ABSTRACT
In a recent report Teachers and Educational Quality: Monitoring Global Needs for 2015 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2006b), the figures showed that there will be a great diversity of teacher supply and demand by 2015. In South and West Asia, there will be an acute teacher shortage. India, Iran and Sri Lanka, while having no need to expand their teaching stocks, need to combat teacher attrition. In contrast, many countries in East Asia and the Pacific, with the exception of Cambodia and Lao PDR, will face the reduction of their teaching forces because of a steady decline in the primary-school-age population. In Thailand, the intake of new teachers, mainly at the primary level, is very small and some teachers have been deployed to the lower secondary sector (Office of Commercial Services (Queensland University of Technology) 2002). In China and many other countries, however, there is still the need to recruit more teachers because of retirements in the teaching force. In terms of the minimum qualification (known as the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) level) required to enter the teaching profession in selected Asian countries, 45 per cent of the primary teachers in Lao PDR had lower secondary education (ISCED 2) while Nepal had only 16 per cent of teachers fulfilling the minimum requirement of an upper secondary education (ISCED 3). In Myanmar, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, 65 per cent, 94 per cent and 100 per cent of the primary teachers respectively meet the requirements of a post-secondary non-tertiary degree programme (ISCED 4). In Macao (China) and the Philippines, 90 per cent and 100 per cent of teachers had attained a tertiary level qualification (ISCED 5) respectively (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2006b). These figures suggest that in some developing societies in Asia, there is a great need to upgrade the minimum qualification and competencies of teachers entering the profession. In some remote areas of Thailand and Indonesia, there has been a shortage of teachers and it is not uncommon to have multigrade teachers teaching more than one grade in primary schools (Sadiman 2004). In some other countries with higher standards and higher proportions of qualification, there are calls for upgrading teacher quality through inservice teacher education and professional development. In the context of educational reform, some countries such as Thailand need to develop ‘an inservice training program(me) to help these teachers to adopt student-centred learning and other new practices’; and
consider ‘innovative approaches to delivering that programme’ (Office of Commercial Services (Queensland University of Technology) 2002, p.22). In some Asian countries such as Singapore, the needs of teacher development may be different from those in less developed areas. A survey in the mid-1990s revealed that a substantial proportion (more than 60 per cent) of teacher respondents were coping only ‘fairly’ in the organization of appropriate and varied classroom activities to cater for the needs of different ability groups and the management of audio-visual equipment. On the other hand, 12.7 per cent of the respondents regarded the general behaviour of the pupils as disruptive or uncooperative, suggesting that coping with disciplinary problems might be another issue of concern for teacher development (Tay-Koay 1999).
