QTS Routes After the Ghana, India and Nigeria Closure: Your Real Options

On 9 September 2026 the Department for Education closed its free Apply for QTS in England service to teachers who trained in Ghana, India and Nigeria. Those three countries were, between them, the largest source of applications the service had ever handled. A great deal has been written in the nine days since about what was lost. Rather less has been written about what is still there.

This page is the second half of that story. It assumes you already know the closure happened — the country-specific pages on Nigeria, India and Ghana cover the reasons, the history and what it means for each country's qualifications — and gets straight to the practical question: given that the recognition service is gone, what is the actual shortest path from where you are now to QTS in England?

The answer is more encouraging than the headlines suggest, for a reason worth stating up front. The recognition service was the only route to QTS that had a country list attached to it. Every other route is defined by what you hold and what you can do, not by where you trained. Nothing that happened on 9 September changed the assessment only criteria, the iQTS criteria, the entry requirements for initial teacher training, or the four-year rule. The door that closed was one of four, and — for an experienced graduate teacher — arguably not the best one.

What actually closed, and what didn't

Precision matters here, because a lot of advice circulating since 9 September conflates three different things.

What closed is the professional recognition service: the free, remote process by which the Teaching Regulation Agency converts an existing overseas teaching qualification into English QTS, with no further training, on the strength of verified documents. It is a paperwork route. It works by checking your degree with UK ENIC, confirming your professional standing with your home country's national regulator, and contacting your referees. It awards QTS to people who are already qualified teachers elsewhere.

What did not close, and what has no country condition at all:

• The assessment only route to QTS. Governed by DfE criteria last published in December 2025, which contain no nationality or country-of-training requirement of any kind. What they require is a first degree, GCSE-standard English and maths, teaching experience in at least two schools, and the ability to demonstrate every one of the Teachers' Standards to an accredited provider.
• International qualified teacher status (iQTS). GOV.UK states plainly that it is open to all non-UK citizens. It is delivered online by English providers in partnership with schools around the world, and it leads to QTS.
• Full initial teacher training in England — a PGCE, School Direct or Teach First place, applied for exactly as a UK-based candidate would.
• The four-year rule, which allows qualified teachers from outside the UK to teach in England without QTS for up to four years. Its conditions are about your training and your regulator at home, not about which country you are from.

The four-year rule: the enabling mechanism, not a route

Almost every workable plan on this page runs through the four-year rule, so it is worth setting out precisely before the routes themselves. It is also, consistently, the single most under-publicised provision in the whole overseas-teacher landscape — a great many people who believe they cannot legally teach in England without QTS simply can.

GOV.UK's guidance on routes to qualified teacher status states that qualified teachers from outside the UK are allowed to teach in England for up to four years without QTS — even in schools where QTS is normally a legal requirement. Two conditions attach to it. You must have qualified as a teacher in a country outside the UK, and you must have successfully completed a course of teacher training recognised by the organisation that regulates teachers in the country where you qualified.

Three refinements matter in practice. First, the four-year window is extended by statutory maternity, paternity, adoption, parental and shared parental leave, so time on statutory leave does not burn your clock. Second, the exemption does not apply in pupil referral units, alternative provision academies or alternative provision free schools, which require QTS from the beginning of employment. Third — and this is the part people misread — four years is a ceiling on teaching without QTS, not a grace period that renews. When it expires, continuing to teach without QTS in a school where QTS is legally required is not permitted.

Read alongside the routes below, the rule's purpose becomes obvious. Assessment only needs you to be teaching. The four-year rule is what makes it lawful for you to be teaching before you hold QTS. They are designed to be used together, and using them together is the single most reliable plan available to a teacher from Ghana, India or Nigeria in September 2026.

Route 1: the assessment only route

For an experienced graduate teacher, this is almost always the right answer, and it is worth understanding why it is structurally different from the route that just closed. The recognition service asked: is your existing qualification equivalent to ours? Assessment only asks a different and, for many people, easier question: can you demonstrate, here and now, that you meet the Teachers' Standards? Your overseas qualification's classification level is not the test. Your teaching is.

The mandatory entry criteria come from the DfE's Assessment only route to QTS: criteria and supporting advice, published December 2025, which binds every accredited provider offering the route. There are four.

