Jamaica struggles as England turns to foreign teachers

Schools are following the NHS and social care providers by increasing their recruitment of teachers from overseas to fill vacancies, leaving classrooms empty in countries such as Jamaica.

- Richard Adams, Carmen Aguilar Garcia

Immigration figures show a rise 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 Rishi Sunak said legal migration to the UK was "too high" and vowed to reduce it.

While the numbers remain modest compared with the NHS, the trend is steeply upwards and will continue rising as the surge in trainee teachers recruited overseas enter the workforce.

Last year nearly 1,100 work visas were issued to qualified secondary school teachers, double the 555 visas issued in 2022 and well above the 205 issued in 2021. This year, more than one in four applicants to teacher training courses in England have come from outside Europe.

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.

Emiliana Vegas, professor of practice at Harvard's graduate school of education, said: "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 lowand middle-income countries, like Jamaica.