Teachers for All â GCE policy briefing (566KB) - VSO

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(EFA) goals 7 demand even greater efforts than the MDGs. At present, the MDG framework hastended to reduce the education focus of donors to universal primary education and gender parity(in primary and secondary education – a goal that rich countries committed themselves to helppoor countries achieve by 2005, but failed abysmally), limiting governments’ efforts to engage inthe fuller EFA agenda.Most poor countries’ governments are fully committed to achieving the EFA goals, and some havedrafted detailed and highly credible plans in consultation with teachers’ unions, civil societyorganisations or coalitions and other education stakeholders. Yet despite donor commitments tofinance all credible EFA plans, many countries’ plans remain chronically under-funded, as donorsrepeatedly fail to deliver the urgently needed funds. As a result, governments are revising theirambitions, and plans are being scaled down to fit available resources. Consequently, sufficientnumbers of teachers cannot be hired and millions of children will remain excluded come 2015 –unless urgent action is taken now. The US$10 billion per year in aid for education that donors lastyear promised will be delivered by 2010, needs to be delivered now. Governments cannot wait until2010 to hire the teachers they need.To help governments and donors address these problems, each chapter of this report closes with asummary of recommendations drawn from the discussion and analysis in the chapter and from theliterature reviewed therein. It is hoped that Global Campaign for Education national coalitions,teachers’ unions, NGOs, child rights organisations and other members and allies of the GlobalCampaign for Education will be able to adapt these recommendations for use in their discussionswith governments and donors. The recommendations are reproduced here, arranged according tothe themes of the chapters to follow:Recommendations on teacher shortage and supply• The MDGs will not be achieved without universal access to quality basic services provided bystrong public systems. This will require a massive investment by poor country governments anddonors in rebuilding the public sector, including investing in recruitment, training and salariesfor 14–22.5 million extra teachers (as well as millions of health workers and other public sectorworkers), and an end to user fees (Oxfam, 2005:1).• Governments and donors must work together to reduce pupil–teacher ratios to 40:1 (whichshould be seen as a maximum in all regions of a country, not an average, nor a target to whichpupil–teacher ratios should be raised). Classes with high proportions of first generationlearners should be smaller than 40:1 to allow teachers to give such children the extra attentionthey need – especially where children speak a different language to their teachers. Double andtriple shifting should be avoided unless different teachers are used for different shifts.• Lower secondary education should be expanded to at least 35% enrolment to ensure adequatenumbers of potential teacher trainees.• Governments must put in place adequate monitoring systems for measuring the impact of theHIV & AIDS pandemic on education. This should include gender disaggregated data. Inparticular, education management information systems (EMIS) need to be strengthened inorder to capture data on teacher absenteeism and mortality as a result of AIDS. As a minimum,governments should protect teachers by developing an HIV & AIDS workplace policy in orderthat bouts of absenteeism, either for caring or for sickness, are formally recognised andrespected.7 The Education For All (EFA) goals, (agreed in April 2000 by heads of state, ministers of education, heads of UNagencies, among others) committed governments to achieving the following goals by 2015:• expand early childhood care and education• ensure all children, particularly girls, complete free and compulsory, good quality primary education• ensure equal access to learning and life-skills training for young people and adults• achieve a 50% improvement in adult literacy rates• achieve gender equality in primary and secondary education• improve the quality of education – especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.6
