Outstanding schools and high performing education systems have a lot in common. For the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), three things matter most: First, they focus on the future, not the past; second, they focus on skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration; third, they have an ability to get and keep great teachers, through a sustained focus on professional improvement.
Given that global teacher supply is fixed in the short run, to raise teacher quality requires supply-side investment in the current teaching stock. To raise teacher quality within and between nations requires a common agreement on standards, creative political decisions on resourcing, and a supportive infrastructure to make it happen.
Start with why
UNESCO has built a Framework of Professional Teaching Standards aligned to its SDG4 on Quality of Education (UNESCO, 2022) that affords a firm international platform. The framework has three domains embracing knowledge and understanding, teaching practice (pedagogy), and professional relations.
Good teachers are subject experts. They use methods that have an impact on student learning and attainment, and they build positive, professional relationships with students, parents, and wider stakeholders.
At a systems level, successful implementation needs effective government action. In framing the strategic ambitions of a nation and the future of its people, governments underwrite the resources required for their long-run success.
Transforming education attracts people to teaching, ensures new teachers are well trained, and commits to impactful professional development; built on the core idea of making the best even better. Taken together, such actions raise the status of the teaching profession and raise its value to society. Seen in diverse countries such as Finland, Japan, and Singapore, these actions make a difference to students.
The point is, it can be done.
Move to how
Being aware of the challenges we face, helps us move quickly from why to how. Guided by poet Herbert, “to him that will, ways are not wanting.” Given that we have standards and the capacity to resource, our focus is on how we build an infrastructure to improve teacher quality.
Infrastructure needs to have properties with the capacity to grow, to adapt and to endure. This will happen with a long term vision for education, through a shared political consensus, and protected from the whims of expediency.
Teachers must be put front and centre as the nation seeks to create a skilled and respected profession. Countries that build professional status attract the best quality recruits. In Bangladesh, the industry needs root and branch reform of the industry: By cutting bureaucracy, removing glass ceilings, and fast-tracking talent. The long term goal is to build a respected profession.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) gives us perspective on how other countries have moved from short term crisis-mode reactions in teacher recruitment and retention, to a long term success strategy of building capacity and status in teacher supply. Supply-side reform involves attracting the best new graduates to education and improving all existing teachers.
First, build a leadership academy to establish national standards for school leadership, have monitoring mechanisms for leaders' impact, and have professional development trajectories for leaders.
Second, widen options for initial teaching training to embrace international providers and online training possibilities.
Third, review the career trajectory for successful school educators, so that mastery in pedagogy and practice becomes a career pathway of value and status.
Making teachers agents in school reform builds status and shows impact, at the macro level of policy and the micro level of school improvement. Key to this is to build a culture of continuous improvement in schools rooted in the belief that good teachers have the capacity to be better professionals. To this end, teaching for impact should be the prevailing philosophy based on research-led practice.
Close monitoring of policy changes needs to be built into the process to ensure effective use of limited resources. This requires alignment between school improvements and individual needs -- a close fit between the needs of the school and its contribution to the system. There is often a disconnect between the strategic needs of the institution and the professional competences of individuals.
End with impact
Education reform starts with why and always begins with a singular focus on students: The qualities we are seeking to instill, the values we wish to inculcate, and the future skills we wish to ingrain.
Supply-side reform in education -- with a spotlight on improving recruitment and retention and in raising teaching standards -- must have as its key performance indicators, qualitative measures on children's wellbeing and quantitative impacts on student performance.
To make this happen, we will need to define, discuss, and agree on the best modalities for measurement and monitoring, to make the future ambitions of a nation the ambitious future for its people.
Simon O'Grady is the Founding Headmaster of Haileybury Bhaluka, the first premier boarding school in Bangladesh. Having built outstanding schools on three continents, he draws on his leadership experience to outline how teacher quality can help create contented citizens in future.
