Which UK Schools and Colleges Can Sponsor a Visa? We Matched 2,922 Employers

If you are a teacher outside the UK, the question that decides everything is not which school you would like to work at. It is which schools are allowed to sponsor you at all. Nobody publishes that answer, so we worked it out: we took every education employer that advertised a vacancy on this site and matched it against the Home Office register of licensed sponsors. Here is what came back.

The headline: about one in seventeen

We matched 2,922 education employers — schools, academies, multi-academy trusts, sixth forms, further education colleges and a handful of universities and local authorities — against the register of licensed sponsors published on 10 November 2026.

169 of them hold a sponsor licence. That is 5.8%, or roughly one employer in seventeen.

But the average hides the only thing that matters, which is what kind of employer you are applying to.

Trusts sponsor. Individual schools mostly do not.

A multi-academy trust or federation is nearly nine times more likely to hold a sponsor licence than a single school: 32.9% against 3.7%. Colleges sit between the two at 12.7%.

The reason is structural rather than mysterious. A sponsor licence costs money, requires a named compliance officer and a record-keeping regime, and is audited. A trust running twenty schools can carry that overhead once and use it across all of them. A single primary school with sixty staff usually cannot justify it, and does not try.

This is the single most useful thing in this article. If you need sponsorship and you are applying school by school, you are playing a game with a 1-in-27 hit rate. If you apply to trusts and colleges, the odds improve by roughly an order of magnitude.

The same picture, measured in vacancies

Employers are one way to count. The more honest measure, if you are scrolling a jobs board, is what share of the adverts in front of you come from an employer that could sponsor you.

Of 4,896 vacancies, 394 came from a licensed sponsor — 8.0%, about one advert in twelve. Among college vacancies it is one in five; among trust-level vacancies, more than one in three; among individual school vacancies, one in twenty-three.

Colleges deserve a particular mention. There are only 142 of them in the dataset against 2,515 schools, but they advertise heavily, they hold licences at four times the rate of schools, and they recruit in subjects — engineering, construction, health and social care, computing — where shortages are chronic. For an overseas lecturer, further education is a materially better bet than the school sector, and almost nobody says so.

Where in England this works

Regional variation is larger than the sector variation, and it runs the way you would expect only up to a point.

The South East and London both run at 10.3% of vacancies from a licensed sponsor. At the other end, the North West is at 1.7% and the West Midlands at 2.2%.

And then there is the North East. Of 169 advertised vacancies in the North East, not one came from an employer on the sponsor register. Not a low number — zero. We checked this twice because it looked like an error. If you need sponsorship, the North East of England is, on this evidence, effectively closed to you, and that is worth knowing before you spend a month applying there.

Who is actually advertising

These are the licensed employers that posted the most vacancies in the period we looked at. Seven of the top ten are further education colleges.

You can check any employer yourself in our licensed sponsor directory, which is rebuilt from the GOV.UK file every week.

What a match does and does not prove

A licence means the employer is permitted to sponsor workers on the routes shown — and all 169 matched employers hold Skilled Worker, all on an A rating. It does not mean they will sponsor you. The role still has to meet the Home Office’s skill and salary thresholds for the route, the employer still has to be willing to assign a Certificate of Sponsorship, and plenty of licensed employers go years without using the licence.

Equally, a non-match is not proof that sponsorship is impossible. The most common reason a school is absent from the register is that its licence is held by its trust, under the trust’s name. If you have found a school you want and it is not on the register, look up the trust that runs it before giving up.

Method, and the limits of it

The employer list is every organisation that advertised at least one vacancy on UK Jobs Alert in the period covered by our current listings data: 2,922 employers and 4,896 vacancies, sourced from the Department for Education’s Teaching Vacancies service. That means the picture is state-funded education in England. Independent schools, and schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are not in it.

Matching was deliberately conservative. We normalised both sides — lower case, accents and punctuation removed, “and” for “&” — and accepted a match only where the employer name was identical and the location agreed: either the same town, or two different towns that our own listings data places in the same English region. That second rule is what lets us accept, for example, a school our data records in Wetherby against a register entry recorded in Leeds.

Thirty-nine further name matches were rejected because the two locations disagreed and we could not verify them — names like “St Mary’s Catholic Primary School” recur across the country, and matching those on name alone would have produced confident nonsense. We would rather undercount.

So treat 169 as a floor, not a total. The real number is higher, because of trust-held licences and because of those thirty-nine. The relative findings — trusts against schools, colleges against schools, South East against North East — are not affected by the undercount, because the same method was applied to every group.

Sources

Sponsor data: Home Office Register of licensed sponsors (workers), file published 10 November 2026. Vacancy and employer data: UK Jobs Alert listings sourced from the Department for Education’s Teaching Vacancies service. For the register as a whole, see how many UK employers can sponsor a visa.

This article is analysis of public data, not immigration advice. Requirements are set by the Home Office and change; check GOV.UK or a qualified adviser before acting.