Education, immigration, qualification

4th December 2025 by Timo Hannay [link]

Over the last few years, the UK government has implemented a series of measures to attract teachers from overseas to train and teach at schools in England. These have ranged from bursaries and relocation payments to visa advice and recognition of foreign teaching qualifications. Teachers in physics and modern languages, subjects in which there have been severe shortages, are a particular focus. Relocation payments were stopped earlier this year, but bursaries/scholarships (typically around £30k, tax free) continue, as does Department for Education (DfE) advice to schools about hiring international teachers through the Skilled Worker visa route, and unsalaried trainees through the Student visa route. Their Get Into Teaching service also provides explicit advice to non-UK citizens.

But how much impact has all this had? The DfE reports today that overall Initial Teacher Training (ITT) recruitment is up, with targets exceeded in primary and 8 of 18 secondary subject areas. In physics, the shortfall has been narrowed: last year the number of applicants reached only 31% of the target, while this year they are at 77%. But a shortfall is still a shortfall, and it is important to note that fully 63% of this year's physics trainees (684 of 1,086 students) are international recruits, so this route remains critical to meeting the ongoing – and thus far unmet – demand for qualified physics teachers in England.

As the Association for Science Education (ASE), in collaboration with the Gatsby Foundation, also reports, England's ability to attract overseas teachers and trainees has been stymied by (among other things) an unnecessarily complex application process, and a UK visa regime that creates administrative and financial barriers for applicants and schools alike. They also report a lack of diagnostic data to better understand what is and isn't working at a systemic level. (See the ASE's accompanying news article and Gatsby's coverage too.)

To add our own modest data contribution, we have analysed the ways in which these policies are – or are not – reflected in the recruiting activities of secondary schools in England, determined by vacancies posted on their websites. This work has also been supported by the Gatsby Foundation, for which we would like to express our thanks.

In summary, we find that:

• Mentions of visas in school vacancy web pages have increased in recent years, albeit from a very low base.
• However, these do not usually relate to staff recruitment, and where they do it is usually to say that the school does not sponsort visa applications.
• Thus there appears to be little to no evidence that schools in England are actively trying to attract overseas teachers, at least in physics, with offers of visa sponsorship.

 

In-ad-visa-ble

For many years, SchoolDash has been studying vacancies posted on the websites of secondary schools in England. One by-product of this is a cache of nearly 9.5 million recruitment pages gathered since 2017. This allows us to retrospectively analyse their contents, for example by searching for certain keywords.

Figure 1 shows the results of searches for selected terms across web pages collated between September 2019 and September 2025 (just over 7 million pages in total). The proportion of pages mentioning 'physics' rises and falls with the usual annual cycle of teacher recruitment, with peaks in the spring and troughs in the summer; there was also a lull during the 2020-21 pandemic, when school recruiting displayed a prolonged decline. This illustrates a useful point: though finding the word 'physics' on these pages is not the same as finding a verified advert for a physics teaching vacancy, the overall frequency is indicative of such vacancies.

In contrast, mentions of 'bursary' are not seasonal, but have waxed and waned over a longer period of time, with a gradual increase during 2021-22 followed by a decline during 2024-25. The reasons for this are not completely clear, but might reflect shifting priorities or sentiments among schools. (Note also that bursaries are paid not through the school, but during training at a university.) Pages containing the word 'overseas' show a striking pattern, with a huge drop in late 2020, followed by a steady decline since then. This appears to be mostly down to Brexit: there was a similarly steep increase in late 2018 (not shown in the graph), which coincided with the UK-EU Draft Withdrawal Agreement. This announced a new proposed immigration regime, which then came into effect in December 2020, with EU free movement ending and a points-based system being introduced. The results for 'visa' are even starker: until mid-2023, mentions were very rare, but have since risen sharply – a possible sign that visa issues have become more salient for schools. We explore this trend further below.

(Use the menu below to switch between 'physics', 'bursary', 'overseas' and 'visa'. Hover over the graph to see corresponding values.)

