According to newly published projections by the UK Department for Education (DfE), reforms aimed at making England more attractive to overseas teachers will still result in thousands fewer teachers from overseas working in the country compared to before Brexit.
The DfE’s projections show that the reforms, which are intended to make it “fairer and easier” for teachers trained overseas to work in English schools, will only result in an additional 619 teachers from newly eligible countries applying for qualified teacher status (QTS). This marks a 37% increase on the previous year, but is still far short of compensating for the significant decline in European nationals seeking to teach in the UK since the Brexit vote in 2016.
The number of QTS awards to applicants from the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway fell from 4,795 in 2015-16 to just 704 in 2021-22. The reforms are also expected to have little impact on the overall shortfall between current initial teacher training recruitment and government targets, which stands at 9,376 new postgraduate trainees.
Catholic boarding schools 