Workforce Transformation

There is a real risk the world will not achieve inclusive, quality education for all by 2030 as set out in SDG 4. To meet the growing demand for quality education, the world must recruit and train 69 million teachers by 2030, 76 percent of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In some of the poorest countries, the required increase in teachers is equal to at least half of the projected number of graduates of tertiary education – a proportion unprecedented in even the most successful and most industrialized nations.

New approaches are needed, but increasing the supply of teachers alone will not be enough. Even in places where there are sufficient teachers in classrooms, many are not qualified or properly trained, and they often have limited pedagogical and subject knowledge. In addition, teachers often work in relative isolation with little support and are expected to fulfill increasingly diverse roles in order to respond to wide-ranging needs of their learners. There has been very little analysis and thought leadership around the changing role of the teacher and additional roles beyond classroom teachers that can support students to learn the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in this century.

The Education Workforce Initiative (EWI) is exploring options to professionalize a wider set of roles in the education workforce at both school and district levels.

EWI’s flagship report, Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation draws on the latest evidence and innovations to propose three dynamic visions for the education workforce, both now and in the future:

• Vision 1: Strengthen the education workforce. This involved creating an effective education workforce at all levels of an education system, with coherent approaches to strengthening each element of the workforce lifecycle for all roles – from recruitment and preparation, to professional development and career progression.
• Vision 2: Build learning teams. Many teachers are not sufficiently supported to develop the skills required to provide inclusive, quality learning for students. Effective teachers are critical, but they cannot work alone – it takes a team to educate a child. Countries need to harness the talent of the broader education workforce.
• Vision 3: Transforming education systems into learning systems. A learning system is a future-oriented vision, where learning teams, networks of education professionals, cross-sectoral partnerships, data, and evidence are harnessed to build a system that is able to learn and adapt.

EWI is working with three countries – Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Vietnam – to address their education workforce challenges, drawing on the research and testing new approaches

• Ghana: Redesigning the education workforce to improve learning. EWI and PricewaterhouseCoopers Ghana are working with the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service (GES) to redesign the national, regional, district and school workforce to improve learning, support equitable and inclusive access to education, and enable more effective school management. An organizational design approach is being used to understand existing challenges and define critical roles challenges and their associated competencies and skills.
• Vietnam: Leveraging adaptive and active learning to support STEM. EWI has partnered with the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) and Arizona State University (ASU) to prototype an adaptive and active learning program for 7th grade math teachers and students. This has drawn on ASU’s work on “High Touch High Tech Learning” which has shown how adaptive and active learning can be used to free up teachers’ time to focus on “high touch” learning of students through projects, discussions, hands-on experiences, nurturing higher order skills such as complex problem-solving and socio-behavioral skills. An independent evaluation showing significant impact on learning outcomes was led by researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul National University, University of Illinois, and Yonsei University.
• Sierra Leone: Rethinking teacher deployment for equity. EWI is working with the Teachers Service Commission and Fab Inc. to explore options for disadvantaged districts to have a sufficient supply of high-quality, qualified teachers, in line with the government’s ambition for a fully competent workforce by 2023. Evidence, analysis, and policy products on a range of issues including effective education workforce management, teacher recruitment and preference matching, and education workforce spatial analysis, have been undertaken to support the development of workforce policy.

Our Innovative Pedagogies Project (IPP) is working with country partners in Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda to create awareness, political will, and action around adopting inclusive, engaging, adaptive, and playful pedagogies and breadth of skills. This research and advocacy project, supported by The LEGO Foundation, is part of a wider effort to provide an inclusive, engaging, and adaptive education for every child. 

We are collaborating with the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana; Aga Khan Foundation and Samuel Hall in Kenya; and A Partner in Education, and The Wellspring Foundation in Rwanda to highlight bright spots and innovative practices within each country and to co-develop country action plans to address the gaps. Learn more about IPP here, read the IPP policy brief, and check out the IPP digital toolkit to help us promote the power of inclusive, adaptive, and engaging ways of teaching .