A couple of weeks ago, I was sat next to a brilliant young inner-city teacher at our FE Awards. Actively involved in educational discourse, a prominent voice on Twitter and clearly committed to teaching, she was lively company.

But such was her frustration with the state of things in England’s education sector, she told me, that she was probably going to accept an offer of a job at a British school in one of North America’s most dynamic cities.

My new friend was a cast-iron example of a problem that has been repeatedly highlighted in the last few months - the brain drain of teacher talent to the booming international schools market.

Ofsted’s Sir Michael Wilshaw and many others have presented the forecasted 500,000 teachers that these schools will hoover up by 2020 as a big risk to recent advances in British education. How, the chief inspector has asked, can we compete with the vast salaries offered in sunnier climes overseas when we have an increasingly short supply of teachers?

But what if this were not a disaster? What if it were a huge opportunity that the profession’s recruiting sergeant majors had been missing?

Let’s be honest: it’s unlikely that teaching will ever be able to compete with many other professions on financial reward, however much ministers are loathe to admit it. So there has to be something else.

Certainly there’s the sheer joy (or what’s left of it) of teaching young people. That must be the most important reason to sign up to a life of planning, marking and explaining to “hilarious” friends that 12 weeks’ holiday a year doesn’t really pass the Ronseal test.

But what about telling enthusiastic graduates that if you qualify to teach in the UK, it opens up the world to you? That, after a year or two of teaching in Blighty, there is an army of employers from Delhi to Dubai, from Los Angeles to Lagos, desperate to get you to come to work for them.

Your teaching skills will be in demand globally.

Transferable global skills

What other profession has such easily transferable global skills? When an English teacher joins an international school in the United Arab Emirates, they won’t have to get to know the Emirati curriculum or the Emirati school system: the odds are they’ll be teaching a scheme of work in the style of schools that you would find in Enfield or Eccles - but with a bulging pay packet that will make a big dent in any future mortgage deposit back home.

And this temporary migration could be good for the wider English education system, too (assuming that the majority will eventually head home). After all, who wouldn’t want a teaching population with broader cultural experience? Perhaps schools should even encourage their staff to take a year away, in the style of a medical elective. It would be the sign of a mature and confident profession.

Going to teach abroad should not be a symptom of a problem; it should be something that is celebrated as part of a young teacher’s rite of passage.

Promoting the idea won’t worsen the recruitment crisis here and now (those heading away will end up doing so anyway), but it might play a part in tackling the issue in the medium and long term.

The potential calamity is not with the going, therefore, but instead with the coming back.

Many will come home anyway. But as things stand - especially with exams, accountability and assessment systems in both primary and secondary sectors in meltdown - it’s increasingly hard to see why.

Just ask my new friend.

This is an article from the 6 May edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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