What Teacher Shortage? It’s Not Just The Scale But The Nature Of The Challenge, FLS News FLash

Most would agree that good teachers make all the difference. As recent research attests, ‘the most effective interventions to improve student learning rely on teachers’. The imperative to bring the magnitude of teacher shortages to global attention is clear.  However, there is a danger in aggregating projections to generate headlines such as ‘69 million teachers must be recruited by 2030 in order to meet SDG 4’.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics, which produced these projections in 2016, no longer undertakes such exercises, recognizing they can be misleading. However, the figures retain currency, most recently being cited in the recent report released by the Education Commission, Transforming the Education Workforce. Ultimately, whether at global or national level, reducing teacher need to a single figure masks important nuances within the numbers………………