With school already started for some pupils and the bulk will be back next week, one in five will have a new teacher. Not just a new class teacher, already a familiar face with the pupils as the teacher has been on the school staff, but a brand spanking newly employed teacher.

At the end of the last school term year there was a mass exit of 80 or so schoolteachers.

Staggeringly, over half of all of Cayman’s schoolteachers come from abroad. Most of the recruitment comes from Jamaica and the United Kingdom.

There is now a drive to address the situation by training Caymanians and one can only wonder why this hasn’t been done before.

The University College of the Cayman Islands (UCCI) and the Department of Education are working together to implement a more robust training course that will make it easier for students to reach the necessary qualification skills to work in the public school system. Previously, a Caymanian who wanted to become a teacher had to go oversees to study as the previous UCCI training course did not meet the government schools standards.

This new training course will commence this September and UCCI president, Roy Bodden, said Caymanian teachers would be able to fit into “classroom situations with the minimum of adjustment, since there will be no difference in accent and other cultural nuances”.

With so many Caymanians unemployed, especially school leavers, this would seem to be a win-win situation all round.