institutional issues

(i) Registration of accredited teacher training providers is a critical step toward quality improvement. This information should be made public so potential

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candidates are aware of a provider’s status when choosing a program. A web- based system may be used to display all nationally accredited providers of teacher education, and should be periodically updated. Accreditation should be at two levels: minimum physical facilities and compliance with the NTSF.

(ii) To avoid constantly playing catch-up, there is an urgent need to review the preservice training for its program structure, alignment with the NTSF, and delivery modalities. The review process should include comprehensive research of higher education conventions and practices such as the Bologna Declaration on higher education to identify a workable framework for individual countries. (iii) As noted in all country reports, there is a huge supply of unemployed graduates

in the market. The challenge is how to recruit them into the teaching profession without increasing the salary budget. There is a need to raise the entry

requirements for the teaching service to elevate the profession’s status and make it attractive to graduates who can bring a higher level of professional competence to the teaching workforce.

(iv) Increased teaching and learning resources and facilities are necessary, such as traditional and electronic libraries, to encourage self-directed and lifelong learning. Options for procuring information and communication technology (ICT)-based resources such as an open access journal, open education resources, and other e-learning resources to stimulate self-directed learning and self- development among teachers.

1. Training Programs

(i) To ensure all preservice training programs meet the NTSF standards, benchmark programs against NTSF to validate compliance for agreed norms for subject content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. Modernize programs by including contemporary practices such as problem-based, student-centered, self-directed and lifelong learning, and activity- and project-based learning.

(ii) Increase flexibility for teacher deployment by consolidating teacher specialization as basic and secondary education teachers. Make it mandatory that all teacher training programs ensure capacity to teach at least two subject areas (secondary teachers) and multiple subjects (primary teachers).

(iii) Clearly articulate in programs credit accumulation to progress to higher

qualifications and equivalence across different training providers, including CPD.

2. optimizing infrastructure investments

To increase the supply of good teachers, most previous investments in teacher

development placed significant emphasis on building teacher training institutes, teacher resource centers, professional development centers, and so on. Traditionally, teacher training has been considered outside the comprehensive higher education system, which led to the development and expansion of a parallel higher education system. This is no longer sustainable in terms of both the quality of teachers graduating from the two systems, plus the cost implication of supporting the parallel systems.

(i) There are many potential providers of teacher training in each country. To increase efficiency, priority should be placed on merging and leveraging the resources of the existing teacher training providers, not building more institutions. It will be good to access the strength of teacher training institutes

for pedagogy, and the universities for subject content and explore collaboration options. Universities (private and public) are significant stakeholders in teacher development and are perceived to be of higher quality for subject content knowledge in the region. Public–private partnerships and twinning arrangements should be considered to leverage the strengths of different institutions and improve the quality of graduate outputs.

(ii) The available teacher development infrastructure, built by the various projects, is currently seriously underutilized. A utilization and optimization study of existing facilities can help maximize return on investment and inform any infrastructure investments noted for teacher development in the development assistance pipeline.

(iii) Many of the various outreach facilities, such as teacher resource centers, are not being used and have few, if any, teaching and learning resources. The regional governments cannot provide the regular funds for operation and maintenance. There is an urgent need to minimize infrastructure expansion and provide teaching and learning facilities, including ICT facilities and e-learning resources. The other option is to consider leasing facilities to other teacher training providers to supplement operational costs.

3. information and communication Technology facilities

and e-learning resources

The potential for ICT to contribute to education in general and to teacher education in particular has not been fully appreciated in all the countries in the region, despite the international recognition and adoption of the same. Most ICT investments to date have concentrated on strengthening management systems, and some fragmented investment is providing ICT equipment to teacher training colleges.

(i) To maximize the benefits of ICT investments, adopt a systematic approach to integrate ICT into all aspects of teacher development, including the NTSF, the initial preservice program, and teacher performance monitoring. Adopting an integrated national policy will minimize redundancies, incompatibility, obsolescence, etc., and thus increase efficiency.

(ii) Upgrade teacher training institutions’ libraries by developing e-library facilities— procure open education journals and other open educational resources and/or selectively seek affiliation with commercial resource providers. Providing access to good quality resources empowers teachers and promotes self-development. E-learning resources can help teachers improve their subject content knowledge as well as their pedagogical practices. The e-learning resources for subject content knowledge can also be used by students, so the investment can have multiple benefits. Access to good learning resources is a major impediment to education in the region.

(iii) To increase access to e-learning, identify selected teacher resource centers and learning centers and establish e-learning centers. Connectivity is not a prerequisite for e-learning. Negotiate with training providers to use the selected outreach facilities to jointly establish libraries with e-learning resources for teachers and students.

(iv) Develop human resource capacity to provide continued support to ICT interventions, preferably through established positions within the government

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departments or through service contracts. Having qualified staff is critical for ensuring that both national and rural ICT centers are regularly upgraded and maintained. Capacity is also necessary to develop and curate a national teacher professional development repository.

4. managing Teacher Demand and supply

(i) As noted in the national reports, the countries’ initial push to increase access considered ways to rapidly train enough teachers to meet the demand. However, over the years, teacher demand has become more complex: consideration of rural and urban demand, gender equity, subject specialization and mismatch, and so on require more disaggregated analysis. Furthermore, the management of teacher demand and supply is now being expanded to include quality measures—hence the push for developing and establishing the NTSF. Managing supply requires enhancing the capacity of education management information systems (EMIS) to collect data and undertaking more complex and disaggregated analytics to forecast medium-term demand. There is a need for strategic analytics, rather than simply the student–teacher ratio, as the basis for demand forecast. For instance, the ability to track the number of trainees in the system (private and public) and their specializations, and match those numbers with medium-term demand, can help to manage expectations of graduates seeking teaching jobs.

(ii) Recruitment policies should be changed to hire only candidates who have already received training—as is done in every other profession. This will eliminate the expansive practice of recruiting unqualified individuals and sending them for training with full pay—a very inefficient system. Policies to deal with exceptions (such as remote places where deployment of trained teachers may be a challenge) should be available only on a case-by-case basis—not a national policy.

(iii) Related to the above point is managing the high attrition from the teaching workforce, which ranges between 5% and 10%. With strategic replacement with high-quality teachers, within 5 years, the system will have 25%–50% of teachers who are of high quality, and this core group can create enough impact to change the practice from within the system.

(iv) All regional countries have an abundant supply of self-funded graduates looking for jobs, a valuable human resource that is currently not being utilized and should be tapped. Intensive pedagogical training can transform them into good teachers. The efficiency gained by doing this can be used to incentivize teacher performance. Recruiting teachers from graduates who have funded themselves saves government money. The governments just provide short-term pedagogical training and the savings can be used to provide incentives for teacher performance through awards that may include financial rewards.