ALMOST 500 qualified Jamaican teachers swapped local classrooms for classrooms in the United Kingdom (UK) last year, as that country increased its recruitment drive to fill teaching vacancies in its schools.

That’s according to a report published in the British newspaper The Guardian on Tuesday.

“Schools are following the NHS (National Health Service) and social care providers by increasing their recruitment of teachers from overseas to fill vacancies, leaving classrooms empty in countries such as Jamaica,” The Guardian reported.

“Immigration figures show a jump in the number of skilled worker visas issued to teachers from abroad, while the Government in England is using bonuses to boost the number of teacher trainees from overseas
— at a time when [Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak said legal migration to the UK was ‘too high’ and vowed to reduce it,” added the report which pointed out that the trend to recruit teachers from overseas is rising steeply upwards and will continue rising.

“Jamaica alone supplied 486 qualified teachers last year, twice as many as in 2022, as schools in England launched recruiting drives in a country with a population of just 2.8 million and suffering its own chronic shortages of qualified teachers,” added The Guardian.

The issue of Jamaican teachers migrating in droves and the impact this would have on the local education sector was a hot-button topic in the lead up to the start of the new school year last September.

At that time, Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams reported that there had been a reduction in the number of teachers resigning for the first nine months of 2023, compared with the corresponding timeline in 2022.

According to Williams, 427 teachers had tendered their resignations for the period between January and September and this represented less than two per cent of the total complement of teachers in the public school system.

She said 1,538 teachers resigned between January and September 2022, representing approximately 6.2 per cent of the sector’s complement.

“We are in a much better place this year relative to last year regarding resignations. But also, this year, a larger number of teachers will go off on their long leave of four months or eight months. We have to put strategies in place to manage that as well. But we are delighted with where we are… as we look at the number of teachers… that are retained in the sector,” Williams said during a post-Cabinet media briefing last September.

But The Guardian quoted Emiliana Vegas, a professor of practice at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, as saying: “The reality is that, from the perspective of a Jamaican teacher, moving to the UK to work is economically a good idea. Salaries and working conditions are much better in the UK than in most low-and middle-income countries, like Jamaica.

“But for Jamaican society, it has the impact of pulling away scarce talent, thus perpetuating the challenge of raising education quality in Jamaica and similar countries and increasing the gaps in student learning between high- and low-income societies.”

According to the report, schools in England that have directly recruited from Jamaica include those in the Harris Federation academy chain, based around London.

“Last year, Schools Week reported that the Harris Federation flew staff to the island to hold interviews, and hired 50 teachers mainly in science and maths. Dan Moynihan, the federation’s chief executive, said at the time: ‘We recruit Jamaican teachers who are fantastic people, but we are having to do that because we can’t find teachers here,’ ” reported The Guardian.

It noted that the focus on overseas recruitment by the UK comes as schools there report acute teacher shortages in some subjects. Record numbers quit the profession last year and experts at the National Foundation for Educational Research have warned that teacher supply is in a critical state that risks the quality of education.

“The Department for Education (DfE) in England has sought to meet its targets for trainee teachers by recruiting more from overseas, introducing a £10,000 ‘international relocation package’ for physics and modern foreign languages teachers as well as easing requirements for applicants from countries, including Jamaica, India, and others, to gain qualified teacher status,” said the report.

A DfE spokesperson is quoted as saying that international recruitment aims to support the best qualified applicants from abroad to make valuable contributions to its workforce.

But The Guardian noted that Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers in the UK, has warned against schools following the health and social care sectors in using “short-term, sticking plaster” solutions.

“Recruitment from overseas is workload intensive, costly, and bureaucratic for hard-pressed schools. Often, international teachers only stay a short time, as they may not be granted indefinite leave to remain or permitted to bring their families, adding to teacher churn which is bad for pupils,” the report quoted Whiteman as saying.