Investigating professional experiences of teachers with a migration background

Teaching is becoming a global labour market. The number of overseas teachers in English schools has grown significantly too. The origins of these teachers diversified, due to the government’s policy to address teacher shortages via recruiting overseas.

Secondary teachers in mathematics, physics, sciences, computer science and modern foreign languages have been on the shortage occupation list for some time. Data shows that 24% of secondary schools in the Department for Education’s school omnibus surveys had recruited internationally (IFF 2023) and 1,110 overseas Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) awards were done between 1 February 2023 and 31 July 2023 after 21,003 people applied (gov.uk 2023). This is in addition to the increased numbers of overseas student teachers on the initial teacher education programmes.

The project is extremely timely in terms of ongoing national policy goals to boost efforts to recruit more overseas teachers as part of the government’s recruitment and retention strategy for a post-Covid world. In light of the increasing global movement of teachers, the project is expected to inform thinking in education policy and practice about how to support and retain global teachers in local contexts. The longer-term benefits are for the training, career progression and retention of migrant teachers, as well as for their students and schools.

This project will advance the academic field of sociology of education and migration in England and internationally, which has mainly focused on school experiences of migrant children. This research will also demonstrate the importance of using migration as an independent analytic category in advancing scholarship on minority ethnic teacher recruitment and retention, especially with its focus on multilingual teachers who are not from Anglophone countries.

Voices Across Cultures: Professional Experiences of Migrant Teachers

The available literature shows that migrant teachers face substantial challenges during their professional transition, even when migrating between Anglophone systems (Bense 2016). These circumstances have implications for their retention in the state education system. Yet, there is limited literature on this topic in England. This professional group is rarely acknowledged by teacher unions, policymakers and school leaders despite growing numbers. The public discourse often fails to properly distinguish between ethnicity, national identity and migration categories.

This project has the following objectives:

1. to investigate professional experiences and identities of teachers with a migration background in English schools;
2. to produce good practice recommendations with regard to developing and supporting these teachers for dissemination among school leaders, school-based training providers, teachers’ unions, policy makers and third sector organisations.

Through engagement with non-academic audiences, the project expects to put professional issues faced by teachers with a migration background on the agenda for policy and practice.

This project adopts a mixed-methods design

The individual interviews with teachers will focus on STEM and MFL subjects who are on a shortage occupations list that facilitates professional migration. The survey will be open to any teacher with a migration background to investigate broader national patterns. Given the diversity of this profession, we will consider the intersections of migration statuses with gender, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, qualifications, subject, geographical location, etc.