The assessment itself is tightly time-boxed by design. The criteria require providers to include the assessment of practical teaching in a school, early years or further education setting, and state that the process typically does not last longer than three months. Assessment cannot be based solely on evidence of prior experience and achievement — that evidence is valuable, but it must be verified in a live teaching context. You are assessed within one of three age phases: 3 to 11 (primary), 7 to 14 (middle) or 11 to 19 (secondary).

If you fail to provide evidence within the three-month period, or the assessment concludes that you do not fully meet the Teachers' Standards, you are deemed to have failed the route. That is a real risk and worth naming: this is an assessment, not an administrative conversion, and providers do turn people away at the initial-assessment stage precisely so that they are not entered into something they will fail.

What assessment only really costs

GOV.UK quotes a range of about £1,500 to £4,000, adding that fees vary between providers and may be substantially more if you are outside the UK. That range has been repeated so often that it has taken on a life of its own, and it is worth checking against what providers are actually charging for 2026/27, because the real distribution is narrower and sits toward the upper half.

Two things follow. First, budget around £3,000 rather than the £1,500 floor, and treat anything at the bottom of the GOV.UK range as a pleasant surprise. Second, the fee is payable by you or by your school, and many schools will pay it — particularly academy trusts that recruit internationally and have a direct interest in converting an overseas-trained teacher to QTS before the four-year clock runs out. Raise it at offer stage, in writing, as part of the package. A school that has budgeted £3,000 for your QTS is a school that expects to keep you.

Route 2: iQTS — a full qualification, without leaving home

International qualified teacher status is the right answer for a different person: someone whose existing qualification does not reach degree level, or who has fewer than two years of teaching experience, or who simply cannot get to an English classroom in the near term. Where assessment only certifies what you already are, iQTS trains you.

GOV.UK describes iQTS as a UK government-backed international teaching qualification that is recognised as equivalent to English QTS by the Department for Education. The routes-to-QTS guidance states it is delivered online by English teacher training providers in partnership with schools around the world, that it is currently available from 14 providers, that it is open to all non-UK citizens, and that you do not have to visit the UK. It is trained and assessed against the same standards as English QTS and leads to QTS.

That combination — no relocation, no sponsor licence, no visa, no country list — is why iQTS has become the default recommendation for teachers who are still overseas and have no immediate route into an English school. You complete it in the school where you already work, over a standard academic year, and arrive in England already holding QTS, which materially changes your position in the job market and removes any reliance on the four-year rule at all.

On cost, the DfE's position is that providers set their own course fees and that those fees should be affordable in a number of global settings so the qualification is attainable worldwide. In practice that means a wide spread and no published benchmark, so compare at least three providers. Entry requirements are broadly a first degree, English at around IELTS 6.5, and GCSE-equivalent maths — plus science for primary. The programme runs over a standard academic year with a substantial minimum of days in classrooms, so it is a genuine course of training rather than a documentary exercise. The DfE updated the iQTS criteria and the requirements for iQTS inspections on 3 June 2026, so check the current criteria rather than a provider's older prospectus.

Route 3: full initial teacher training in England

The most conventional route, and the most expensive: apply for a PGCE, School Direct or Teach First place in England exactly as a domestic applicant would, undergo a year of full-time training, and come out with QTS. GOV.UK puts the fees at £9,250 to about £32,000, depending on your immigration status and the provider, and notes you will need to relocate to the UK.

That fee range is not a provider-by-provider spread so much as a home-versus-overseas fee status spread, and it is where the serious budgeting mistake lives. An overseas applicant arriving on a Student visa will normally have overseas fee status and will normally be quoted toward the upper end. Teacher training bursaries and scholarships, which are widely advertised and genuinely generous in shortage subjects, are generally restricted to trainees with home fee status — so the headline bursary figure and the headline fee figure very often do not apply to the same person. Our teacher training bursaries guide sets out the amounts, and our comparison of PGCE, School Direct and Teach First covers the differences between the routes themselves.

Despite the cost, there are two situations where full ITT is genuinely the cleanest answer. The first is a teacher whose qualification sits well below degree level with no realistic prospect of topping it up — a full ITT course solves the degree problem and the QTS problem in one move, since you enter with a degree and leave with QTS. The second is a teacher who qualified a very long time ago, has been out of classroom practice for years, and would struggle to evidence current attainment of the Teachers' Standards to an assessment only provider. Retraining is slower and dearer, but it is certain in a way the other routes are not.

