Teachers

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:

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.

Recognizing the need to support and value teachers at every stage of their career, the World Bank has developed a framework for countries to strengthen and support a pipeline of teachers to improve student learning. This framework promotes a holistic approach to teacher policy, ensuring teachers are prepared, supported, motivated, and recognized. 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).

Supporting countries to develop and implement successful teacher policies 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 (LMICs) 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.

The World Bank supports countries to develop and implement 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 a 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). The project drove policy reforms to reduce disparities without added cost: New teachers are sent 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 reform to create 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  supported government efforts to improve teachers’ CPD, including the design and rollout of the national CPD framework. The framework includes school- and group-based CPD for teachers, largely through peer facilitators and teachers’ communities of learning. Since 2021, the framework has been 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 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, the World Bank has supported teacher policies and professionalization as part of core of education reforms. 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, the World Bank supports a package of interventions to increase teachers’ motivation. In addition, the project is creating standards for trainers and providing capacity building to enhance teacher training colleges as hubs for teachers’ CPD.

Classroom observation tools

The Teach suite of tools was designed to help countries collect data on teaching practices and teaching quality.

Teacher professional development

Many teachers lack the core knowledge and skills for teaching, which are typically gained through initial teacher education and continuous professional development (CPD). The World Bank supports teacher policies that provide ongoing support through high-quality CPD and strong school leadership.

Education & Skills

Education and skills training are the bridge between human potential and economic opportunity.

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