focused domestically, and schools in England now have more teachers than ever before.”
