The Recruitment and Retention of Languages Teachers of Colour from the Global South in England

Lisa Panford | 7th May 2025 | Opinion Articles

In the following opinion article Lisa Panford finds that urgent intervention is needed to address the conditions into which languages teachers of Colour from the Global South are inducted. Further, their retention in the profession requires attending to the ways that policies and practices within our own subject discipline cause harm to People of Colour.

As noted in the policy collection framing this opinion piece, the teacher recruitment crisis is stark in secondary languages and requires our close attention if we are concerned with addressing the challenges of uptake. As our subject was still to recover fully from the blow of its removal from the core curriculum at Key Stage 4 and with it reeling in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the difficulties to recruit led to languages teachers being ascribed the status of shortage occupation. Following the introduction of policies which have targeted international trainees, the latest forecasts predict that we can expect modest recruitment increments for the academic cycle 2025-26 driven by non-UK domiciled applicants from Nigeria and Ghana. This trend coupled with the government’s Fairer Approach scheme which affords Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) to linguists who already hold teaching qualifications in Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa and Ukraine signals that we might expect an increase in People of Colour (POC) teaching languages within secondary schools in England.

The increase of POC entering the profession might be conveniently packaged as a response to perennial reports documenting their underrepresentation  and as a demonstration of commitment to diversifying the teacher workforce. But in light of the lack of anti-racist education policy development in England to address the persisting differential patterns of professional outcomes for teachers of Colour, initiatives which seek to recruit from the Global South would more accurately be interpreted as the interest convergence of addressing the shortages in domestic supply. In addition to the ethical problems associated with the consequences of extracting educators from the Global South are those associated with how this process is managed and the conditions into which these teacher candidates are inducted.

Coherent policy interventions, for example, are urgently needed to address the practical and financial barriers presented to all international trainees. These include the reinstatement of international relocation bursaries and revisions to the current visa sponsorship process which are proving to be a major hindrance to trainees' ability to secure their first school appointments following the successful completion of their training course (Claro and Nkune, 2025; Campbell and Davies, 2025). But while the recruitment of teacher candidates is important, it is their retention which will most powerfully mitigate the teacher shortages in schools and ensure the resilience of our subject discipline. This requires attending to the ways that our institutional and subject disciplinary ideologies, systems, structures and practices contribute to the pushout rates which disproportionately impact teachers of Colour.  That trainee teachers of Colour (across all subject disciplines) may experience isolation, be exposed to racism and receive inadequate preparation to navigate the racism they are subjected to in teaching has been well documented. Less well understood, are the raft of compounding subject-specific factors which may make languages teacher training a racially hostile space.

Racism and languages teaching intersect at the application stage, the point at which, according to recent data, the biggest losses of languages teachers of Colour occur. Teacher candidates, many of whom are multilingual and already hold teaching qualifications, may have their multiliteracies downgraded because they are valued solely on their proficiency of the ‘big 3’ (European) languages. They may also be inaccurately ascribed or denied native speaker status in the interview process. The hierarchisation of languages and their delegitimisation may be further entrenched by the artificial distinction made between ‘Modern Foreign’ and ‘Home Heritage and Community Languages’ and an assessment provision which excludes all indigenous African languages. Languages trainee teachers of Colour may also have their subject knowledge, literacy and professional legitimacy questioned by university tutors or school mentors on the basis of their accents or non-standardised (read, African or Latin American variants of) French or Spanish (see my contribution in chapter 14 of Molway and Gordon, 2025). They may be subjected to further harm on school placements when they are charged to deliver a curriculum which includes celebratory narratives of colonialism with teaching materials which present tokenistic representations and harmful stereotypes of the Global South. Or when they are required to navigate deficit discourses about pupils of Colour as explanatory factors for disparities in attainment or engagement in languages with their school colleagues.

In addition to the need for statutory endorsement of the Anti-Racism Framework through the Initial Teacher Training and Early Careers  and Ofsted Inspection frameworks, a targeted, subject disciplinary approach to identifying the ‘hidden workload of coping with racism’ is required if we are concerned with retaining languages teachers of Colour within the profession. Diagnosing racism in a nice field like languages  teacher education is an uncomfortable position to take not least because many of us who are embedded within the domain have dedicated our careers to embracing, sharing and promoting international perspectives and cultural insights.  This positioning, however, does not make us unaffected by racism or devoid of the responsibility to identify and disrupt the ways in which we perpetuate racism through our practices. Those of us who are implicated within teacher education, whether in our capacity as teacher educators or school-based mentors/colleagues, must first recognise, and then address, the raciolinguistic ideologies we uphold through the policies and practices to which we subscribe. It is incumbent upon us to attend to the ways in which our profession and subject discipline cause harm to POC and this matter is particularly urgent if we are to continue to exploit the ‘the strong educational ties’ we have with countries of the Global South. 

Language teacher candidates of Colour from the Global South must be valued not as commodities, but as the professional agents who will shape the future iterations of our subject discipline, enthuse and promote curiosity and a ‘liberation from insularity’ for the next generation of linguists. It is imperative that we pay close attention to their treatment.

Futher reading

Bevan, Kerry, 2024. ‘An Exploration of Student MFL Teachers’ Emerging Perceptions of Decolonizing the MFL Curriculum’, Focus on Practice (Wales Journal of Education). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16922/wje.p6.

Cushing, Ian. 2023. ‘“Miss, Can You Speak English?”: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Oppression in Initial Teacher Education’, British Journal of sociology of Education, 44.1: 896-911.

Molway, Laura and Anna Lise Gordon. 2025. Mentoring Languages Teachers in the Secondary School. A Practical Guide (London: Routledge).

Panford 2025.pdf

Download PDF • 85KB