Commonwealth Teachers Group (CTG) First Edition, March 2025
The UK is not alone in its aggressive recruitment of OTTs Whereas in the UK teacher migration is typically from the Caribbean and Africa, Australia and New Zealand recruit heavily from Oceania, particularly small island states like Fiji and the Cook Islands.
New Zealand has relaxed its immigration rules for overseas secondary school teachers due to shortages, with overseas secondary teachers put on a fast track to residency.
The Fijian Teachers’ Association reported that last year, 100 qualified early childhood education teachers left the country, with a further fifty teachers migrating to Australia at the end of December. A significant loss from the workforce of a country with a population less than one million.
Countries are sounding the alarm about the loss of qualified teachers
In Ghana, teacher recruitment and retention has not kept pace with increases in enrolment, particularly following the extension of free education to secondary high school in 2017. In October 2023, the National Association of Graduate Teachers in Ghana (NAGRAT) reported that as many as 10,000 teachers in the country had left for developed countries. A survey by NAGRAT revealed that eight in ten trained teachers would migrate from Ghana given the opportunity. Nigeria’s deep-rooted education crisis is being exacerbated by teacher migration. Over 20 million children are out-of-school, yet classrooms lie empty. The Universal Basic Education Commission estimates a shortage of almost 200,000 teachers in public primary schools alone – dwarfing the numbers required in the UK. The loss of teachers and the wasted investment in their training and professional development is hugely detrimental to wider society. Teachers are skilled professionals, who contribute both economically and socially to a nation’s development. The investments that governments make in teacher education are also lost to the benefit of countries who played no part in their professional training. As the Global Report on Teachers identifies, comprehensive data on teacher migration is not available, and while teachers may migrate for a range of reasons, teacher labour migration tends to mirror general migration patterns driven by the pull of better wages in the destination country. This mirrors the finding of the recent Global Status of Teachers 2024 that globally low pay is the most common cause of teacher shortages. It also points to the need for all countries to tackle the root causes of teacher shortages. Transforming the status of teaching in all countries into a high-status, high-retention profession, where teachers are valued, empowered and paid competitively and attractively must be the priority.
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