BBC — A teacher training group has started seeking recruits from southern Europe because of a “shortage” of top graduates in certain subjects.
Suffolk and Norfolk Initial Teacher Training’s adverts target graduates from Italy, Portugal and Greece.
It said it hoped to attract “untapped talent” to East Anglia.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) said the move may “plunder” talent from countries which, because of high unemployment, are “soft targets”.
Geoff Robinson, from Suffolk and Norfolk Initial Teacher Training, said it was “very challenging to attract top graduates in shortage subjects”.
The project run by the partnership, which represents Norfolk and Suffolk county councils and more than 100 schools, will support successful applicants to gain professional teaching qualifications in the counties before taking up teaching posts in local schools and colleges.
It is aimed at graduates in maths, physics, chemistry, computing and modern foreign languages who hope to become teachers.
Nikos Savvas, principal at West Suffolk College, said: “As the region’s economy grows, with science and technology playing an increasingly important role, the need for inspiring and engaging teachers in these subjects has never been greater.”
Hilary Buckey, regional secretary for the NUT, said there was a nationwide issue with teacher recruitment.
“We are very soon going to have a teacher shortage crisis because teaching is not seen as an attractive profession and a lot of people are seeking to get out of it.”
Lowering bureaucracy and paperwork and improving working conditions, she said, would help ease the current domestic recruitment “challenge” rather than “plundering” talent from southern Europe.
She accused the training partnership of “picking the soft targets” of struggling southern European countries with high levels of unemployment.
