ABSTRACT
The international school context today is characterised by rapid change, and a lack of shared terminology or agreement about when or where such schools originated. It would be safe to claim, however, that international schools had their recent origins principally in the need for globally mobile professional parents to arrange education for their children while located away from the home context, and that the majority of such schools have been and continue to be English medium. It is not surprising, therefore, that the majority of teachers attracted to, and sought by, such schools have been native English speakers educated themselves in an English-medium environment (Hayden and Thompson 2008). In the absence of a shared accepted definition of the concept of an international school it is impossible to be precise about the exact number of such teachers. The conclusion reached by Canterford (2003), however, based on an analysis of international school details held by Inter - national Schools Services (ISS 2010) in 1997-8, that the teaching staff of such schools are dominated by Americans and British, seems plausible. Equally plausible is the anecdotal evidence suggesting that increasing numbers of native English speakers from New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Canada and South Africa are now joining the teaching staff of such schools. The balance of nationalities among international school teachers varies in different parts of the world and may relate not only to their native language, or how far they wish to travel from ‘home’, but also the extent to which taking a teaching post outside one’s home country appears attractive. Joslin points out that ‘Unlike international companies where personnel are posted from headquarters in the home country to other locations, and are given pre-departure crosscultural training and orientation programmes, teachers choose to apply for a post overseas’ (2002: 34). Whether teachers choose to move from their home context may be influenced by the extent of the risk such a choice will represent. Sutcliffe, observing in 1991 that most teachers in international schools at that time were British or American, linked this point to the fact that teachers in the UK and USA are not civil servants. For those in countries where teachers are classified as civil servants, he argued, reluctance to move outside the ‘home’
education system may be linked to ‘the lack of freedom to move and to respond to openings as they occur, the national career and pension structures, and the general bureaucracy’ (1991: 175).
