Abstract
Too many children are not learning to
read in the East Asia and Pacific region’s middle-income
countries. In some countries in the region, such as the Lao
People’s Democratic Republic and the Philippines, more than
90 percent of 10-year-olds cannot read and understand an
age-appropriate text. To accelerate learning in these
countries, better teaching will be needed. To improve
teacher quality in the next 10 years, where should countries
focus their attention? On improving the teaching skills and
content knowledge of their existing stock of teachers, on
recruiting and better training new teachers, or on doing
both? This paper contributes to this discussion by addressing
two policy questions: (i) will East Asia and Pacific’s
middle-income countries need more or fewer teachers in the
coming decade, and (ii) quantitatively, how important will
the newly recruited teachers be (the flow) relative to the
teaching workforce who have already been recruited (the
stock)? To answer these questions, the paper uses a simple
model that projects the required number of primary school
teachers in each of the East Asia and Pacific region’s 22
middle-income countries. The model is based on several
factors, such as: (i) the size of future cohorts of
children, (ii) the proportion of those cohorts who end up in
school, (iii) the pupil-to-teacher ratio, and (iv) teacher
attrition. Two key messages emerge with an important policy
implication. First, significant heterogeneity exists across
the 22 countries, with seven countries projected to need
fewer teachers overall in the next 10 years relative to the
teacher stock in 2020, while the rest will need to expand
their teacher workforce. Second, despite this heterogeneity,
in every East Asia and Pacific country, teachers who are
already “in the system” are expected to constitute the
majority of teachers still employed in 2030. In some
countries, teachers who have already been recruited will
constitute more than 70 percent of those who will be in
schools in 2030. The finding has an important policy
implication, namely: if countries want to improve the
quality of teaching in schools, their primary focus in the
next 10 years should be on improving the stock, that is, the
quality of their current teacher workforce (through more and
better teacher professional development).
