Number of classroom teachers and academic staff

Definition

Count of personnel employed whose primary assignments are instruction and/or research. At the tertiary level, this includes personnel who hold an academic rank with such titles as professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, lecturer, or the equivalent. Personnel with other titles (e.g. dean, director, associate dean, assistant dean, chair or head of department) are also included if their principal activity is instruction or research.

Data source

Administrative data from educational institutions (school census) or teachers’ records.

Source definition

UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Calculation method

Tn,t = Number of teachers at level n of education in year t

Where:

n = 01 (early childhood educational development), 02 (pre-primary), 1 (primary), 2 (lower secondary), 3 (upper secondary), 23 (secondary), 4 (post-secondary non-tertiary), 5 (short-cycle tertiary education), 6t8 (bachelor’s or equivalent, master’s or equivalent, and doctoral or equivalent), and 5t8 (tertiary)

Data required

Total number of teachers at each level of education in a given academic year.

Interpretation

The number of teachers assesses the size of the teaching workforce by level of education in each country.

Limitations

The precision of this indicators can be subject to the enumeration method, e.g. headcount or ‘full-time equivalent’ count of teachers.

Purpose

The number of teachers or academic staff (tertiary) informs about the volume, composition, and allocation of human resources in education institutions in a country. A higher number is expected to enhance the learning environment through instruction, applied research, scholarly activity, and service in support to national education policies.

Quality standards

This indicator should be based on reliable data on teaching staff at each level of education and from all types of educational institutions in the country (public and private). When calculating this indicator, one should take into account the existence of part-time/multi-grade/multi-level or double-shift teaching, as well as other practices that may affect the precision of this indicator. When feasible, the number of part-time teachers should be converted to ‘full-time equivalent’ numbers of teachers before use in the indicator calculation. A double-shift teacher should be counted twice, etc.

The UIS sets standards and maintains the global database used to produce this indicator.

Types of disaggregation

By sex and level of education.