Publish at January 30 2024 Updated January 31 2024
The issue of teacher shortages is frequently in the news in the field of education. Almost every region of the world has to deal with this new but worrying situation for the education community. UNESCO, the UN's culture and education arm, is taking an interest in this unprecedented phenomenon for the first time. A full report will be published by the end of the first quarter of 2024. Nevertheless, the organization has already published a broad outline of its data in November 2023.
The non-governmental organization set out to calculate the shortfall in achieving universal primary and secondary education across the globe by 2030. A total of 44 million teachers will be needed to achieve this. Of these, 58% will be needed to replace retiring teachers and 40% to fill new posts. The regions most affected by the shortage are sub-Saharan Africa (15 million), South Asia (7.8 million) and Europe and North America, with 4.8 million new teachers needed to fill the gap. By 2030, only 78 out of 197 countries will have enough teachers to guarantee universal primary education.
The question of teacher qualifications is also of some interest. 85% of secondary school teachers worldwide, for example, have the required qualifications. However, this number drops to 60% in sub-Saharan Africa. Declines were also noted in Latin America and the Caribbean (4%) and in Europe and North America (6%).
This phenomenon of missing teaching professionals is leading to more and more overcrowded classrooms and a totally unbalanced pupil/teacher ratio, reaching 1 teacher for every 35 pupils in Central and Southern Asia and 1 for every 56 pupils in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, the richer regions of the world still manage to have a very satisfactory ratio compared to the poorer ones.
The global teacher attrition rate doubled between 2015 and 2022, rising from 4.6% to 9%. This level would be higher among men, who would have greater professional mobility than women and would be discouraged by, among other things, stagnant salaries or pressure from the education system. This may also explain the low retention rate seen worldwide, which is also due to a variety of factors:
To combat this loss of professionals, UNESCO believes that the profession needs to be made more attractive. Obviously, this means improving working conditions, but it also means making the profession more representative in terms of gender and origin, given its sometimes unstable status in some regions, and its media image, which is often dull rather than positive.
The organization therefore suspects that making it a vocation, with a status and above all funds invested to ensure that their position and working environment are stimulating, would help enormously in retaining and perhaps even bringing back some who have abandoned the profession. This means further professionalizing the teaching profession by offering regular training, providing access to quality teaching materials and giving teachers the autonomy they need to feel in control of their classrooms.
This implies, ipso facto, national policies along these lines, all over the world. Substantial public investment will have to follow, of course, to ensure that all this is possible.
So it remains to be seen how the final report will refine the reasons for and solutions to these shortages. Incidentally, UNESCO has stated that the exercise will be repeated every two years in order to observe the progression of the phenomenon on a global scale.
World Teacher Report: Addressing teacher shortages - UNESCO (35 pages) (FR /EN / ES)
Photo : futag.mail.ru / DepositPhotos
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