Karl Williams: Another immigration backdoor is opening

Exporting education means importing more labour

Ministers have consistently failed to get immigration under control because the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Nowhere is this more evident than in education. Not content with importing vast numbers of students from developing nations, Britain’s universities are now going after their teachers too.  

A record 490,000 immigrants came to the UK on sponsored study visas last year, bringing with them 135,000 dependents. International student numbers were up by 90 percent on 2018, while dependents coming over on student visas increased tenfold. These two trends were driven mainly by immigrants from non-EU countries, notably India and Nigeria.  

Most people, with one or two honourable exceptions, have been surprised by the scale of this surge. But this was always the post-Brexit plan. It was set down in black and white, in the Government’s own ‘International Education Strategy’ (IES).

First formulated in the chaotic twilight of the May premiership, the IES was reaffirmed in February 2021. Essentially, it is a strategy for turning the UK’s education sector into an export industry.

In practice, this means increasing ‘education exports to £35 billion per year’ and ‘international students hosted in the UK to at least 600,000 per year’. And from the get-go, diversification of student recruitment and market access was seen as vital, with the priority targets being India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and Nigeria. 

So whatever the Government is now saying about reducing the number of dependents piggybacking on student visas, it still needs to pump up student immigration by another 110,000 to hit its own targets – hence the pushback from the Department for Education on suggestions that numbers should come down.

However, away from the growing furore around student numbers, a new immigration route is being opened up for school teachers: the ‘international qualified teacher status’, or iQTS. Added to the IES in the 2021 update, the idea is ‘to export teacher training’.

The logic behind the new qualification is simple. Teachers will be trained abroad by UK-based providers to UK standards, in collaboration with schools in the trainees’ home countries. Backed up by the reputation of Britain’s education sector, the iQTS will become the international gold standard of teaching qualifications.

Ostensibly, the selling point of the iQTS is that it will enable aspiring teachers to get jobs in ‘a range of schools worldwide’. But the iQTS also automatically leads to qualified teacher status (QTS) in England. This qualification is a legal requirement for teachers in maintained schools and is seen as desirable for teachers in academies and free schools, as well as the independent sector.   

So this raises the question: if you are a Vietnamese iQTS holder, is the value in that qualification going to come mainly from opportunities to teach in Nigeria? And ditto for Nigerians in Vietnam? Or is it going to come from moving to Britain? Answers on a postcard.

While the IES glossed over it in 2021, the Government’s own ‘Get Into Teaching’ website is certainly not shy about drawing out the logical implications of the iQTS-QTS equivalence. Of course, immigrants still need to meet minimum salary requirements of £26,200. But the minimum starting salary for state school teachers is already above this at £28,000, and is rising to £30,000 this September.  

The iQTS will be a passport to a job in England. And both schools and migrants are starting to cotton on to the fact. So again, it turns out that the IES, which was supposed to be an export strategy, is actually an import strategy. And one which the stakeholders are rallying behind.  

True, English schools are facing recruitment and retention (R&R) challenges. But R&R is a problem in Australia, France and many other countries. The causes are similar: bad leadership which leads to pointless bureaucracy, and the new lure of homeworking in comparable white collar professions. These things are already being addressed: the answer is not to rely on a massive influx of migration through the iQTS, but to make sure heads run their schools properly and make them more attractive places to work in for everyone.

Unfortunately, the iQTS has gained its own momentum. The pilot scheme was launched in September 2022 with six providers. From this September, 14 institutions will be providing iQTS training, with post-1992 ex-polytechnics preponderant: Plymouth Marjon, Sheffield Hallam, Edge Hill and so on. Doubtless more will follow suit in 2024. And these institutions now have every incentive to entrench themselves further into a pro-immigration position. There is money to be made.    

So any attempt to change the iQTS policy – and the IES more broadly – will result in resistance not just from DfE civil servants, but also from universities and their well-connected chancellors and vice chancellors. And that is before we get on to schools, teacher unions and education NGOs. In fact, reforming the iQTS and closing down this incipient immigration route will mean taking on the entire bureaucratic-stakeholder nexus of the education establishment – Michael Gove’s intractable ‘blob’.

Nevertheless, there might be an opportunity here. More so than benign-sounding student migration, the iQTS could be the crowbar that prises open the blob’s carapace. The British public want lower immigration, and that was what the 2019 Tory manifesto promised. If the Government is serious about delivering on this, it needs to emulate Gove’s former radicalism and be prepared to teach education stakeholders hard lessons in accountability and democratic legitimacy.

Karl Williams is Deputy Research Manager at the Centre for Policy Studies