Teachers in International schools: a global educational 'precariat'?

An over-looked global educational development has been the exponential growth of 'international schools'. The field in 2014 involved almost 350,000 educators in over 7,000 English-medium schools in non-English speaking countries. This is expected to rise to half a million educators, mainly American and British, in 10,000 schools by 2022. The field has never constituted a ‘system’, and it remains largely un-inspected, un-monitored and un-regulated. There was substantial evidence from both social media comment and real-life reports in the popular press during 2013 and 2014 that the field is becoming an increasingly precarious one for teachers, as well as administrators. Guy Standing’s (2011) 'insecurity framework' is used for stating the case that teachers in international schools could conceivably be identified as a sub-group of the global ‘precariat’, and the issue warrants further empirical investigation.