Now that the last little bird has flown out of the nest, I am considering emigrating from the US to the UK to teach maths. I already have QTS status and I saw an advertisement for Quantum Scholars. It looks like a recruitment group supported by the Ministry for Education but (call it paranoia) I’m a little leery of recruiters especially when there is little information outside of their own website. So does anyone in the UK have experience with or knowledge of Quantum Scholars?
I would always look at the information published by the UK Government. Look at the UK government’s own website for more info, which links to Quantum Scholars site as one of the recruitment agencies they use.
How is this a thing? Why is the UK in the position where they want to import teachers from the USA, NZ, SA, Canada etc?
[Moderating]
Since this is asking for personal experiences, let’s move it to IMHO
Because persistent dissatisfaction with pay and working conditions in the profession, making it difficult to recruit and retain teachers, now coincides with a demographic bulge which increases the number of students in secondary school, and so the demand for teachers. The problem is particularly acute in the fields of science, maths, modern languages and information technology, where appropriately qualified teachers have a variety of career options outside the education profession.
Switching to paid tuition in '97 and then the 2004 HE Act probably didn’t help things.
Eh?
There is a long-standing tradition of bringing teachers here from other English-speaking countries. I was at a school in the 1950s and we had a Canadian history teacher. He was a nice guy, but incapable of controlling a class of 30 teenage boys who found that they only had to ask him a question about Canada and he would spend the rest of the lesson telling us what a great place it was/is.
There is a big shortage of teachers here for a number of reasons; not least because of how they get so much publicity telling everyone what a rotten job they have in an effort to back up their pay claims. Like many jobs, it will vary enormously according to where the school is, but more importantly on the head and the school culture.
If people have to pay for uni, they’re less inclined to do jobs that pay less when they finish, was my thinking with that.
Teaching’s not badly paid, despite what teachers might tell you. Add in decent pensions, and a lot of them do better than people in my profession (advertising).
Those pensions are not to be sniffed at: They are not dependant on some large ‘pot’ of money somewhere but are paid directly from the government and are directly based on earnings. Basically, a teacher will get a pension equal to 1/60th of their salary for every year they were a member of the scheme; so after 30 years, they can retire on, effectively, half-pay, and this is adjusted for inflation each year too.
I am afraid you are out of date on the Teachers pension scheme.
Those who started before a certain date and expect to retire within the next 10 or so years will remain on the scheme you describe.
The majority of new entrants and those with longer than around 10 years to work have been - or will be - moved to the career average scheme which has a normal retirement age of between 66 to 68 dependent upon date of birth.
Contributions have risen from around 3% to 7.2% for staff - the scheme is no longer the bargain it once was.
There have been problems with the costs of the pension scheme such that contributions have increased so much, the payout date increased and the effect of careeer averages has reduced the payout so much that for some staff it has not been worth joining it - which has the knock on effect of making the latest scheme less viable due to reduced contributors.
What it means is that the government737SS47 has had to fill in the black hole by calling is a ‘good deal’ but put over £900 million of public money into the scheme to support it.
In the NHS the problem was even more stark and led to a long running work to hours by consultants because they were actually penalised for earning more than a certain amount - the contributions rack up as salary increases which - when added to the higher tax rates meant they were actually taking home very little more for lots more working hours.
The Fire Brigades Union took the government to court of the the cost of employee contributions on the ground that the costs of contributions are around 3% higher than the value of the scheme to the employee - and they have won that round of the legal battle to have their excess contributions returned to members. This is a test case because it will means that all the other public service employees that have been forced into the current public sector pension arrangements will also have a valid claim.
What it all boils down to is this, the pension scheme for public workers under around 50 is poor value and is contributing to the difficulty in recruiting staff - hence the shortfall of 92000 nursing staff in the NHS - these are unfilled posts.
You can dd they have been trying to recruit staff into police, prisons, fire brigades, probation and they cannot fill the vacancies.
My advice is that the teachers pension scheme is only marginally worthwhile joining - but only because everyone should make provision for old age and not because it is a good scheme.
“Not badly paid” and “can earn more elsewhere” are not binary opposites.
I agree. Another factor is that there’s been a push to try and recruit more of the cream of graduates into teaching (those with first and high second class degrees), with full bursaries only available to those that meet this criteria. The problem with this is twofold. Firstly, these high achieving graduates are precisely those who, if they don’t have a vocation for teaching, are also likely to get good, high paying jobs in the private sector. And secondly, those who might previously have gone into teaching with less prestigious degrees (and no doubt become competent teachers),already saddled with student debt from their undergraduate degree, are more likely to want to move into the workforce to pay off that debt rather than incur more debt by doing their teaching certificate.
OB
I’ve decided and because I already have my QTS (thank you Michael Gove) I will be pursuing emigrating to the UK either at the start of the next school year or the one after depending oh how much QS helps with that process.
Do you guys just put the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything?