Tag Archives: international education

Am teacher will travel

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The BBC is reporting that another top UK Independent School is opening up a campus in Asia. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35533953 I am sure that the move will make good business sense and possibly even help to keep down fees in their UK operation if it makes money.

The BBC piece concludes that there are now about 8,000 international schools around the world, teaching 4.26 million students, according to research by the International School Consultancy. Apparently, nowhere has growth been faster than in Asia.

Such has been the growth that the BBC article reports Thailand now has over 172 international curriculum schools, half of them following England’s national curriculum.

Malaysia has 142, Japan 233, and Singapore – which makes it difficult for foreigners to enrol in local schools – around 63. Myanmar could also become a hotspot – Dulwich College will open there next year. .Hong Kong which had 92 such schools in 2000, now has 171. Only South Korea has seen a retraction, with some international schools struggling to fill places.

However, the big growth has been in mainland China. From a dozen schools 15 years ago, China has some 530 English-medium international schools, catering for 326,000 students.

Now those that have heard me speak at conferences recently will have noted that I have said I was one of the few people that would be happy to see a slowdown in the Chinese economy because of this growth in schools. I have said that too many international schools in China could be a real drain on teacher supply in this country.

If we assume that the majority of the 8,000 schools worldwide use English as at least a partial medium of instruction and employ an average of ten UK trained teachers per school that would mean upwards of 80,000 trained teachers not available to work in the UK. Assuming a 10% growth, would mean 800 new schools a year and as a result possibly 8,000 teachers departing overseas to staff these schools, this plus the regular replacement numbers for posts in existing schools. This might explain some of the growth in departure rates identified in the recent NAO Report. 8,000 teachers would equate to between a quarter and a third of the output of training in England, although presumably some of the teachers going overseas will come from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so the lower figure might be more realistic. Even so, anything above 10% would be worrying, especially in the subjects where there is a shortage of supply.

It is not clear what can be done to stem the growth of international schools and it is becoming a valuable export industry that no doubt also helps to steer undergraduates in the direction of UK universities. Perhaps we will need to import more teachers from overseas, but that won’t go down well with those worried about immigration.

What we cannot do is allow schools in deprived areas of England to be starved of teachers to satisfy the demands of the affluent middle-classes of the emerging Asian nations.

 

 

Kazakhstan

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As a geographer by background, I am always intrigued to see where the readers of this blog come from? Overwhelmingly, as might be expected for a parochial blog of this nature, the readers come from the United Kingdom. However, views from Kazakhstan have now topped the 100 mark over the past twelve months, making it the third ranked country by number of views of this blog: Thailand is ranked fourth during the same period, with the USA in second places, as might be expected. The People’s Republic of China notched up one visit the day after I commented that I hadn’t seen any views from that country: will the same thing happen again after this post, I wonder?

I am not sure who reads this blog in Kazakhstan and whether they are in Astana, Almaty – the largest city – or out on the Steppes of Central Asia, but I send them all best wishes for the celebration of their Independence Day in a couple of weeks time.

This musing about the geographical distribution of readers naturally followed on from writing the previous post about the likelihood of the need for the recruitment of overseas teachers to work in schools in England finding it challenging to recruitment enough home-based teachers. I doubt many Kazakhstan teachers will be headed for the bright lights of London just yet, but teachers from the Irish Republic do seem to be likely to face a publicity blitz trying to entice them to teach in London and other parts of the country.

Teaching is increasingly becoming a global profession with opportunities to practice across the globe. I first visited international schools in Dubai in 1991, coincidentally taking the first digital pictures on the trip – long since lost – with a Canon camera. The past half century has marked profound technological changes, the tablet might one day rival the original word processor as a change of monumental magnitude, a development rivalled only by the development of the internet that has made the communication of this blog possible. Or, it might, like the fax machine and overhead projector, become little more than a footnote in the history of technology and communications. Either way, I think that a teaching and education approach based upon a nineteenth century model of learning has eventually to succumb to new approaches. What that will mean for teachers and their relationships with pupils isn’t clear.

Such changes will also affect the State and its relationship with its citizens. Transferring the cost of education back to parents might be seen by some governments an alternative to raising taxes, especially as governments may think that such an approach has been working in higher education where tuition fees have been introduced. Although here, pressure to reduce fees through competition has yet to really manifest itself; probably because demand still exceeds supply in most countries.

For us, in England, the core is how to deliver effective learning to those that don’t see the value of schooling? Does that require us to do things better, or to do better things?