 lester123: No I don't believe it is xenophobia at all. I actually agree with countries training their own teachers rather than poaching teachers from other countries, particularly less developed/less wealthy countries. I was just stating a fact that there is now a surplus of teachers in the UK and that this has been a fairly recent change.
Notwithstanding the tendentious name choice of 2 earlier posters, neither of whom from their conveniently appended photo looks anything like the small number of unfortunate and downtrodden African refugees whom I have come across in real life, this is not a discussion about the issues highlighted. It is a discussion about voluntary economic migration. Lower middle class wasp workers who choose to exercise their skills in foreign climes. Especially apparently from UK to Oz. And vice versa. lester123: ...I was replying to an OTT on the OTT forum, of course I wasn't going to address how these changes have affected UK teachers
Obviously you are free to address whatever isssues you see fit. Ditto not address others. As you see fit. But, I dispute the logic of you blithe affirmation "of course." I would suggest that the issue of how any measures being enforced in the UK affects UK teachers is a crucial part of the global picture within which the position of OTT can be analysed. To repeat my main point, teachers in the UK are under the cosh and hence OTT are too. Probably in spades. That is the nature of the beast vis a vis nation states in the real world. lester123: It is a fairly open door at present, as (4 year university trained) teachers are assessed and judged on an individual basis without arbitrary barriers preventing employment (as long as you can meet other visa requirements).
Where should I begin with the above. all the points which I have highlighted are problematic. To me at least. To begin with, what proportion of the English teacher workforce, crammed as it is to the guanwales with exceptions, special cases and friends of the headteacher, meet the apparently simple condition of "4 year university trained", even if you accept the weak meaning of 3 year degree plus 1 year PGCE. Less than 50 per cent, I suggest. Much less perhaps. [If you take the literal meaning, virtually nobody in English school education has a 4 year undergraduate degree. Scotland does honours degrees like that, but not England generally] So plenty would get a very dusty reply from Oz House it seems to me. But the central issue is the choice of the word "arbitrary", which for me initially counts as meaningless but strongly pejorative, in the context. All rules are arbitrary to those who don t like them, of course. 30mph as no better than 29mph or 31mph as a speed limit. It is arbitrary in that sense. But it is not arbitrary in the sense that the named figure is universally applied [in the most unlikely circumstance of a visit to the courts.] Which elements of the rules for OTT are in your opinion "arbitrary" in the true sense of applied diffeently to different people of similar standing? Now for me arbitrary is "judging on an individual basis" with implicitly no known criterion for the decision but plenty of scope for creative decision making. I have personally seen lots of that in English schools, but I always honestly thought that a place like Australia, which I have no direct personal knowledge of whatsoever, would have eschewed such practices.
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