Foreign teachers are being offered an extra £10,000 to come and work in Britain in bid to fill classroom vacancies

[SerendipityJane]

Apparently we aren't getting enough immigrants.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12131699/Foreign-teachers-offered-extra-10-000-come-work-Britain.html

oh, and it seems we need to import fishermen too

https://www.ft.com/content/5a438a26-4046-4df6-b4e1-b49af82cfbe0

This sounds so ignorant and xenophobic.

I have a friend who is a qualified primary school teacher. She is Romanian. She is applying for jobs left, right and centre and often can’t even get a foot in the door.

School where am working already has loads of cover staff , mostly African. Kids are feral. No control.
The recruitment is a broken system. . Who would want to stand in a room and potentially get assaulted..?
I'm leaving to earn some money elsewhere

Great, so now experience teachers will need to work even more ours to support foreign teachers who have cero knowledge about the British education system AND they will get more salary.

We need to improve pay and conditions.
Then we would be able to train and retain our own teachers.

My DD has various processing related SEN and really struggles when teachers have foreign accents. They might be fab teachers, but if she cant understand them there's not much point is there.

The problem isn’t that we need immigrants. The problem is that the government is happy to lay them£10k more but is refusing to do the same for ‘native’ teachers.
Pay teachers better and you won’t need to rely on immigrants!

We've had some Australians and New Zealanders doing short term cover. Nice enough people but they don't understand the system and have quite a different approach.

Exactly. What cultures are you referring to? I’d say worldwide including in Britain there’s a problem with children and females not being valued enough but as a former educator who has worked around the world including London and with people from a wide variety of backgrounds there was never any issues with teachers from abroad not valuing children or being sexist. At least no more than the average Brit teacher.

The issues I did see as a pp said is they just weren’t used to the level of disrespect and extreme behavioural problems you see in some of the classrooms here and as a result were unprepared.

Hopefully that’s something they can get support with in the classroom, but tbh there’s many British people/residents with foreign accents and it’s something many people have so it would be beneficial in the long term for her to learn to understand different accents.

I agree, this is my main objection to it and I believe a lot of the teachers will have a rotten time depending on which schools they’re plonked into.

Yes of course it would. But when it takes all her concentration to process what a teacher is saying at classroom speed when they have a clear accent, and can't listen & take notes simultaneously, just how do you expect her to 'learn' to do this? Normally you can ask people to slow down / repeat themselves, but in a classroom you just can't do this every time in every lesson. You wouldn't ask a colour blind person to just 'learn' to distinguish the colours they can't.

My DD won't be the only one who has this difficulty. Children with various audio or processing SEN have enough difficulties without increasingly putting foreign accented teachers in front of them.

The same is happening with social workers. Our local authority is recruiting South Africans as we are so short of staff.

Lots of teachers who trained here have foreign accents, are you suggesting some sort of bar from people with one? Accents vary wildly across this country anyway, I'd say there's more difference between a southerner and a scouser than some people from abroad! Accessibility is something that should be supported of course and appreciate it is a genuine issue, but even without initiatives like this (which for the record I do find a pile of shite when they're doing nothing to address recruitment and retainment here) it's never a guarantee.

Teachers from abroad never last long; they are quickly demoralised by workload and behaviour! We even had an Irish teacher who moved to our school who thought it was better in Ireland and went back.

Exactly this. I’m in my 13th year and I’ve tried so hard to want to stay but I am broken. I plan to leave within the year. I feel sad for this kids because it is them who will suffer with the amount of good, experienced and dedicated teachers that are leaving. But, I no longer recognise myself as a person; no hobbies, no interests, no time to visit friends and family and I hate what I’ve become! I absolutely will not let my children (toddler and 9 month old) grow up watching their mummy battle with such a toxic environment and unhealthy work/life balance.

They could double the salary and I wouldn’t stay. They thing that would make me stay is sorting out the workload; smaller classes; more PPA time for marking and prep, less absolutely pointless paperwork! But to do this requires more teachers, which they can’t recruit or retain so the disastrous cycle continues.

A lot of senior management teams need to be more supportive of staff as well and make them feel like they are valued! They also need to show that they are cared about when it comes to dealing with pupil behaviour! I had my first “physical assault” ever from a pupil last year; I’m not naive, they happen but I was 8 months pregnant and the pupil had no consequences other than missing my next lesson and they didn’t even have to apologise. I don’t want to work in a system that allows that.

Just like the NHS, nothing but an overhaul of the system will fix the deep rooted problems. These “sticking plaster” fixes might plug a gap and get the system through another term/year etc but the system will continue to collapse from within.

I'm a languages teacher and on my course the university recruited at link universities in Spain and France. Over 100 students came for 20k or 15k (approx, my memory is poor) tax free . But they weren't retained. Many left straight after the pgce year. Others left during or just after completing their NQT.
Retaining is the issue.

If we do not have the people here,what do you suggest?

I would suggest that the government address the workload and pay issues that mean teachers aren’t staying and make moves to substantially improve them.

There is no shortage of qualified teachers in England. What there is a shortage of is qualified teachers prepared to teach in English state schools. The government need to look at why they all left. I know plenty who would return if conditions changed. This could be done quite quickly.

What I suspect this latest plan will entail, is recruiting people from abroad who
will come over (without their families?!). £10k will be paid via an agency who will take a massive slice off themselves. The recruit will then be paid on the unqualified teacher scale as they don’t have QTS. They will then do the job for a bit and realise how awful it is, then leave quickly.

Meanwhile, the only people who have benefitted, is the agency. As always, someone already quite rich and well-connected will just make even more money.

Does Mrs Sunak part own any teacher agencies?

🙄Says someone who clearly knows nothing about the retention crisis in teaching.

There are lots of generous bursaries and have been for years. DS got a tax free bursary of £29K six years ago to teach maths. He still teaches and loves his job but the worload is huge.
They have also increased starting pay for newly qualified to £30 but they haven't increased the pay up the line.

There are many thousands of fully trained teachers in the UK who don't work in teaching. They leave in droves because of pay and workload.
It's like the NHS. The governemnt seem happy to train doctors and teachers for Australia rather than pay them properly.

2 recent quotes by Robert Jenrick speaking at the CBI conference...""UK firms should be "looking to the British workforce" rather than relying on immigrants to fill jobs post-Brexit""if I was a business manager, I would be looking to the British workforce in the first instance, seeing how I could get local people into my business, train them up, skill them to do the job." .........hmmm would be nice if the government practised what it preached,eh?!

I personally think that points 2, 3 & 5 should be universal and would help boost the economy and health of the nation,but obviously as the government are trying to destroy the economy and any last bastions of Britishness, they will never implement it.

There needs to be progressive pay. As PP said, the starting salary is not bad, comparable with some other graduate programmes. However, you often reach the highest "ceiling" within a few years - the pay for experienced teachers is often only £10-15,000 more than the starting salary. What seems like a decent salary when you are young and single becomes insufficient once you want a house and family.

However, as is typical with the current government, there is no long-term thinking. School budgets are too low to retain experienced teachers so even in the time of a recruitment crisis, older experienced teachers are still being "managed out" because schools can only afford to pay the lowest salaries.

I am an experienced teacher who has been top of the upper pay scale for years-every year is effectively a pay cut.

It’s the pointless workload that I want cut most though-make some immediate changes and I would consider staying.

The biggest issues for me are workload and behaviour. I can't see these improving.

In our sector, once you are capable of doing the job and are fully trained you get paid a wage - you'll only get paid more when you are promoted/take on more responsibilities - I'm sure in teaching it's the same - move into management and get paid more.