Proportion of teachers with the minimum required qualifications, by education level

Definition

SDG Indicator 4.c.1: Percentage of teachers by level of education taught (pre-primary, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education) who have received at least the minimum organized pedagogical teacher training pre-service and in-service required for teaching at the relevant level in a given country, in a given academic year. Ideally the indicator should be calculated separately for public and private institutions.

Data source

Administrative data from schools and other organized learning centres.

Source definition

UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Calculation method

The number of teachers in a given level of education, in a given academic year who are trained is expressed as a percentage of all teachers in that level of education, in that academic year.

Data required

Number of teachers at each level of education who are trained and total number of teachers at each level in a given academic year.

Interpretation

A high value indicates that most students are being taught by teachers who are pedagogically well-trained to teach.

Limitations

National minimum training requirements can vary widely from one country to the next. This variability between countries lessens the usefulness of global tracking because the indicator would only show the percent reaching national standards, not whether teachers in different countries have similar levels of training. To address this limitation, the UIS has initiated the development of an international classification of teacher training programmes that can be used for comparisons of such programmes across countries.

Purpose

Teachers play a key role in ensuring the quality of education provided. Ideally all teachers should receive adequate, appropriate and relevant pedagogical training to teach at the chosen level of education and be academically well-qualified in the subject(s) they are expected to teach. This indicator measures the share of the teaching work force which is pedagogically well-trained.

Quality standards

The indicator should be based on available data on trained teachers for the given level of education, from all types of educational institutions in the country (public and private). The UIS sets standards and maintains the global database used to produce this indicator.

Types of disaggregation

By sex, level of education and type of institution (public/private). Location is not currently collected at the global level but this could be considered in the future.