Teaching requirement policies globally and their implications for monitoring SDG 4

Teachers are the cornerstone to inclusive, equitable and high-quality education. The current SDG monitoring framework on teaching requirements, however, is based on national definitions and, as a result, masks critical disparities in the preparedness of teachers across countries. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) has recently created a new dataset on country teacher requirement policies. It reveals that not only do lower income countries tend to have lower qualification requirements officially, but also, and critically, they tend to have very low requirements for alternative entry pathways for teaching with many countries requiring no training. Establishing a global benchmark for teacher qualification policies is needed to better understand the differences in education quality across the world. However, measuring minimum training requirements for alternative pathways to teaching is also needed to understand the inequality in teacher preparedness within countries.