What are the key predictors of international teacher shortages?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recurrent teacher shortages have been a long-standing problem for many countries. Popular strategies to attract and retain teachers, used over several decades across the world, include bursaries, scholarships, performance-related pay, professional development and reducing workload. Governments in England have invested heavily in such policy responses, but none have been shown to be particularly effective. Such policies have tended to be based on weak research evidence. Much previous research has not considered the many different factors that can explain teacher shortages, and so yields misleading results by focussing on a few factors only. In this paper, we present our ongoing research to advance understanding of teacher shortages by comparing 18 countries that reportedly have and have not experienced teacher supply issues, using a complex Qualitative Comparative Approach, and based on numerous international datasets with (initially) hundreds of possible determinants. The results suggest that wider economic issues, such as the employment rate of graduates in subjects like humanities, are key predictors of shortages, along with teacher reports of poor behaviour of students, lack of resources, and pay. This should be of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including policy-makers, wanting to develop more effective and targeted interventions to improve teacher supply.