Louise Regan, from the National Union of Teachers, said that there are already issues when it comes to recruiting new teachers in both Jersey and Guernsey.
‘There are concerns across the board about the high turnover of staff,’ she said.
‘The UK are not recruiting enough teachers at the moment and we are losing a lot of teachers in the first four years of them becoming employed.
‘I know Guernsey is struggling to recruit teachers because of the high cost of living.
‘I know from talking to people in Jersey there has been a drop in the number of people going to university and that needs to be looked at because that will have an effect on the number of people coming into the profession,’ she added.
Ms Regan also said that while visiting schools she is hearing increasingly that growing workloads and funding cuts are the main issues concerning teachers.
She said: ‘Teachers arrive for work early and finish late. They also take after-school clubs and end up taking work home with them and marking books in their free time.
‘Most teachers will work through their holidays and a lot of them will spend their free time sick because they have worked themselves so hard.’
The Education Department said: ‘We are fully staffed for September but monitor recruitment levels very carefully because we recognise that a good quality education relies on a supply of high quality teaching staff.
‘We are aware of the pressures in the UK and have taken specific measures including linking with UK universities to get their science and maths graduate teachers to come to Jersey.
‘The issue here is mitigated to some extent by the Jersey Graduate Teacher Training Programme, which takes people currently working in other industries in Jersey and trains them as secondary school teachers. We have now trained 60-70 people this way.’
