If Your Country Isn't Eligible for QTS Recognition: What Actually Applies

This page exists because the question "is my country eligible?" is asked constantly and answered badly. A great many pages purport to tell teachers from dozens of countries where they stand, with confident country-by-country detail. Almost none of that detail comes from the DfE, because the DfE has not published it.

So rather than inventing a list, this page does three things: sets out precisely what has been published and what has not; goes through the removals that have actually happened and the reasons given for them; and then — because this is the part that genuinely helps — explains why being outside the recognition service matters much less than it appears to.

There is no list of ineligible countries

GOV.UK's guidance Overseas-trained teachers: apply for qualified teacher status in England sets out which countries and territories are eligible to use the service and on what terms. The policy paper A fairer approach to awarding QTS to overseas teachers explains the policy behind it and carries the change log recording eligibility changes.

Neither publishes the inverse. There is no document listing ineligible countries. There is no per-country reasoning for absence. There is no published process by which a country can apply to be added, no announced review cycle, no consultation, and no criteria document setting out what a country must demonstrate. The only criteria that have ever been published in this area are the two limbs the DfE cited when removing countries in September 2026: a country must have a national regulator that can confirm a teacher's professional standing, and must be able to provide references that meet the service's requirements.

The eligible list, in full

As at the date this page was last updated, and following the 9 September 2026 change, the position is:

• Eligible with no additional conditions: Australia, Canada, the European Economic Area (all EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), Guernsey, Hong Kong, Jersey, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA.
• Eligible with conditions attached: Jamaica, Singapore and South Africa — who must additionally either be working in a valid teaching role in England, or hold a level 6 teaching qualification for ages 11 to 16 in maths, languages or science, or a level 6 teaching qualification for 11 to 16 plus a degree at least 50% in maths, science or a language (excluding English).
• The UK's other nations and territories: teachers qualified in Wales hold QTS recognised in England automatically. Teachers qualified in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Gibraltar use the same service to have their status confirmed.

• Removed 10 January 2024: Zimbabwe.
• Removed 9 September 2026: Ghana, India and Nigeria.
• Everywhere else: not on the list, with no published explanation of why, and no published route to becoming so.

Our page on the conditional route for Jamaica, South Africa and Singapore sets out exactly what those conditions require, including a trap that catches a great many South African applicants.

Zimbabwe: removed in January 2024

Zimbabwe is the clearest precedent for how these removals work, and it is worth setting out precisely because it tells you what to expect.

Zimbabwe was among the countries added when the DfE widened the recognition service on 1 February 2023. It was removed on 10 January 2024. The change log on GOV.UK's Apply for qualified teacher status (QTS) if you teach outside the UK records the reason directly: Zimbabwe was removed from the list of eligible countries because the DfE had been unable to verify the required documentation from that country.

Three features of the Zimbabwe episode are worth carrying forward. First, the window was short — eleven months between addition and removal. Second, the stated reason was verification: not the quality of Zimbabwean teacher education, not the competence of Zimbabwean teachers, but the DfE's ability to confirm documents. Third, there has been no reinstatement, no published review and no appeal mechanism in the two years and eight months since.

There is a small but telling corroboration of the removal in the data. The Teaching Regulation Agency's Annual Report and Accounts 2023-24 publishes a country table covering applications made between 1 February 2023 and 31 March 2024 — a period during which Zimbabwe was eligible for eleven of fourteen months. Zimbabwe does not appear in that table at all, because the table lists the 48 countries and regions that were eligible at the point of publication rather than at the point of application. The effect is that a removed country vanishes from the published record entirely, which is worth knowing if you are trying to research your own country's history with the scheme.

Ghana, India and Nigeria: September 2026

The most recent contraction took effect on 9 September 2026, nine days before this page was last updated. Two distinct reasons were given for the three countries.

We cover each in depth on the dedicated pages for Nigeria, India and Ghana, including what the TRA's own outcome data shows about how the route was performing for each country before it closed — which, in all three cases, is considerably less favourably than the reaction to the closure implies.

