Teachers

Teachers are the most important school-based factor influencing students learning. They do more than convey information; they equip children with the skills, knowledge, and values necessary for success in school, their careers, and society.

Effective interventions to improve student learning depend on strong teachers. Transitioning from a less effective teacher to a highly effective one can equate to several additional years of schooling and learning. Teachers also significantly impact students’ long-term social and employment outcomes, helping to prepare them for the world of work. Moreover, the teaching profession itself is a major source of jobs for men and women. Indeed, it will be a key employment opportunity in the future as tens of millions of additional teachers will be needed around the world.

To ensure that all children are taught by effective teachers, the World Bank emphasizes the importance of preparing and supporting teachers throughout their careers. This support to teachers is increasingly vital in the context of low levels of learning, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and the significant learning recovery needs due to prolonged school closures during pandemics, wars, and natural disasters.

Key challenges include:

Low learning outcomes: Many children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10, partly due to inadequate recruitment, preparation, support, management, and motivation of teachers.
Teacher shortages: An additional 44 million teachers are needed to achieve universal primary and secondary education and meet the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) by 2030.
Inadequate teacher preparation: Many teachers lack the core knowledge and skills for teaching, which are typically gained through initial teacher education (ITE) and continuous professional development (CPD). These programs often do not reflect the realities of overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms.
Deployment issues: Too often, insufficient numbers of teachers are deployed to areas where they are most needed, particularly in remote and underserved regions.
Rigid career structures: Teacher career structures often lack flexibility and leadership opportunities, making attracting and retaining highly effective teachers difficult.

Last Updated: Apr 21, 2025

The World Bank recognizes the need to support and value teachers at every career stage. To this end, the World Bank has developed a framework for countries to strengthen and support a pipeline of teachers for improved student learning. This framework promotes a holistic approach to teacher policy, ensuring teachers are prepared, supported, motivated, and recognized.

A diagram of a teacher's processAI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: Benveniste 2024.

In 2018, the World Bank launched the Global Platform for Successful Teachers with the report “Successful Teachers, Successful Students: Recruiting and Supporting Society’s Most Crucial Profession” (updated in 2021) and the Teach Primary classroom observation tool.

Supporting countries to develop and implement successful teacher policies

The World Bank’s approach to supporting teacher policymaking includes:

Making teaching attractive: Improving the teaching profession's status, compensation policies, and career progression structures.
Strengthening teacher preparation: Ensuring initial teacher education (ITE) includes strong field placement experiences to prepare teachers for real classroom environments.
Meritocratic selection and deployment: Promoting the effective selection and deployment of teachers to ensure all students have access to quality teaching.
Ongoing support and motivation: Providing high-quality continuous professional development (CPD) and strong school leadership.
Wise use of technology: Enhancing teachers’ ability to reach every student by leveraging technology.

Supporting countries to measure effective teaching practices

The World Bank’s open-access suite of classroom observation tools — Teach Early Childhood Education (ECE), Teach Primary, and Teach Secondary — helps low- and middle-income countries collect data on core teaching practices. Since its launch in 2019, these tools have been used in over 50 countries, with ongoing implementation in 10 more countries. Teach Primary results have informed UNESCO’s 2024 Global Report on Teachers, and Teach ECE results have been included in the Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education by UNICEF and UNESCO.

Supporting countries to improve ITE and CPD

The forthcoming report, “From Prospective to Prepared Teacher: A Global Study of Initial Teacher Education,” analyzes how primary school teachers are prepared worldwide through various models of ITE. It identifies lessons and guiding principles to help countries improve their teacher preparation mechanisms, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Coach program provides tools and resources to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of teacher CPD programs. Additionally, the World Bank helps countries strengthen their ITE, induction, and CPD systems through tailored support, such as the Education Policy Learning Exchange.

Making teacher policy work

The 2023 report, “Making Teacher Policy Work”, examines what it takes to design better teacher policies, using a framework that combines education and behavioral science insights with real-world policy examples. The report highlights that effective teacher policies must address individual-level barriers and be operationally feasible and politically acceptable.

Last Updated: Apr 21, 2025

The World Bank supports countries worldwide in developing and implementing successful teacher policies, identifying and evaluating effective teaching practices, and improving initial teacher education (ITE) and continuous professional development (CPD).

Examples include:

In Malawi, the World Bank supported the government in building an updated, accurate, and comprehensive database of teachers and their postings, identifying and analyzing the factors driving teacher allocation (e.g., road access to schools, electricity, distance to nearest trading center), and developing a school categorization that drove policy reforms to reduce disparities without added cost: new teachers are targeted to hardship schools, and the 20 percent of teachers working in the most remote schools receive a meaningful bonus.

In the Dominican Republic, the World Bank supported a comprehensive teacher reform that included the creation of professional and performance standards for the accreditation and development of the teaching career. These standards are used in teacher selection, preparation, induction, and evaluation.

In Tanzania, the World Bank has supported government efforts to improve teachers’ CPD, including the design and rollout of the national teacher CPD framework, Mafunzo Endelevu ya Walimu Kazini (MEWAKA). MEWAKA includes school- and group-based CPD for teachers, largely through peer facilitators and teachers’ communities of learning. Since its inception in 2021, MEWAKA is now implemented in more than half of Tanzania’s 184 districts. The proportion of teachers in those districts regularly participating in collaborative lesson planning, classroom observation, peer learning and mentoring, and reporting higher job satisfaction and efficacy has doubled from around 40 percent at baseline to 80 percent.

In Sri Lanka, the World Bank supports the development of a flexible teacher career framework that offers mobility across roles associated with the classroom, administrative positions, and advisory or training services or becoming a teacher educator.

In Morocco, teacher policies and professionalization have been at the core of education reforms, and the World Bank has supported these efforts. A new five-year ITE model is enhancing teachers’ core knowledge and skills for teaching, improving teacher effectiveness, and increasing the overall attractiveness of the profession.

In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), the World Bank supports a media campaign to explain the importance of teachers for the country’s future as part of a package of interventions to increase teachers’ intrinsic motivation. In addition, support is being provided to strengthen teacher training colleges as professional development centers by creating standards for trainers and providing capacity building to enhance these training colleges as hubs for teachers’ CPD.

Last Updated: Apr 21, 2025

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