In the ongoing teacher shortage, Melanie Butler takes a look at what is driving practitioners both in and out of work.
Originally published June 2024.
‘Why don’t our teachers come back? Whatever happened to loyalty?’ one UK school executive asked a woman who spent years involved in recruitment for a major global school group.
‘What did you expect?’ she snapped back. ‘You laid them all off during COVID and you didn’t even have to pay them redundancy money because you had kept them on zero-hour contracts for years. Loyalty has to work both ways.’
In fact, under UK law, workers who have been on zero-hour contracts with the same employer for more than four years normally do have the right to redundancy payment, as several schools found out when the UK’s TEFL Workers Union began filing bundles of claims at the Employment Tribunal.
There is now a massive shortage of TEFL teachers across the world; indeed, a massive shortage of teachers of any subject. Isn’t this just a simple example of the law of supply and demand: if the supply falls, the price you have to pay will go up? And in some places, the pay has gone up. In the UK, London, Brighton and Oxbridge hourly rates have risen quite sharply but to little avail – the teachers aren’t coming back.
In most of the rest of the world, salaries have barely changed in more than a decade. Take the British Council network: in the last year or so we’ve seen their teachers in Taiwan join a Union because their pay hasn’t changed in 20 years, teachers in Portugal went on strike claiming their pay had increased only 1% since 2009, while in Japan, staff came out over the Council’s failure, after two years of negotiations, to bring their pension rights into line with local law.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, things are changing. The Labour Courts are working on a pay agreement between Unite the Union and employers, following outcry in 2018 when teachers were left stranded at Christmas after their unaccredited school closed its doors. Sources among both the Union and employers told the Gazette they are confident an agreement will soon be reached, with one industry source welcoming the move because it would ‘put pressure on the rogue providers’.
Sectoral pay rates are nothing new. Spain has had them for decades, though rates remain low. In Australia they have been set, as most pay rates are, by the Fair Pay Ombudsman for many years and are probably the highest in the English-speaking world. The problem, however, is that employers are allowed to employ teachers on a ‘casual basis’, with four-week rolling contracts.
While teachers earn a reasonable wage, it is job security, not income, which is causing the problem. And it is the demand for secure jobs that is preventing experienced teachers from returning to the sector. In London, for example, many ex-TEFLers have shifted into working as teaching assistants where their ELT qualifications give them a head-start. Their pay – though low at around £500 a week – is guaranteed, and their hours are regular, from 8:30 to 15:30. Lesson planning and marking is minimal, and while most TAs are unpaid eight weeks of the school holiday year, they can easily get TEFL work in the school holidays.
Moving into the mainstream, where teacher shortages are also rife, is increasingly common. One school on the south coast, which contacted its former teachers after COVID, found they had all taken permanent jobs at a local school for children with Special Educational Needs.
When the owner of ELC Bristol – one of the six schools in the country to get a perfect score on inspection – set out to find his teachers, they had all found permanent jobs. They wanted to come back to teaching, but would not accept zero-hour contracts. He took the decision to sell ownership of the school to the city’s top not for-profit independent schools so he could offer them permanent jobs. For the results of this endeavour, read the case study at the bottom of this article.
The companies running university foundation year programmes are generally offering salaried jobs, some fixed-term. Kaplan is offering a starting salary of £35,000 in London, though the London rate for INTO has always been salaried positions of £37,000-£45,000.
Will language schools have to follow their lead? In the UK, they may have no option. If the Labour Party win the next election they have to ban zero-hours contracts unless staff choose them. After working for 12 weeks, workers must be offered a permanent job based on the average of all working time undertaken, and not just ‘teaching hours’.
‘I did see that,’ one school owner admitted. ‘But I didn’t realise the impact.’
Case study
ELC Bristol set out to build back its teaching team after COVID. Below, Vice Principal and Academic Director of ELC Bristol, Mark Calland reveals the secrets of their success in recruitment and retention:
The key factors in recruitment and retention for us are:
- Salary: most of our teachers start on £24.73 per teaching hour. We also have an 11-band scale with the top level being £30.60 an hour.
- Security: all but one of our regular teachers are on permanent contracts, and the teacher who isn’t chose not to take one, as she only works a few hours and wants the flexibility not to work for certain periods.
- Support: a caring and supportive ethos has long been key to our success as a school. We also try to be flexible and accommodating in relation to what hours teachers want to work, which classes they would like to teach or avoid and in granting holiday requests. We get termly feedback from teachers in the shape of an end-of-term feedback form and this also enables us to tailor our professional development to their wants and needs. We also have an annual staff review, which gives teachers another opportunity to make requests and voice concerns. From the top down at ELC, a sense of humour has always played its part in ensuring that people enjoy being in the staffroom and look forward to coming to work.
- Career development: we have a principal, an academic director, a director of studies and a senior teacher, which gives ambitious teachers the sense that there is scope for promotion if they work hard and are successful in their roles.
Only one regular teacher left us last year; he had only been with us for several months and was not on a permanent contract, but had been offered one at the University of the West of England on a high salary. This represents 5% of teachers leaving.
