Leonardo Blair, Staff Reporter
LOCAL DIPLOMA-TRAINED teachers seeking jobs in the United Kingdom were last week snubbed by British recruiters as they were perceived to be insufficiently prepared to work in their classrooms.
Despite reports of a severe teacher shortage in the UK, one local agent for British recruiters told The Sunday Gleaner that many Jamaican teachers who were previously accepted into the British education system with only a diploma are now experiencing serious discrimination from their English colleagues.
"A number of them (diploma teachers) now in the system are having a difficult time. They are on their own. They don't have any support and the schools (in the UK) don't see them as qualified. Some of them when they go there end up as teaching assistants," said Christine Kelly, director of local/overseas operations at Jobquest Jamaica, an international recruiting firm.
Ms. Kelly who has been recruiting teachers from Jamaica since 2001, says the companies she has been recruiting for have insisted on degree-trained teachers only, which is the standard normally required of teachers in the British education system. Already, says Ms. Kelly, she has successfully recruited 50 teachers holding degrees from Jamaica and she is currently seeking to recruit more of them.
Several diploma-trained teachers who had turned up among nearly 400 recruit hopefuls at a seminar hosted by Jobquest and the Liverpool Hope University College, UK, at the Altamont Court Hotel in Kingston last week were shocked to learn of the distinction.
Many of them who had come expecting jobs, walked away in disappointment when they were told that they would have to upgrade their diplomas to degrees before they could be considered as serious contenders for Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in the UK.
"I felt like we were undertrained in comparison to the English teachers in terms of what they had to offer," said one diploma-trained teacher after the presentation.
DEFICIENCIES
Paul Davies, associate dean of Education at Liverpool Hope University College who was one of the presenters, explained that "the diploma falls short of the qualification required of teachers" in the British system.
He explained that teacher hopefuls who have the equivalent of a UK bachelor's degree stood a better chance at landing teaching jobs in the UK compared with their diploma-trained counterparts.
In response to the distinction being made, Hazel Keating, principal of the St. Joseph's Teachers College which trains teachers for the early childhood and primary levels said that local teacher training was adequate for the Jamaican system.
"Our system is different from theirs," she said. "You can't take a primary teacher from Jamaica and expect them to function in their system like that. Our system is adequate for Jamaica. They must know what they want."
She explained that the Government was in the meantime examining the idea of raising the bar at teacher training institutions to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree.