The Philippines: what we could and couldn't find

The Philippines comes up more than any other country in this context, largely because Filipino teachers are recruited internationally in very large numbers and because a number of commercial sites assert a Philippines–UK QTS pathway. We went looking for the evidence. Here is exactly what we found, and did not find.

• The Philippines does not appear on GOV.UK's list of countries eligible to use the Apply for QTS in England service, in any tier — neither unconditionally nor conditionally.
• The Philippines does not appear in the Teaching Regulation Agency's country tables. Annex A of the TRA's Annual Report and Accounts 2023-24 lists 48 countries and regions, covering applications from 1 February 2023 to 31 March 2024. We checked every row. There is no Philippines row, and no mention of the Philippines anywhere in that report.
• We found no DfE publication, policy paper, transparency dataset or change-log entry that mentions the Philippines in connection with QTS recognition at all — not to include it, not to exclude it, not to acknowledge the question.

The practical position for a Filipino-trained teacher is therefore the same as for a teacher from Kenya, Pakistan, Malaysia, Egypt, Brazil or anywhere else not on the list: the recognition service is unavailable, and the three routes that carry no country condition are available. That is not a consolation prize — as the pages on Ghana, India and Nigeria show, the recognition service was declining the overwhelming majority of applicants from high-volume countries anyway, and the assessment only route is both faster and more likely to succeed for an experienced graduate teacher.

The pattern behind every removal

Look at the four removals together and a single theme runs through all of them, which is genuinely useful to understand because it tells you what to do next.

Zimbabwe: the DfE had been unable to verify documentation. India: no national regulator able to confirm professional standing. Ghana and Nigeria: references that could not be verified with an institution. Not one stated reason concerns the quality of a country's teacher education, the competence of its teachers, or the rigour of its qualifications. Every one concerns the DfE's ability to check a document with a third party from a desk in England.

That matters for two reasons. First, if you are from a removed country, it means the decision says nothing about you, and you should not carry it into how you present yourself to a provider or an employer. Second, and more practically, it tells you what every subsequent gatekeeper will care about. An assessment only provider, an iQTS provider and a prospective school all need to verify your employment history and your professional standing too. They do it themselves rather than by writing to a national regulator, which is precisely why those routes remain open — but the underlying question is the same, and you should prepare for it.

• References from institutional email domains wherever they exist. Contact every referee before naming them and confirm the address they will reply from.
• Corroboration where domains do not exist. Letterheaded, signed and stamped confirmation of employment, evidence of the school's registration with the relevant authority, contracts and payslips.
• Documentary evidence of professional registration from whichever body registers teachers in your country, in whatever form it can issue.
• A UK ENIC Statement of Comparability if the academic level of your qualification is genuinely in doubt — not as a route to QTS, which it is not, but as evidence a provider can act on.
• Certified translations of anything not originally issued in English, obtained early rather than when asked.

What being outside the list does not mean

Three misconceptions do most of the damage, and all three are wrong.

It does not mean you cannot teach in England. The four-year rule allows qualified teachers from outside the UK to teach in England for up to four years without QTS — even in schools where QTS is normally a legal requirement. The conditions are that you qualified as a teacher in a country outside the UK and completed teacher training recognised by the organisation that regulates teachers in that country. There is no country list attached to it. The window is extended by statutory maternity, paternity, adoption and parental leave, and it does not apply in pupil referral units or alternative provision.

It does not mean you cannot get QTS. Three routes remain, none with a country condition, and they are set out below.

And it does not mean every school is closed to you. The QTS requirement bites in local authority maintained schools and non-maintained special schools. Academies and free schools have no legal requirement for their teachers to hold QTS at any point in their employment, and around four-fifths of English secondary schools are academies. That is a very large share of the job market in which the QTS question is, legally speaking, not a barrier at all — though it affects your pay scale, since the STPCD unqualified teacher scale starts materially below the Main Pay Range, and an individual trust's policy can be stricter than the law.

