Next month a new immigration law comes into practice, this new law will have a negative effect on the teacher shortage crisis. Head teachers around the country are at their wits end due to the lack of teachers currently available. The shortage is so acute that the Government has also been forced to produce a tv advert to attract more people into the teaching profession, which in this instance is strange considering the implementation of the new immigration law that will come into affect next month. To summarise briefly, from next month any person living and working in the UK of non-EU origin must be earning in excess of £35,000 per annum in order to be allowed to continue to reside in the UK, this will definitely effect a lot of the non-EU teachers currently being employed by schools in the UK.
Due to the shortage of teachers in the UK many schools have been forced to look outside of the UK in order to fill vacant positions. Due to most of the schools budgetary constraints the £35,000 threshold will make it exceedingly hard for most of the schools to hold onto their non EU staff, as the average salary for a teacher is between £21,000 – £29,000. The only teachers that are exempt from this new law are secondary school maths, physics and chemistry and this is due to their acute shortage, although in our experience there is a shortage in many other subjects as well.
To conclude we want to give both sides of this argument but you can see what side Oliver Parkes is on. Therefore we have have put forward the government’s argument defending the policy: A government spokesman has stated “that in the past it had been too easy for some sectors to bring in workers from overseas rather than to take the long-term decision to train the domestic workforce in the UK. “These reforms will ensure that employers – including those in the education sector – are able to attract the skilled migrants they need. But we also want them to get better at recruiting and training UK teachers first”.