 

Lab-Leading Migrants

As already mentioned, simply finding these terms on school websites – even on recruitment pages – does not necessarily mean that they are referring to vacancies. For all we know, they might be about pupil admissions ('bursary'), school trips ('overseas') or credit card payments ('visa'). The sheer number of pages involved make it impractical to check each one by eye, but we can use a large language model (LLM) to help.

To that end, we fed a subset of 9,555 of these web pages to an LLM chosen on the basis that (a) they contained the word 'physics' and (b) the page at the same web address (that is, URL) had not contained this term on our previous visit, usually the night before. In other words, these were putative new physics recruitment ads. The LLM was then instructed to confirm for each page whether or not it really did contain an advert for a physics teacher vacancy. About 50% of them (4,790 adverts) were thus confirmed, and manual checking of a subset indicated that precision and recall were high (well over 90%).

As shown in Figure 2, these also showed the typical annual pattern of peaks in the spring and troughs in the summer, as well as a mid-pandemic decline, a post-pandemic spike, and a more recent slide in overall numbers of vacancies, as we have previously reported.

(Hover over the graph to see corresponding values.)

We also instructed the LLM to determine whether the same page explicitly mentioned:

• Bursaries related to recruiting or training teachers
• Grants relevant to hiring (eg, for relocation, recruitment or retention)
• Visas or immigration status
• Visa sponsorship

The results by calendar year are shown in Figure 3. (Note that these include all pages analysed by the LLM, not just those with physics teacher adverts. The trends were similar for both sets, but analysing all pages provides larger sample sizes and reduces statistical fluctuations.)

The first thing to note is that very few recruitment pages (<5%) mention any of these factors. Beyond that, mentions of bursaries have been more or less flat. Those for grants, visas and visa sponsorship have all, in their own ways, shown increases since 2023. However, it is important to note that this indicates only that they have become salient, not necessarily that they are on offer to applicants.

(Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values.)

To explore this further, we manually inspected adverts from 2025 mentioning visas and sponsorship. In almost all cases, these were either statements that visa sponsorship by the school was not on offer, or were the result of a new search option on the website relating to visas or sponsorship. In only two cases did we identify physics teaching vacancies where visa sponsorship was explicitly offered.

 

Font crawl

Of course, it is possible that for many schools, information about aspects such as visas and sponsorship are not contained on the main vacancies listings page, but in other documents that provide further details on each position. We do not routinely gather such pages, but we do conduct occasional deep crawls of secondary school websites, collating essentially all identifiable and available pages. The most recent of these was conducted in mid-September 2025, so we used this as a basis to conduct a keyword search across the full text for pages mentioning 'physics' and 'visa'.

Across 5,956 schools and 2.3 million web pages, we found a total of 4,019 pages, representing 238 schools, that contained both 'physics' and 'visa'. But on manual inspection it turned out that the vast majority of these were spurious matches, often relating to pupil admissions, especially at independent schools seeking to attract families from overseas.

In fact, only 13 of these pages were about both (a) staff recruitment and (b) related immigration issues. Of those, 9 were about various kinds of teacher training provision, with a statement that visa applications would not be sponsored. One was about teacher training with an offer of visa sponsorship; one was a school group offering teacher recruitment services to other schools; one was for a science technician position, but unable to provide visa sponsorship; and one – drum roll, please – was for a physics teacher vacancy, though it was at best ambiguous about visa sponsorship.

Admittedly, September is not high season for school recruitment, but these results suggest that, as far as we have been able to detect, schools are not using offers of visa sponsorship to attract physics teachers from overseas.

 

Vis-à-visa

Having analysed millions of secondary school recruitment pages dating back over several years, and millions more pages from a deep crawl of school websites conducted earlier this year, we find almost no references to visa sponsorship in relation to physics teaching vacancies. Where we have found comments about visas for staff, they usually say that the school does not sponsor applications. Thus there appears to be little to no evidence that schools in England are actively trying to attract overseas teachers, at least in physics, with offers of visa sponsorship.

To understand what might be putting them off, and what to do about it, as well as the wider picture, we encourage you to read the ASE report that we mentioned at the top of this post.

As ever, we welcome your thoughts. Please write to: [email protected].