US teenager hopes to study in UK, stay on as English teacher

Hi - I am posting this on behalf of a friend. As my knowledge is not enough for me to help her, I hope that someone here might be able to advise.

If I have posted in the wrong forum, please accept my apologies.

My friend has just started her second-to-last year in high school in the United States. She is a US citizen. She could possibly claim Canadian citizenship through her grandmother, but she does not have it now.

My friend is very keen to study for an undergraduate degree in English in the UK (starting in autumn 2016), earn a PGCE certificate and hopefully stay in the UK and teach English at the post-primary level.

Can anyone offer advice as to how to make this happen? My knowledge is quite scant, but my intuition says that coming to the UK to study might not be so difficult, but staying on after graduation might be trickier for a non-EEA, non-Commonwealth citizen. How likely are post-primary English teachers to be sponsored by local authorities/the Department of Education? Is the demand for teachers in this discipline much higher than supply?

Any advice is truly much appreciated.

Many thanks

Not a problem, but very expensive.

Budget £40k for the full three/four year course inc PGCE, not for the short of funds but maybe parents?

Canadian Citizenship won't help apart from maybe YMS but that's for then, not now.

After that she'd be in the mix with the rest, to be honest there are lots of native UK people in the same boat at that time, not sure a US English speaker would gain any kudos, those days are over so she'd be bottom of the list for a Work Permit. Bear in mind work Permits are generally issued to experienced professionals, not this fresh out of Uni...

YMMV.....

Thanks for the reply.

Wanderer wrote:After that she'd be in the mix with the rest, to be honest there are lots of native UK people in the same boat at that time, not sure a US English speaker would gain any kudos, those days are over so she'd be bottom of the list for a Work Permit. Bear in mind work Permits are generally issued to experienced professionals, not this fresh out of Uni...

That's really what I'm getting at. I didn't imagine that studying here would be too tough (although expensive...), I thought that the difficulties would be with staying on in the UK after study would be tough.

So really I'm trying to get a handle on whether it will be difficult for a newly qualified, non-EEA English teacher to be sponsored in the UK directly after graduation. I guess it's pretty unlikely? Are there other fields which are more in demand?

Many thanks

They are generally struggling with well educated science teachers - and a lot of primary schools are going to need to start looking for teachers who can teach programming.

But it's important to understand that there's been a HUGE push to get graduates into teaching - when I left uni (albeit 15 years ago) - I had a significant number of my friends jump into teaching in some way.

It is expensive and difficult for schools and LEAs to sponsor employees so they are much more likely to take from their (rather huge) pool of UK grads and EU grads for which they have to do nothing.