ABSTRACT
Teachers are central to the ambition to provide an education for all children. The global commitment to ensure a basic education for all by 2015 has seen a significant expansion of primary education in many countries with a consequent rapid increase in teacher numbers. There has been a parallel mobilisation of international activity around the 2015 target, something unique in education policy. How to give every child a school place is by far the most daunting educational problem faced by the world community. In other aspects of social policy similar challenges exist. In health the campaigns to eradicate malaria and to combat HIV/Aids have been international in terms of politics and research. In education a similar global focus, realised through the UN Millennium Development Goals and UNESCO’s Education for All programme, has been more recent but the commitment seems sustained. Other international agencies have universal basic education as a major concern and increasingly, the social and economic pressures to provide universal and equitable access to secondary schooling are becoming part of the discourse. This discourse has also evolved to take in the growing worry about the quality and overall achievements of these newly expanding education systems. The UNESCO 2005 Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO, 2005) provided a strong critique of the issues around quality and highlights teachers central to this concern. The World Bank has created eight policy goals necessary to ensure the improvement of teacher effectiveness (World Bank, 2010a). The UK’s Department for International Development has called for the prioritisation of teachers in education development initiatives (DFID, 2010). In this context the way teachers are educated becomes an important part of the education and development agenda.
