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

It's an easy out again, they need to look first at what is going wrong, why there is low retention and solve those issues.

We went from having so many teachers in the 80s 90s many who at the time had spent a lifetime teaching.

All governments need to face the real issues not paper over them with borrowed labour.

There's a deficit of teachers. Foreign people want to teach. What's the problem in letting them come here to teach? We had EU teachers and no one complained.

Well perhaps the issue is using foreign teachers as a sticking plaster instead of addressing the actual problems.

Getting new teaching styles into the classrooms might turn out to very a good thing. Uk teachers don't want to teach so why not give other nationalities the opportunity to fill vacancies.

They will be working and contributing to funding the system.

The ones putting the strain are the British born who can work but won’t work or who are net takers rather than net contributors.

Even though British people are given bursaries to study, either aren’t motivated enough to take it up or if they do, they are too fragile to go the distance.

Everyone is to be blamed except the people and their mindset. Give us more money, they say but will that change anything? People here want something for nothing. Give more money but where do they think this money is coming from?

The immigrants help to put money into the Treasury’s purse so you can have the more that you continually ask for.

The mindset of young British people are similarly fragile. Me, me, me. Give me, I’m entitled to, ill-disciplined and I could go on.

Without immigrants, British people would not be able to get the funding from the state that they so desperately think they’re entitled to even when they are net takers rather than net contributors.

I have just found a new job in what I hope will be a happy school. I have had to take a£6,000 pay cut as they can't afford me otherwise. It is an awful situation out there.

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.
This is quite normal outside teaching - you are paid to do a job, and you get paid more in real terms when you are promoted to do another job with more responsibility - do teachers really think the rest of the workforce continue to get increasing salaries despite doing the same job? We give our team lovely generous pay rises but they have to take on more responsibility - if they don't want to do that they stay at the same grade.

And yet at the other end of the scale teachers aged 50+ are still getting shoved out of the door via a well known and apparently legal bullying process.

Teachers have been leaving to work abroad for years. Better conditions and better behaved children.

But different teaching styles aren't wanted now. Most schools that I know use a selection of prescriptive schemes EG white rose, rising stars, cusp, discovery. That tell them precisely what to teach and when.
This lack of any sort of creative input is what is making the job a little worse for some teachers.
(Although admittedly easier for others)

You can't go into a classroom and teach in your own style any more. This is one of the problems with every moment being micro managed from above there is no longer any room for individuality or catering to the needs of individual children. It's all about targets and grades.

Teaching isn't the same as jobs in business or whatever. You need good, experienced teachers in the classroom. I'm retired now but I didn't want promotion out of the classroom into a management role because I liked working with the children. Also, I lived in part of the country where my pay (Mainscale Upper Threshold) was adequate. I had to leave London and go North for this though.

I don’t dislike teachers, I dislike the system that has made some of them what they are. Cowed in class, scared of kids, aggressive parents that threaten them if their little darlings are not pandered to. Some enlightened leaders do manage to work within the system and support their teachers, but unfortunately too many are trained as semi social workers rather than teachers.

Why do I know this. I’m just about to employ the third person in three years that is leaving teaching and this is what they tell me as their reason for leaving. Is so sad and yes they do have transferable skills so relying on them thinking they can’t get a job elsewhere, the evidence is that many can

The problem here is that the DfE know that they have a massive shortage of teachers but can't pay them more because the Treasury won't fund it and govt policy is to not negotiate with strikers. Schools can no longer be expected to take it out of budgets like last year as the well is dry.

What the DfE can control it has put up - the bursaries, the regional payments for shortage subjects and now these bonuses for immigrants, which goes against the Home Office need to reduce immigration.

There's no joined up thinking between government departments because departmental policy is determined by the fact that the Treasury is utterly short-minded and extremely tight-fisted. Long term investment is out of the window.

The DfE could do other stuff, of course, to reduce workload and so on, but hating teachers gets in the way of that.

What are the differences between Australian and English schools? My sibling is relocating soon.

I left teaching a couple of years ago and it wasn't the pay that had me leaving after 14 years. The job completely changed from when I trained and I couldn't keep working in such a broken system. The government needs to sort out school funding and the culture within school ( stop running them like a business) and value the experienced staff members more.

