Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to increase recruitment of staff from non-EU countries in the UK education sector after Brexit.

The department is committed to ensuring that schools are able to recruit appropriately to fill their teacher vacancies. The majority of teachers in schools in England are recruited from within the UK and our priority is to meet our teacher recruitment needs domestically. However, schools have always been able to recruit staff internationally, and teachers from overseas make an important contribution to our education system.

The department runs programmes to help schools recruit from overseas. Our Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics International Teacher Recruitment Programme supports state-funded secondary schools in England with the recruitment of maths and physics teachers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA.

In our recently published ‘Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy’, we committed to exploring opportunities to develop new and existing partnerships, focusing particularly on language teachers, in order to boost the recruitment of teachers from overseas.

The government’s white paper ‘The UK’s future skills-based immigration system’, outlined proposals to introduce a new skilled workers route, open to all countries across the globe with an expanded skills threshold covering work at Regulated Qualifications Framework level 3 and above, including teachers. Those coming to the UK on this route will need to be sponsored by an employer.

As part of developing this new immigration system the Home Office is undertaking a programme of extensive engagement with stakeholders across the whole of the UK to shape the final details of policy and processes, and the department will continue to work very closely with them on this.