Recruiting from abroad
Private nurseries having difficulty finding the staff they need are following schools down the road to recruiting them from other countries. Alison Mercer reports
Private nurseries having difficulty finding the staff they need are following schools down the road to recruiting them from other countries. Alison Mercer reports
Porchea Samuels describes herself laughingly as 'either a guinea pig or a pioneer'. She is the first nursery nurse to be recruited in South Africa and employed in Britain by the Teddies nursery group. Many others are likely to follow in her footsteps, as the recruitment crisis in the UK bites and nursery chains increasingly seek to recruit qualified staff from overseas.
Porchea is a qualified teacher aide, or assistant, with 12 years' nursery nursing experience. Last year she spotted a newspaper advertisement seeking nursery staff in the UK and placed by new recruitment agency Psycad. Porchea's application was successful and in July last year she moved to London to take up a job in Teddies' Twickenham nursery, initially for one year (see box).
The woman behind Porchea's move to the UK is Teddies co-founder Amanda Johnson. Teddies was bought by BUPA Healthcare in August 2000 and Amanda left full-time employment there at the end of 2001, although she remains a non-executive director. Now she has positioned herself at the forefront of recruiting nursery staff from overseas and Teddies has become one of the first customers for her new venture - unsurprising, perhaps, given BUPA's experience in recruiting healthcare staff from overseas.
Amanda's move into recruitment started when she made contact with a business called Symbiosis, which specialises in placing nurses from South Africa in Saudi Arabia. She left Teddies to go into partnership with Symbiosis to form a new enterprise, Psycad International Recruitment services, which specialises in placing teachers of all age groups and nursery nurses in the UK. She is now the managing director of Psycad UK, though Psycad also has offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg and hopes to open for business in New Zealand, Australia and Canada within the next 18 months.
Amanda believes that interest in staff from overseas has increased dramatically. According to Home Office figures, in the first eight months of last year, 3,700 permits were issued for foreign teachers, as compared to 1,405 the previous year. South Africa is the most fertile recruiting ground, with 1,311 permits being issued for the UK for South African teachers, more than double the next most common source country, Australia.
Psycad plans to have a relatively small client base within the UK and cover all the issues involved in recruiting from overseas. Amanda is registered as a work permit representative and handles all the administration in ensuring checks are complete. All staff are given an induction before they leave South Africa, have accommodation arranged for them and are picked up from the airport by a Psycad representative.
The recruitment process is meticulous and designed to give as much security as possible to both the client company and staff. Applications are followed by a face-to-face interview at one of the South African offices. If this is successful, full details are forwarded to Amanda, including information about police checks, health checks and references, all of which are followed up. The candidate is then interviewed over the telephone, first by Psycad UK and then by the potential employer. If the employer wishes to make an offer, this is sent in writing to the candidate, along with contracts, terms of employment, job description and required health and police forms. Psycad UK processes the work permit application, which normally takes from ten days to three weeks, and arranges flights.
Amanda says, 'The future for Psycad looks immensely promising. The demand is substantial and there is a strong supply of suitable candidates at all levels. Psycad UK has been trading only since January 2001, but the airport run is already becoming familiar to us. We would hope to be placing 20 candidates a month by the end of the year.'
While there is a general consensus about the recruitment crisis in nursery nursing, as yet it does not appear to have driven many other agencies or employers to look abroad.
Some agencies report that they have had bad experiences applying for work permits, including Jacqui Rolfe of CG Recruitment, who tried to get a visa for an overseas NNEB student and was told that the NNEB was not an advanced enough qualification.
There is the issue of whether overseas staff will be recognised as qualified by Ofsted's Early Years Directorate and count towards meeting overall requirements for qualified staff. The Department for Education and Skills has said that it will accept the judgement of NARIC, the National Academic Recognition Centre, on whether overseas qualifications are equivalent to those available in the UK.
