What’s really behind teacher shortages here and abroad?

In England, it might seem as though teacher shortages are perennial and universal. In fact, many countries worldwide do not report a problem with the supply of teachers, and some have never reported a shortage. Our new research paper reports initial findings on why this might be.

We looked at dozens of different education systems and considered hundreds of potential explanatory variables including geography, economy, and teacher pay, conditions and experiences. The figures come from large-scale or official data, such as TALIS or EURYDICE.

We then worked with a subset of countries which could be securely classified as having difficulty or not with the supply of teachers, looking at the determinants of their shortage status.

The former include Australia, Cyprus, Finland, Lithuania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Taiwan. The latter: Czechia, England, Estonia, France, Japan, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

We used the novel approach in this field: qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Our aim with this approach was to create the simplest set of necessary conditions to explain a teacher shortage (or absence thereof).

What we found is that, to some extent, a shortage is self-defined by each country. Several have high student-to-teacher ratios, large class sizes or long statutory working hours and report no shortages, and vice versa.

There is no single, simple indicator of a shortage. Advertised vacancies can be as much a sign of extra funding as of classes in danger of having no teachers.  

It is important to look at non-educational factors, just as it is important to listen to non-teachers about why they did not choose the profession. To ignore wider societal issues would be to bias the results about why teacher shortages exist.

There is no single, simple indicator of a shortage

For example, areas with a higher population density have fewer problems, as do countries where other graduate professions are not paid well in comparison to teaching. Another indicator of no shortage is a high unemployment rate in non-vocational occupations. But none of these are education-specific issues.

On the other hand, financial incentives, performance-related pay, professional development, class sizes and a number of other education-specific factors often cited in relation to teacher supply are not actually relevant in our model once other factors are considered.

Similarly, workplace stress is related to shortages, but is not needed as part of the simplest explanation of the difference between shortage and non-shortage countries. Shortages are created by having too few applicants, and/or by too many people leaving teaching early.

In England, there is no shortage of applicants for teacher training, but too many are rejected (for no clear reason), including a disproportionate number of ethnic minority students.

There is also a widespread problem of hard-to-staff schools, notably schools with high levels of student disadvantage and poverty. A clear approach to solving this local issue would be to prevent the occurrence of such schools by spreading poorer students more evenly between schools.

Shortages tend to be less in countries where there are more resources for schools, students are better behaved and teaching contact hours are lower in comparison to total statutory working hours.

But these are only partial solutions. The overall picture of the difference between shortage and non-shortage countries could be summed as the level of respect for teachers by all parties: students, parents, public, the media and policy agents.

This kind of appreciation is, to some extent, a combination of many other factors, including some of those noted above. But it is more than this. It is a feeling about how the profession is viewed.

In some countries, like Greece, people have to wait, sometimes a long time, for a vacancy to become a teacher, even once they are trained.

Counties like Singapore, South Korea and Finland do not report teacher shortages. Teachers there say they are held in high esteem, and appreciated by the government and the public.

Teachers in countries like England, France and Japan are significantly more affected by teacher shortages. In these countries, teachers report being held in much less esteem.

In England, for example, only 25 per cent of teachers reported feeling that they are valued by society. Only 10 per cent feel they are valued by policymakers.

This is surely what policymakers need to address in a more coherent way.

Read the full paper, ‘What are the key predictors of international teacher shortages?’ here