people and planet

19
Adequate supply of qualified teachers..........................................................................328
Teacher motivation and support......................................................................................333
The formulation of a target on teachers has been both
applauded and criticized. The international community
recognizes the importance of a distinct target relating to
the teaching profession, which had been missing from
the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals
agendas. However, there has been dissatisfaction that
in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), teachers
are considered a means of implementation, which
risks underestimating the profession’s fundamental
contribution to the provision of good quality education
and an enabling learning environment. The actual
formulation of the target is also weak, referring only to
the ‘supply of qualified teachers’ and including a limited
conception of how to enhance teachers’ qualifications.
This chapter will go beyond these relatively narrow
confines to address the monitoring implications
of the more general commitment, expressed in the
Education 2030 Framework for Action, to ‘ensure that
teachers and educators are empowered, adequately
recruited, well-trained, professionally qualified,
motivated and supported’.
ADEQUATE SUPPLY OF
QUALIFIED TEACHERS
Overcrowded classrooms are still common in many
of the poorest countries, pointing to an inadequate
supply of teachers. The ‘teacher gap’ is the number of
teachers at each education level needing to be recruited
to achieve universal enrolment while ensuring that the
average pupil/teacher ratio does not exceed a set target
level. In richer countries, teacher shortages are reflected
in hard-to-fill vacancies in specialized subjects, resulting
in teachers teaching subjects for which they are not
qualified (Santiago, 2002).
There are two major challenges in defining a teacher
shortage. First, statistics on average teacher availability
hide substantial inequality within countries. Second, the
quantity of teachers cannot be isolated from quality.
Policy-makers have often responded to the challenge
of expanding enrolment and increasing class size by
lowering hiring standards.
TEACHER AVAILABILITY AND DEPLOYMENT
The traditional indicator of teacher availability is
the pupil/teacher ratio. Globally, there are 17 pupils
per teacher in pre-primary education, 24 in primary
education, and
18 in lower and
upper secondary
Globally, there are 17 education.
pupils per teacher in pre-
Yet, there is no global
primary education, 24 in
consensus on the
primary education, and recommended pupil/
18 in lower and upper teacher ratio by
level of education.
secondary education
Moreover, while a
higher pupil/teacher
ratio is linked with a
larger average class size, the relationship is not one-toone
and varies considerably between countries. Class
size depends on how teachers are allocated to classes.
This, in turn, is linked to factors such as the proportion
of time teachers spend teaching and the relationship
between the length of the teacher working day and
student instruction time.
In a group of about 30 mostly high income countries, a
pupil/teacher ratio of 10 was linked with an average class
size of 20 in primary and lower secondary education.
For a pupil/teacher ratio of 17 in primary education, the
average class size was 18 in Slovakia but 27 in Japan in
2013. Likewise, for an average class size of 27 in lower
secondary education, the pupil/teacher ratio was 15 in
the United States but 32 in Mexico (Figure 19.1).
328
CHAPTER 19 | TARGET 4.C – TEACHERS