Teacher quality

Teacher quality is said to be the most important factor influencing learner outcomes. The Education for All Goals set by UNESCO have been achieved by some countries but many millions of children remain out of school or with poor teachers.

According to UNESCO and the OECD, developed and developing countries across the world are grappling unsuccessfully with the problem of providing up to date teacher education both Initial Professional Development and continuing professional development to a diverse and large workforce (450,000 in England, 1.3M in Pakistan in 2006).

Teachers have varied backgrounds making the targeting of professional development programmes difficult. Some may have little or no teacher training, others may have doctorates in specialist subjects but no training in pedagogy – the science of teaching and learning. In other cases, teachers may be much more deeply knowledgeable having studied for their qualifications over four or more years. As well as varied backgrounds, teachers often work in remote areas. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD research across 20 countries (2009) confirms that improving the quality of teachers’ knowledge (see Lee Shulman’s definition) is the intervention most likely to bring about improvements in learning and educational outcomes.

To address this problem, the OECD calls for the: “creation of ‘knowledge-rich’, evidence-based education systems…in many countries, education is still far from being a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are not yet being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of those practices.” (OECD, 2009, p. 3)

By way of contrast, the medical sector has established structures and processes worldwide addressing knowledge mobilisation. The concept of Translational Research i.e. how research findings might apply in practice is much more developed in medicine than in the education sector.

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Wikipedia