Primary School Teacher Deployment: A Comparative Study

Ensuring education for all at the primary school level is not just a matter of recruiting enough teachers: they must be deployed effectively across the education system. Even countries with sufficient total numbers of teachers may have shortages in some areas, or be unsuccessful in recruiting female teachers, with consequences for the participation rate of girls in schools.

Primary School Teacher Deployment presents four detailed studies from countries with low net educational enrollment levels: Nigeria, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and Pakistan. The book demonstrates the effects of inequitable teacher deployment and addresses these problems at the country level. The contributors make overall recommendations on deployment policies and practices in a number of areas to assist educational planners to achieve Education for All goals, particularly with regard to female teachers, but also dealing with training and recruitment, in-service training, teacher incentives, teacher utilization, and effective decentralization.

Fatimah Kelleher is Education Programme Officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat, London.