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

The response to poor behaviour seems to be stricter school uniform rules - maybe they could try actually dealing with behaviour than fiddling with the window dressing? Teachers battle on all sides - my kids were really well behaved but even they started to feel quite downtrodden by the overly controlling nature of the school - it felt totally repressive. Not sure how anyone pupil or teacher can flourish in such an atmosphere, it's horrible for everyone.

Has it been announced who will be running this scheme.

I have no doubt they will be mates of a Minister and will make more per student recruited than the "relocation payment".

This is it in a nutshell. Why are they trying to bring more teachers into the country when we have enough of our own? They just don't want to do the job because the conditions are so dire and the prospects for experienced teachers are so poor in relation to easier desk jobs.

My guess is these people will bring their families and increase the immigration figures even further, putting more pressure on all our services.

Strict rules are the result of kids and parents taking the piss. It used to be obvious what was acceptable and parents used to accept the school's decisions more readily. This is no longer the case. I have been teaching for over 25 years now and behaviour is terrible. I have one lovely class which now feels unusual and like a surprise. They are pleasant and do their best. It reminds me of why I used to love it. Sadly they are one outlier class.

So Ghana, India, Singapore, Jamaica, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe will lose precious teachers that could help (with the exception of Singapore) educate their future workforce and improve their economy especially as the relevant countries would have invested in the training of these teachers.

As a radical thought, in order to recruit, motivate and retain our existing teachers how about paying them more, improve their working conditions and generally invest more into education rather than poaching teachers from countries that can ill afford to lose them?

Out of interest how would she get on with a teacher with a Newcastle, Glaswegian or Welsh or any accent different from your own?

This.
Retention of experienced teachers is the issue. Fund the schools properly and give teachers a payrise.

@CaptainMyCaptain She would struggle with any very strong accent such as broad Glaswegian, but would be fine with milder ones. The only problem she had in education was a Turkish(?) teacher, the combination of accent and pace was impossible (and she ended up having to change classes).

My point is that positively encouraging teachers from abroad is only going to increase issues for children with processing difficulties.

She clearly needs support when she struggles to understand the teacher but this is not a valid argument against 'foreign' teachers. She might be lucky to have a teacher at all the way things are going.

Utterly immoral and incompressible, first they came from the gold and diamonds, then the drs and nurses and now the teachers. So kids in Africa don’t deserve healthcare and education, they just get poorer and developed countries just get richer off the hard work of other countries to train up people in desperately needed occupations.

Unsurprisingly most people on this thread complaining that these workers will bring their families (how very dare they, they should never see their kids or partners when they help educate our kids) and speak in foreign accents ( I honestly don’t have words for this one)

I have just resigned from the profession after twenty years. I earn about £43,000 as I also have a management point (TLR). I work full-time and have no life at all. I rarely see my own kids and when I do I'm exhausted. I've taken a job WFH on a similar wage but no school holidays. The problem is not really recruitment but retention. I cannot earn anymore than I am on unless I move up to Senior Leader and I don't want any more responsibility. I think that every year the job will get easier but it doesn't. Behaviour gets worse, budgets get squashed, goalposts change and it's exhausting. In the twenty years I've been teaching, my subject is now approaching it's fourth GCSE change. The workload this takes is immense. Not to mention Ofsted and poor parental support.

To be clear, I wasn't complaining about families, just appreciating an irony that Suella has effectively just banned lucrative overseas students' families.

You couldn't pay me enough to go back into teaching. It's the job that never ends

At the previous primary school I taught in, recruitment was so bad that they had already resorted to recruiting OTT. We had one from S. Africa and another from the USA. Neither had even so much as taught in a British school before and they were paid as unqualified teachers too.

The S. African one didn't last very long. She was appalled at the behaviour from the kids in the school and left for a better school. The American struggled along for a few years (Phonics teaching was a real challenge given her pronunciation issues), then got pregnant and never returned after having the baby!

Things were already that desperate there, as no-one wanted to teach in that school nor send their kids there (undersubscribed in almost every year group). This was before COVID, so about 4-5 years ago now.

So we want migration to come down, but we need more migrants to fill skilled positions.

We just need more teachers to leave the UK to work abroad to balance it out.

DO you know why this REALLY peaves me?

I'm British - born and raised, with 2 science degree's. But because I've lived in another country for a bit (currently an ex-pat in Japan) if I return to the UK and want to train as a teacher, for 3 years I'm not allowed a student loan to do a PGCE (or any studying such as to become a social worker, nurse etc). I'd have to pay international tuition fee rates and everything.

Yes that's not right

There is no joined up thinking

This just gives the lie to uk immigration policy. Skills issues in the UK are a mess.

We need to improve parenting, so that kids go to school eager to learn and get on in life, instead of using it as an excuse to mess about. It should be MUCH easier for schools to expel bad kids, and the remaining kids would be much less likely to mess about if they'd seen the worst offenders kicked out of school with all that entails.

Poor you, doesn't look as if you received much of an education yourself 😪.

• peeves
• degrees

I can't speak for Australia but I'm NZ school is across the board more relaxed and teachers have more discretion on what / how to teach, and there are far, far fewer exams. Having to cope with the endless rules and cultural bizarreness differences wouldn't be easy.

Which doesn't mean the odd bit of stupidity doesn't get imported here (looking at you, National Party!!)

This 💯

Sadly, this is a really good point. I never thought about it like this

Brexit innit.

Idiots forgot UK are 2 islands, With all the import/export over sea and land involved.

Idiots to expect idiots to vote on such a major decision,

Eire is still EU.

Even N.I Unionists can't get their shit together....