The Government plans to spend £10 million on hiring 600 foreign teachers, as it launches one of the biggest ever overseas recruitment campaigns.
A tender published by the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), has revealed how the Department for Education seeks to address the "acute" shortage of teachers in Maths, Physics and Modern Languages.
The cost to the taxpayer of recruiting each teacher will be over £16,000 - before they have even stepped foot in a classroom.
The Government blamed the growth in pupil numbers, improvements in the economy, a shrinking graduate pool and greater competition in the labour market for its failure to recruit enough teachers within the UK. It says that overseas recruitment is necessary as a "supplementary avenue of teacher supply".
Despite initially allocating £4.1 million for the scheme - just £6,800 per teacher - the government has now admitted the project will cost between £6 million and £10 million. Teachers will need to be recruited from overseas, trained up to qualified teacher status and given English lessons if necessary.
The successful company will then need to secure the teachers' passage into the country by guiding them through the visa and immigration process, and then place them in a school. The first cohort of overseas teachers will be placed in schools by September 2018.
Source: The Telegraph