Does it matter if we in England are recruiting teachers so heavily in Jamaica that classrooms there don’t have enough of them? Ask those who run school systems in the Caribbean that desperately need their brightest and best. People will always want to be mobile. The issues are in what numbers, and why and how.
When I became director of education in Hackney in 1989, the first Black person to hold such a post, there was a massive shortage of primary school teachers and secondary maths and science teachers across the country. I recruited 55 teachers in Trinidad to come to work in Hackney; 50 in primary schools and five in secondary schools. They had all been made redundant by their government on the order of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as part of a structural adjustment programme. I insisted on three things. One, that they would come to England as family units unless they were single. Two, that Hackney would be responsible for finding them accommodation and school and college places for their children and would help to find employment for their spouses who were not teachers; and three, that they would all be supported to gain qualified teacher status and graduate and postgraduate qualifications.
They were given work permits for two years, at the end of which the Home Office insisted they return to Trinidad. I had a running battle with the Department for Education and the Department for Employment that resulted in all 55 teachers being given permanent leave to remain, though some of them decided to return to Trinidad for family reasons. The rest made a massive contribution to improving schooling outcomes in Hackney, with some of them becoming subject advisers, school heads and deputies.
This was no brain drain. Rather, it was acknowledging that while the IMF was prepared to decimate Trinidad’s workforce of highly competent and experienced teachers, Hackney council was fully aware of the role they could play in school improvement – especially as there were so few Black teachers in Hackney and, indeed, London.
The training and induction the teachers received in Trinidad and on arrival in London gave them a thorough understanding of race and education here, and of the challenges they were likely to face. As Black teachers with excellent teaching skills and a love for the children they taught, they made a difference to the learning experience and educational achievement of each and every pupil, despite the stereotypical expectations parents and their own teaching colleagues may have had of them.
But that doesn’t seem to be what is happening now in terms of detail and strategy. By choosing to recruit Jamaican teachers as “the right kind of immigrants” to help solve England’s teacher shortage, the government and its academies are failing to pay sufficient regard to the experience of teachers generally – homegrown Black teachers in particular – and the political context of schooling and race.
What expectations do employers have of the workload Jamaican teachers would be expected to carry? How do they deal with situations in which new teachers’ experiences translate into management practices and decision-making that may conflict with the culture of an English school? How will they fare in academies that exclude disproportionate numbers of Black students, given the community’s continuing concern about wasteful, discriminatory and destructive school exclusions?
What’s needed is not a poaching exercise, but a change of mindset. In 2015, David Cameron offered the Jamaican government £25m to build a new prison. Jamaica has a growing crime problem and a terrible murder rate, given its population size. Rather than facilitating Jamaica to lock up its “foreign nationals” serving time in British jails and awaiting deportation, the country should acknowledge its historical responsibility for the state of Jamaica’s schools and the lack of opportunity for its school leavers, especially those from poor urban areas, and invest in repair.
Those teachers who have made the journey are doing what many before have done, and are understandably pursuing what they think is best for themselves and their families. England, meanwhile, has every right to operate in its own interests. It has never done otherwise, and will happily denude the former colony of its qualified and experienced teaching force, whom it played no part in schooling and training. But Jamaica’s teachers also have a job to do: nation-building, educating the nation’s youth and equipping future leaders. England should focus on enabling Jamaica to pay its teachers to achieve working conditions and salary levels that will not be push factors for their migration to English schools.
England has taken unthinkable amounts from the Caribbean, and it still does so. It should think more about how it behaves and what it gives back.
Prof Gus John is an academic and an equality and human rights campaigner
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