Sadly this is being pushed out but SLT. The last school I taught at had a set structure to their lessons meaning every lesson had to follow the same format. No space for individual teaching styles. The idea behind it was to give the pupils clear structure and they'd know what to expect each lesson. What it meant in reality was that there was no space for the pupils to express themselves and explore ideas and have interacting discussions on the subject as we needed to be sticking to the times of the set structure of the lessons which must always include 30 minutes of silent writing.

I am disgusted at this - whilst not against recruiting teachers abroad and feel they can bring a new and valuable experience there would simply be no need for this is teachers had the correct conditions. I assume there is a recruitment allowance going to a Tory friend somewhere in there.

Never mind recruiting teachers ... focus on retaining teachers.

Fund schools properly

Reduce class size

Give more PPA

Have a robust policy regarding parents.

For our next academic year the budget is just not going to work. The cost of everything is rising - exercise books for the next academic year are £15 more per box of 100 for example this year. Everything is squeezed. Schools are being given impossible books to balance.

We are not social workers .. year more and more time needed for social issues as those we refer on to a stretched.

Class size is out of control .. sometimes 34/35 in a class now for English / Maths / Geog / History / RE. Teachers are put under massive stress to get these children to target when how can you actually personalise their learning when you see them maybe two hours a week in a class of 35? Marking a set of anything takes significantly longer as its most classes in the day have increased this much.

Behaviour is out of control - as SMT I am called to pick up students that need removed. By the time we pick up they have been through a policy of verbal warnings and recorded info. Pre covid I may have removed a student twice a week .. now it is every period on rota. Calling home to tell a parent their child has swore at the teacher / another child, thrown equipment, pushed staff, kicked chairs over and finding less and less support. Parents just don’t want them home and wont reinforce boundaries. They don’t care what their child does as long as they are at school. And then these children are interrupting the learning of all the other children, the pace of the lesson, the exposure to content that classes need to get through to be exam ready. And normalising poor behaviour.

I have a lot of colleagues that have left teaching with a heavy heart and would come back without a payrise if there was a change in the workload and conditions.

I have a lot of colleagues that have left teaching with a heavy heart and would come back without a payrise if there was a change in the workload and conditions.

Yes, me too.

It’s bizarre that the government will try absolutely ANYTHING else-troops to teachers, £1000 to agencies to lure teachers from abroad, bursaries to train etc etc, but not look at workload!

I would imagine an afternoon meeting with the DfE and a panel of teachers could probably come up with a list of changes that could be implemented that would make the job much more manageable overnight.

DH and I both have management responsibilities in teaching (though I am primary and the opportunity for progression is quite limited). We still only earn about £15,000 more than the starting salary and have both been teaching 20 years. DH retrained from a much better paid profession.

The only way to earn a "high" salary in teaching is to become a headteacher and to be honest even then the salary generally does not reflect the level of stress and responsibility.

Uk teachers don't want to teach so why not give other nationalities the opportunity to fill vacancies.

Its not that UK teachers (I’m talking about English teachers more specifically, as I get the impression it’s worse here!) don’t want to teach, it’s that they don’t want to teach in what schools have become since about 2010. Believe it or not, things in schools were much better before then and there are many of us who can remember that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Absolutely
In many of these countries teachers are respected and education is revered. Parents in these countries often have to make sacrifices to send their children to school
These foreign teachers then come to England and are shocked by the lack of discipline and entitlement of some of the students

This is thoroughly depressing

Well many on MN are unsupportive of teachers. The press are critical.

The issue isn't pay as you know the pay scale when you go into the profession. It's poor behaviour, threat of OFSTED, workload. Since covid students are emotionally fragile.

I am worried for my children's education and whether they will be able to recruit teachers for them next academic year.

This sounds as if the toxicity of our govts (they seem to be frenemies to me) is having a real life effect on how the nation operates.

These fecking charlatans have been fiddling while rome burns.

Workload/assessments etc - aren’t these a result of Gove’s time as EdSec?

We need a govt that cares and invests in society. It doesn’t have to be this way.