The issue
Teachers are fundamental to achieving quality education for all. Without teachers, new classrooms and new textbooks are useless. But poor salaries, inadequate training, management and working conditions are forcing many teachers to leave the profession.
The facts
While donors are encouraging poor country governments to scale up enrolments to get the remaining 80 million children still excluded from education into school, they are not making similar investments in teacher recruitment, training and retention. Primary school teachers in Africa are paid as little as 25 US dollars a month, thus officially living well below the poverty line. Yet teachers in many countries are expected to teach classes of over 100 pupils, and work 12-hour days.
Because of limits imposed on public spending by the IMF, governments are struggling to save money by cutting corners on the length of teacher training. Opportunities for teachers to access in-service training, professional development or promotion are limited, and head teachers aren’t given the training or staff they need to enable them to manage schools effectively. As a result, the quality of education children receive is suffering.
What we're calling for
VSO's Valuing Teachers' research, completed in ten countries, has identified the following key demands:
- Donors must ensure financing is available and the IMF should give autonomy to governments to enable them to recruit and properly train at least 18 million more teachers needed by 2015
- Teachers need to be paid a living wage, and be paid on time. Donors should be willing to support teachers' pay in the same way as other education interventions
- Policy makers at all levels should consult teachers on education reforms
- Governments should provide teachers with more opportunities for promotion and professional development
- Head teachers and other managers should be given training and administrative support
- Where adequate preparation has been provided, budget holding and decision making powers should be devolved to school level, so that schools can be more responsive to local needs.
Valuing Teachers research & advocacy
Since 2000, Valuing Teachers research has been conducted in 10 countries and is currently underway in 3 more (see table of research reports and contact details of Valuing Teachers team members below). Following the research, advocacy strategies are developed, which include the development of partnerships and volunteer placements in:
- Civil society education coalitions: to develop their capacity to use research findings to lobby for change, undertake budget and other Education For All monitoring activities, and increase their voice in policy making processes
- Teachers unions: to increase their capacity to represent teachers, negotiate better terms and conditions and engage in education policy dialogue
- Gender and disadvantaged people’s representative organisations: girls' education focused organisations, networks of people with disabilities, dalits, ethnic minorities or people living with or affected by HIV & AIDS
- Ministries of Education: to increase their capacity to be responsive to civil society engagement in policy dialogue
Outcomes have included:
- The VSO/GCE report on IMF conditionality and teacher recruitment in Zambia, received wide media coverage in 2004. In 2005 Zambian government announced the relaxation of the IMF imposed Public Sector Wage Bill ceiling, allowing it to increase its education budget and employ 5000 new teachers per year since 2005.
- VSO Rwanda placed a volunteer in the teachers union, helping to increase union membership by 400%. Another volunteer established a new GCE coalition which successfully lobbied, during the Poverty Reduction Strategy consultation process, for secondary teachers’ salaries to be doubled.