Your routes, which are the same for everyone

Because the routes below are identical whatever your country, we have put the detail — entry criteria, current provider fees, sequencing, and a decision framework for choosing between them — in one place: QTS routes after the Ghana, India and Nigeria closure. Despite the title, nothing in it is specific to those three countries. In outline:

• The assessment only route. An accredited provider assesses you against the Teachers' Standards rather than testing whether your qualification is equivalent to an English one. You need a first degree as a single qualification, GCSE-standard English and maths (plus science for ages 3 to 11), teaching experience in at least two schools and typically two or more years of it. GOV.UK puts fees at about £1,500 to £4,000; published 2026/27 provider fees run from roughly £2,500 to £3,500. The DfE expects the whole process to take no longer than three calendar months from your registered start date — and its criteria state that practical teaching experience for this purpose is not restricted to taking place wholly or mainly in England.
• iQTS. A UK government-backed international teaching qualification, recognised by the DfE as equivalent to English QTS, delivered online by English providers in partnership with schools around the world. GOV.UK states it is currently available from 14 providers and is open to all non-UK citizens, with no need to visit the UK. This is the strongest option if you are still overseas and cannot easily reach an English classroom.
• Full initial teacher training in England. A PGCE, School Direct or Teach First place, applied for as a domestic candidate would. GOV.UK puts fees at £9,250 to about £32,000 depending on immigration status and provider, and you will need to relocate. Slowest and dearest, but it resolves a below-degree-level qualification and the QTS question in a single move.

How to check your own position properly

Four steps, in order, and all of them free or cheap.

• Run the DfE's own eligibility questionnaire at apply-for-qts-in-england.education.gov.uk before reading anything else about your country. It is self-service, takes a few minutes, is authoritative, and is current in a way no third-party page can be.
• Check the change log, not just the guidance. The update history on the policy paper is where eligibility changes are recorded, and it is the fastest way to see whether anything has moved since you last looked.
• Separate the qualification question from the immigration question. They are decided by different bodies under different rules, and solving one does nothing for the other. Our visa sponsorship guide covers the second.
• If your qualification's academic level is genuinely uncertain, get a UK ENIC Statement of Comparability for your specific award. It will not give you QTS, but it will end the guessing and it is evidence a provider can act on.

Sources and accuracy

The eligible country list, the conditional terms for Jamaica, Singapore and South Africa, the general eligibility requirements and the two-limb test a country must meet come from GOV.UK's Overseas-trained teachers: apply for qualified teacher status in England and the policy paper A fairer approach to awarding QTS to overseas teachers, whose update history records the 9 September 2026 change and its stated reasons. Zimbabwe's removal date of 10 January 2024, and the statement that it was removed because DfE had been unable to verify documentation, come from the change log of GOV.UK's Apply for qualified teacher status (QTS) if you teach outside the UK.

The 48-country table, and the absence from it of any Philippines or Zimbabwe row, come from Annex A of the Teaching Regulation Agency Annual Report and Accounts 2023-24, which states that at the time of publication teachers who qualified in 48 countries and regions were eligible to apply for QTS. The four-year rule, the assessment only fee range, the 14 iQTS providers, the statement that iQTS is open to all non-UK citizens and the ITT fee range come from GOV.UK's Routes to qualified teacher status (QTS) for teachers and those with teaching experience outside the UK. The assessment only entry criteria — the single-qualification rule on degrees, the two-school requirement, the typical two-year experience floor, the three-month process and the statement that experience need not take place wholly or mainly in England — come from the DfE's Assessment only route to QTS: criteria and supporting advice, December 2025.

On the Philippines we have deliberately reported an absence of evidence rather than constructing a position from it. We searched GOV.UK guidance, the DfE's QTS transparency data publications and the TRA's annual report, and found no reference to the Philippines in connection with QTS. We are stating that as a null result, with the searches named, rather than asserting a conclusion the DfE has not published. This page is independent guidance, is not affiliated with the DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, UK ENIC or any recruitment agency, and is not regulated immigration advice.