Towards common benchmarks for teaching qualifications and training.

 

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’s new data on teaching requirements exposes how children’s access to quality education varies across the world. For example, not only do low-income countries have the largest class sizes, they also have the lowest qualification requirements and the most instances of alternative pathways to teaching that require no training. The result is that 180 million of children in primary education in sub-Saharan Africa (24 percent of total enrollment in primary globally) are taught by 4.7 million teachers (14 percent of primary teachers globally) who are predominantly required to have only a secondary education diploma for teaching. The relationships between requirements around teacher qualifications and income classification and regional classification showcase the lack of equitable provision of quality education globally; these relationships raise pertinent questions for the international community as we work together to build back better post-pandemic and achieve the aims of SDG4.

  Measuring disparity in education quality requires a common benchmark for teaching qualifications: one approach is to use the most common qualification as a benchmark. To make such comparisons possible, the 9th meeting of the UIS’s Technical Cooperation Group (TCG) on SDG 4 Indicators in November 2022 approved the use of a benchmark for teacher qualifications that is the most prevalent globally. In other words, the most common minimum attainment required to teach at each education level would serve as the reference academic qualification to teach by level of education in each country. Currently, a bachelor’s degree is the most common requirement, although in some regions the prevalent requirement is only a secondary diploma to teach in primary education (Figure 4 ); however, this level differs by region (Figure 5). This global reference would enable the comparison of teaching qualifications under the same metric between countries and within regions and can, in turn, identify disparities and further policy dialogue on teacher quality and training globally. This will also strengthen the monitoring of SDG Target 4.c which will enable countries to benchmark their progress around teacher training on a standardized scale.