Further Education - Recruiting staff abroad?
WORKERS, FEB 2006 ISSUE
A LOOMING crisis in further education could mean that many lecturers may need to be recruited from abroad. This warning was given recently to the House of Commons education select committee by David Hunter, chief executive of Lifelong Learning UK, which is responsible for developing the FE workforce.
By 2010, about 135,000 new staff will be needed to replace an ageing workforce in a growing education sector. But since colleges were taken away from local education authorities, pay and conditions have slumped compared with school teachers – and now 44% of FE teachers are over 45.
The obvious solution should be to improve lecturers' pay and job security to attract new and younger recruits. Hunter has argued for this in the past but been ignored. The alternative, he said, would be to look abroad, probably outside the EU (where workers are prepared to work for much less). Such workers would be unlikely to have the necessary skills, said Hunter, so would need to be trained from scratch. Another case of importing cheaper workers to keep down pay and conditions in Britain.