The government using migration to plug gaps in the workforce is not unique to teaching. The NHS, social care and agriculture are all sectors that have been actively recruiting foreign workers – the numbers for teaching are comparatively small. Last year, 1,100 work visas were issued to qualified secondary school teachers, twice as many as the previous year and well above the 205 issued in 2021. But, this could just be the start, Richard says.
The causes behind the crisis
Teaching as a profession has become less attractive for a host of reasons. Though many point to the more general problems that plague the public sector like low wages and poor working conditions, the story is a bit more complex than that.
“Many teachers leave for lower-paying jobs, so that tells you it’s not just the money,” Richard says. The workload has become one of the biggest issues for teachers. At 53 hours a week, teachers work more than the average adult in the UK. One leaked study found that a quarter of teachers were working 12-hour days and another found that two in five teaching staff in the UK worked 26 hours for free each week, or 5.5m hours a year combined. Unions have also flagged the creeping problem of technology, with teachers complaining that apps and emails have created an “unreasonable expectation” that they will always be available.
Another issue that regularly features in teachers surveys is bad behaviour. “I think that’s one of the things that people outside schools have real difficulty understanding or appreciating because it’s so difficult to quantify,” Richard says. And it’s not just poor behaviour from students, it’s also parents and management that is making life increasingly difficult for teachers.
Teaching is also slightly out of step with the modern world of work which tends towards a more flexible working environment. Young teachers are watching their peers, who have graduated into a workforce where working from home and flexibility are the norm, while they remain in rigid working environments.
The tactics to recruit
So with all these issues, how has the government reacted? Schools in England have been deploying an “aggressive’’ recruitment drive, using advertising, seminars and directly approaching teachers in Jamaica, and even using people there to spread the news. The new addition is that ministers in England are now also offering a £10,000 international relocation payment for qualified teachers and graduates who specialise in physics and foreign languages to come and train here as teachers. “The government is filling spaces in teacher training courses in England with people from overseas which is interesting considering the government’s rhetoric around migration is that it is too high,” Richard says.
And it’s not just the government, one of the country’s leading academy trusts, the Harris Federation, has been recruiting teachers from Jamaica for five years, flying their staff out to recruit specialist teachers directly. Sir Dan Moynihan, the CEO of the trust, has said the recruitment crisis means schools “have to be creative” to find high quality teachers.
The fallout for Jamaica
Jamaica has long experienced a high flow of emigration, and the outflow of teachers has been a particular problem for the island nation for years. In the past, the US was the primary recruiter and beneficiary of the outflow but the large number of high quality teaching training institutions and the fact that it is an English-speaking country has attracted the attention of the British government and other wealthy nations who have turned to poorer countries to fix their staffing problems.
Predictably, this has led to substantial brain drain: “They’re losing lots of young graduates and are having real troubles filling vacancies. Schools are having to cut top courses because they can’t find qualified teachers, they’re sharing teachers with other schools, they’re livestreaming classes to other schools and the government has recently changed the rules so that retired teachers can come back and work in the classroom and not lose their pensions,” Richard says.
The teacher shortage is not a uniquely British problem, though it is particularly bad here. There is currently an international shortage of teachers – 44 million more teachers are needed globally if education is to be provided to every child, according to new figures from Unesco. The problem will not be solved by shuffling the few teachers around to plug gaps as they appear.