Choosing between them

Strip away the detail and the choice turns on three facts about you: whether you hold a single qualification at bachelor's degree level, how much classroom experience you have, and whether you can realistically be teaching somewhere while you do this.

• Degree + two or more years of teaching + currently teaching (anywhere) → assessment only. Fastest, cheapest of the training routes, and your overseas experience counts. Around £3,000 and typically three months from registered start.
• Degree, but thin or no teaching experience, and still overseas → iQTS. A full academic year of training completed in your own school, no relocation, no visa, and you arrive in England already holding QTS.
• No qualification at degree level, and no route to topping one up → full ITT in England. Expensive and requires relocation, but it resolves the degree and the QTS question together.
• Degree + experience, but no current teaching post → get into a classroom first. Under the four-year rule you can be employed as a teacher in England without QTS. In the meantime, supply, cover supervisor and teaching assistant work all put you in a school; the assessment only criteria require experience in two settings, and settings other than schools count.

The sequencing that actually works

The order you do things in makes more difference than which route you pick, because two of the three routes depend on you already being employed. Here is the sequence that most reliably works for a teacher from Ghana, India or Nigeria starting from scratch in September 2026.

Where academies change the picture entirely

One structural feature of the English school system is worth knowing because it changes the urgency of everything above: academies and free schools have no legal requirement for their teachers to hold QTS, at any point in their employment. The QTS requirement bites in local authority maintained schools and non-maintained special schools; the four-year rule is the exemption that applies there.

Around four-fifths of secondary schools in England are academies. This means a very large share of the secondary job market is, in strict legal terms, open to a teacher without QTS indefinitely. That is not a reason to stop pursuing QTS — it affects your pay scale, your mobility between schools, your position if a trust's policy changes, and whether you can ever move to a maintained school — but it does mean the four-year cliff is less absolute than a reading of the rule alone suggests, and it means an academy trust is very often the most realistic first employer.

Mistakes that cost people years

• Waiting to see whether the closure is reversed. Zimbabwe was removed from the eligible list on 10 January 2024 and has not been reinstated in the two years and eight months since. There is no published route of appeal for a country and no announced review date. Plan on the basis that the change is permanent.
• Assuming overseas teaching experience does not count. The December 2025 assessment only criteria state explicitly that practical teaching experience is not restricted to taking place wholly or mainly in England. This is the single most valuable and least-known sentence in the guidance.
• Stacking two sub-degree qualifications and calling it a degree. The criteria require any equivalent qualification to be one single qualification, not an aggregation. If you hold a sub-degree teaching certificate plus something else, the answer is to top one of them up to level 6, not to submit both.
• Letting the four-year clock run while you research. Assessment only takes about three months once you start, but finding a provider, getting a school to cooperate, and gathering overseas police certificates can take a year before that. Start in year one.
• Paying an agency for QTS. Only accredited ITT providers confirmed by DfE can offer assessment only. Nobody can buy, expedite or guarantee QTS.
• Treating QTS and a visa as one problem. They are decided by different bodies under different rules, and solving one does nothing for the other. Run them in parallel from day one.

Sources and accuracy

The assessment only entry criteria, the two-school requirement, the single-qualification rule on degrees, the three-month assessment expectation and the statement that practical teaching experience need not take place wholly or mainly in England all come from the DfE's Assessment only route to QTS: criteria and supporting advice, published December 2025, which states it will be reviewed before September 2026 — so check for a successor document before relying on it. The £1,500 to £4,000 range, the 14 iQTS providers, the statement that iQTS is open to all non-UK citizens, the £9,250 to £32,000 ITT fee range and the four-year rule come from GOV.UK's Routes to qualified teacher status (QTS) for teachers and those with teaching experience outside the UK. The iQTS provider names and the 18 December 2025 addition come from the DfE's iQTS policy paper change log, and the 3 June 2026 criteria update from the iQTS provider guidance. The 9 September 2026 closure is recorded in the update history of the DfE policy paper A fairer approach to awarding QTS to overseas teachers.

Provider fees were taken from each provider's own published 2026/27 fee information and are the figures those providers were advertising when this page was last updated; fees change annually and several providers quote different rates for partner and non-partner schools, so confirm directly. We have flagged in the text where we could not verify something from a primary source — principally the complete list of 14 iQTS providers, which the DfE counts but does not publish in one place. This page is independent guidance and is not affiliated with the DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, any accredited provider or any recruitment agency.