AJARN COMMENT Rules can change, but as the situation is - or the direction it seems to be going in at the moment - I think were going to see a significant decline in the number of teachers who want to come and work in Thailand. If the military coup didnt put enough people off, then the new tourist visa crackdown has even greater implications. As Ive already said, gone are the days when schools can make teachers work on a tourist visa for a probation period and then send them out of the country to get a non-B visa. If the mission fails, the teacher wont be let back in. They will be stranded in a neighboring country. Surely no teacher is going to risk that. A teacher told me yesterday that 80% of the foreign teachers at his school are doing constant visa runs because they lack degrees. Thats all going to stop now the border crossings have toughened up. So the school will need to replace an awful lot of teachers. The question is - how do they do it? They cant turn to teacher agencies (assuming the school hires directly in the first place) because many agencies are having just as tough a time hiring qualified teachers as the schools are. I spoke to one recruitment manager at a large secondary school this week and he told me that they had decided to go down the package teacher route. By package teacher Im talking about the numerous companies abroad who sell the Thailand dream (six months teaching in Thailand, accommodation, sim card, weekends spent riding elephants, etc, etc) I can see how that might work for a rural school, who are just interested in the novelty of the students seeing a foreign face, but not for a large Bangkok school who needs its teachers to know what they are doing in the classroom rather than some hipster graduate that thinks life in Thailand is hopefully one long beach party.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 01:58:37 +0000
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