Commonwealth Teachers Group (CTG) First Edition, March 2025
Tackling the teacher shortage crisis in the Commonwealth By Oliver Mawhinney, International Policy Specialist at the National Education Union (UK) The world is amid a global teacher shortage. 44 million teachers are need globally by 2030 – a shortage that affects developing and developed countries alike, as demonstrated across the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is home to 2.7 billion people, with more than 60 per cent of the population aged 29 or under. 33 of 56 member states are small states, including many island nations, sitting alongside G20 countries including Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and the UK. Around the world, there are 250 million out-of-school children. More than 40 million of those children live in just two Commonwealth member states, Nigeria and Pakistan. Of the 763 million young people and adults who lack basic literacy skills, more than half live in the Commonwealth. Mirroring the rest of the world, teacher shortages in the Commonwealth are largest in the countries where needs are greatest, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where 1 in 3 of the additional teachers that must be recruited by 2030 are needed. The poaching of teachers: modern-day neocolonialism As the teacher recruitment and retention crisis has deepened in wealthy Commonwealth countries like the UK, so have efforts by these countries to recruit overseas trained teachers (OTTs). Alongside Canada, Germany and the U.S., the UK hosts the largest number of OTTs. In February 2023, the Department for Education widened a scheme which allows overseas teachers to gain qualified teacher status (QTS) in England without having to retrain to include a number of additional countries including Ghana, India, Jamaica, Nigeria and South Africa. Teachers who qualified in 48 countries are now eligible to apply for QTS, the legal requirement to teach in many English schools. Commonwealth countries make up just 10 of the eligible countries but accounted for over three-quarters of applications awarded between 1 February 2023 and 31 March 2024.*
Over 2,300 teachers from Ghana were granted QTS – the highest of any country. A further 655 teachers were recruited from Nigeria. Over 300 teachers from India were recruited and almost 200 from South Africa.
What’s more, this doesn’t show the full picture – there are several other routes for overseas trained teachers (OTTs) to work in England, such as completing their initial teacher training in the UK.
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