World Teachers' Day

  Teachers are the cornerstone to inclusive, equitable and high-quality education. The current SDG monitoring framework on teaching requirements, however, is based on national definitions and, as a result, masks critical disparities in the preparedness of teachers across countries. The UNESCO Institute forStatistics (UIS) has recently created a new dataset on country teacher requirement policies. It reveals that not only do lower income countries tend to have lower qualification requirements officially, but also, and critically, they tend to have very low requirements for alternative entry pathways for teaching with many countries requiring no training. Establishing a global benchmark for teacher qualification policies is needed to better understand the differences in education quality across the world. However, measuring minimum training requirements for alternative pathways to teaching is also needed to understand the inequality inteacher preparedness within countries . The UIS’...

 Defining a trained teacher (global indicator 4.c.1) is a complex task as it is linked to the certification process of teachers, to how the alternative pathways are embedding training and to the in-service training that teachers are obliged to do. These factors determine whether a teacher is trained according to national policy. As result, the meaning of being a trained teacher in one jurisdiction can differ substantially from meaning in a different jurisdiction. The most common requirement for teaching is to have a teacher diploma that is granted by a teacher training program (TTP) . The TTP could have a different definition in terms of the educational level of qualification obtained upon completion of the teacher training program (e.g., secondary, postsecondary non-tertiary, tertiary); the minimum educational level required for entry into the teacher training program; the theoretical duration of the teacher training program and the teaching practice ratio (which is the duration ...

  Globally, three quarters of countries’ pre-service training requirements include Initial teacher education ; however, North Africa, East and Southeast Asia and Oceania have the fewest countries requiring a teaching diploma. Of the different types of requirements for teaching in addition to academic level qualifications that were collected in the data, the requirement to have a teacher diploma that is granted by a teacher training program was the most prevalent. About three in four countries require a teaching diploma, and in all but three regions, South and Southeast Asia, Oceania and North Africa, 70 percent or more countries required a teaching diploma (Figure 7). Note that teacher training programs are based on national definitions and differ by country (see discussion in Box 3). Many low-income countries have alternative pathways to teaching that do not require any pre-service teaching. Many countries that have experienced rapid expansion in access to education or do not ha...

  The UIS has assembled a new database to document the differences in teacher requirement policies around the world. This dataset was collected in response to decisions made at the UIS’s Technical Cooperation Group (TCG 9) to “ Approve suitable country coverage (prevalence rate) to be used to determine the global metrics for minimum standard teachers’ qualification to teach a specific level of education (ISCED 02, 1, 2, 3) ”. Multiple data sources were used to develop this database. First, data reported to the UIS through its regular country survey was collected and provided the primary source of information. In cases where there were gaps in this data, additional information was collected using sources available on-line from national legal documents (Table B1). The scope of the data collection included pre-primary, primary, lower and upper secondary teachers. The policy information collected in this dataset generally applied to public schools as well as private schools that receiv...

  The most recent data published by the UIS indicates that, globally in 2022, around 85 percent of primary and secondary school teachers met the minimum requirements to teach in their countries. Regionally representative figures for this indicator are available for few regions, but those that exist show wide variation in the composition of the teacher workforce. Among regions with data, Central Asia has the highest proportion of trained teachers. In subSaharan Africa, only 64 percent of primary and 50 percent of secondary school teachers have the minimum required training. This proportion has been declining since 2000, because of the need for additional teachers due to rapid expansion in access, including schools hiring contract teachers without qualifications to cover gaps at lower cost (Figure 2). For instance, in Latin America and the Caribbean, over 80 percent of teachers are trained. By contrast, in sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of trained teachers fell from 84 percent in...

 Since 2000, pupil-teacher ratios have generally declined. The number of students in school from pre-primary to upper secondary has increased from 1.2 to 1.6 billion between 2000 to 2022 while the number of teachers has increased from about 55 million to 87 million. This excludes the additional 14 million teachers at the post-secondary level . Pupil-teacher ratios have declined for each level of education except for upper secondary which has more or less maintained a level of approximately 16 students per teacher (Figure 1). The largest drop has been at the preprimary level, declining from 20 to 14 students per teacher between 2000 and 2022. Despite decreases in the pupil-teacher ratio, there are large disparities between regions and income categories of countries. For example, the global average pupil-teacher ratio was estimated to be 23 in 2022 (Table 1), but the difference between low- and high-income countries is substantial: low-income countries have more than twice the num...

  The current teacher framework has a key focus on quality of teaching . Two concepts are key in the indicator framework. First, “trained” aims to identify the extent to which the teacher workforce has specific  pedagogical pre- and in-service training (indicator 4.c.1) while the second concept “qualified” (indicator 4.c.3) attempts to measure the percentage of teachers meet the minimum academic requirements to teach regardless of the nature of the diploma.  Teacher training could be acquired through different routes. The first is through teacher training programs (TTP) either concurrent (teacher training from the outset through general and professional subjects) or consecutive (when holders of tertiary diploma move to a teacher training program) that grants a teacher diploma. A second route is teacher training acquired through a short professionally oriented or employment-based training that combines work in schools with a tailored training program. Lastly, the access...

  SDG 4 calls for the provision of high-quality education worldwide, and teachers are the cornerstone on which to build inclusive, equitable, and quality education . SDG 4.c aims to “ substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing States ” by 2030.  The SDG 4 teacher monitoring framework places focus on whether enough teachers have the knowledge and skills to meet the education needs of countries , particularly given the evolving context of education in a continuously changing social, technological, and globalized context. To this end, the global reporting framework includes indicator 4.c.1 “Proportion of teachers with the minimum required qualifications, by education level” that measures the percentage of trained teachers by level of education and by sex. Six other indicators complement 4.c.1 reflecting the fram...