GETTING TEACHER MIGRATION & MOBILITY RIGHT
CHAPTER 2 SYNOPSIS OF LITERATURE AND DATA AVAILABILITY Synopsis of Literature Review Research on teacher migration increased substantially following reports of significant losses of teachers by the education ministers of several Commonwealth countries, especially small states such as the nations of the Caribbean. Attendees of Commonwealth education meetings beginning in 1997 learned that large scale teacher recruitment and migration was having a serious impact on the education systems of Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. The Cayman Islands Education Minister acknowledged that more than 70 per cent of teaching staff at government schools were expatriate labour, with about 50 per cent coming from the Caribbean, but the large-scale recruitment of teachers by the United States and United Kingdom forced the islands to compete for the best-qualified teachers. Ministers developed a plan of action calling on Commonwealth Education Ministers to examine teacher loss and the impact on each country’s education system and mandating the Commonwealth Secretariat to develop a protocol for the ethical recruitment of teachers. The subsequent study of teacher migration received a major impetus from this action.1 A report by Kimberly Ochs changed conventional thinking on the direction of migration, finding teacher loss to be a global phenomenon impacting both industrial and developing nations. There was evidence of considerable “south-south” and regional recruitment of teachers (for example, between South Africa and Uganda, Guyana to Botswana, India to the Seychelles), although the larger scale movement tended to be either “south-north” or between countries such as Canada and the UK.2 The Commonwealth Secretariat, informed by research of the Working Group on Teacher Recruitment, adopted the Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol in 2005 as a standard of best practice. The Protocol’s stated aim was to: “balance the rights of teachers to migrate internationally, on a temporary or permanent basis, against the need to protect the integrity of national education systems and to prevent the exploitation of scarce human resources of poor countries”.3 The Protocol lays out a 1
See The Commonwealth website for links to some of this literature at www.thecommonwealth.org, and Ochs and Jackson, “Review of the Implementation” for a history of the Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol. 2 Ochs, Summary of ‘Teaching at Risk,’ 2003. 3 Commonwealth Secretariat, “Protocol,” 7. 2004
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