• Women and members of marginalised groups (such as disabled people, members of ethnicminorities and people living with or affected by HIV & AIDS) should be actively encouraged toenter the teaching profession, through positive discrimination in the form of quotas,scholarships, and lower entry requirements. These should be combined with specific additionalsupport and training to help them attain the national minimum qualifications required toteach.• Bilingual education should be an urgent priority in countries with linguistic minorities (ormajorities). Teachers (of whatever ethnicity) should be trained and equipped to teach primaryschool children in their mother tongue.• Donor countries must guard against deliberately recruiting teachers from poor countries thatcan ill afford to lose them, while teachers’ rights to migrate should be protected. To that end,the 2004 Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol should be expanded to cover non-Commonwealth countries.Recommendations on teacher training• Teacher training capacity – both pre- and in-service – needs to be increased in many poorcountries. Governments should work with donors to ensure teachers are provided with anadequate length and quality of training to enable them to deliver quality education. Donorsshould encourage governments to be more ambitious about the length and quality of training(by offering increased funding). They should recommend a combination of at least an uppersecondary qualification and one or two years’ pre-service teacher training, plus substantial inserviceand continuing professional development programmes to enable teachers already in thesystem to upgrade their qualifications.• Para-teacher programmes and mandatory retirement measures should be phased out withinfive years 8 . EFA plans that include such measures should be revised in consultation withteachers’ unions and adequate financing should be provided by rich countries to allowgovernments to upgrade the skills of teachers recruited on para-teacher schemes. The 1966ILO/UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers should act as a guide forgovernments and donors seeking to reform such schemes.• Pre-service and in-service teacher training colleges should coordinate their training andcontinuing professional development programmes so that newly qualified teachers and alreadyemployed teachers are able to benefit from knowledge of new methodologies and content, andso that governments are able to deliver the same quality of education across a country orregion.• All teachers should be provided with training and access to information about inclusion,focusing on gender, disability, ethnicity and HIV & AIDS and child-centred pedagogy as part oftheir pre- and in-service teacher training. Both pre- and in-service training should focus onenabling teachers to assess and meet the needs of individual children, rather than on genericcategories of ‘problem children’, and on increasing their confidence to apply inclusive practicesto their work.In countries with a shortage of female, disabled or ethnic minority teachers, or with disparities inlevels of teaching qualifications:• Specially designed in-service training should be organised for female, disabled and ethnicminority teachers to compensate for the qualification disparities with other teachers. Such in-8 It should be noted that in some exceptional or extreme situations, such as large-scale emergencies or chronic conflict,para professional teachers may be the only option, and, as such, their employment, training and support would besupported by the Global Campaign for Education as a crisis measure.7
Page 2 and 3: CONTENTSAcknowledgements 3Acronyms
Page 4 and 5: ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONSAIDS Acqu
Page 8 and 9: service training should be coordina
Page 10 and 11: Recommendations on the costs of qua
Page 12 and 13: 2. THE WORLD DESPERATELY NEEDS MORE
Page 14 and 15: Cameroon‘Four teachers for six cl
Page 16 and 17: themselves two majors cause of the
Page 18 and 19: 1. attend the funerals of friends o
Page 20 and 21: Jamaica‘Jamaica is another stop o
Page 22 and 23: There are also often marked regiona
Page 24 and 25: communities (Seel, 2003). There is
Page 26 and 27: 3. A GOOD TEACHER IS A TRAINED TEAC
Page 28: lessons or control classes. As a re
Page 31 and 32: ISCED 4: Post-secondary, non-tertia
Page 33 and 34: Minimum standards for primary teach
Page 35 and 36: use of learning materials; they mus
Page 37 and 38: and Sperling 2004:65). Such beliefs
Page 39 and 40: were similarly narrated about how H
Page 41 and 42: secondary qualification and one or
Page 43 and 44: environments, and promoting greater
Page 45 and 46: Housing, travel, health and other i
Page 47 and 48: Teachers need effective management,
Page 49 and 50: elsewhere) are conspicuous by their
Page 51 and 52: from organisations that have a duty
Page 53 and 54: ‘…reduces corruption and improv
Page 55 and 56: decentralisation processes - leadin
Page 57 and 58:
women have adequate arrangements fo
Page 59 and 60:
professional development programmes
Page 61 and 62:
even where public spending matches
Page 63 and 64:
Investment in education should be s
Page 65 and 66:
Vicious circles: the role of condit
Page 67 and 68:
The answer to the World Bank’s qu
Page 69 and 70:
REFERENCES1. ActionAid Internationa
Page 71 and 72:
38. GCE/ActionAid (2005b), Deadly I
Page 73 and 74:
76. UNESCO (2006b), The Role of Tra
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