“We are just cheap labour”: another Jamaican teacher opens up on low pay at school run by large academy trust

Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, from where some teachers have been recruited to work in English schools. Pic : iStock/Getty Images

A teacher recruited from Jamaica has spoken of how she feels she and some of her compatriots are being discriminated against and treated as “cheap labour,” having been recruited to teach in an English academy but being paid thousands of pounds less than her UK-trained colleagues with similar experience levels. 

Sarah Davis,* who arrived to teach in England two years ago, has only just been granted qualified teacher status and now has had to face being classed as an “early career teacher” – despite having eight years’ teaching experience in Jamaica.

Her situation means that, as well as seeing her salary hit through having been classed as an “unqualified” staff member for those two years, even after this she is unable to be placed on the upper pay scale in line with her experience, because her years’ work in her home country are not counted in England’s system. 

This is despite, Ms Davis argues, England’s schools being happy to draw on the experience of herself and her compatriots in filling often serious classroom, and in some cases management, gaps.