Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation The Learning Generation The Education Commission is a global initiative dedicated to greater progress on Sustainable Development Goal 4 – ensuring inclusive and quality education and promoting lifelong learning for all. The Commission is helping to create a pathway for reform and increased investment in education by mobilizing strong evidence and analysis while engaging with world leaders, policymakers, and researchers. Drawing upon new research and analysis from more than 300 partners in 105 countries, the Education Commission’s groundbreaking 2016 report – The Learning Generation: Investing in education for a changing world – put forward an action plan to deliver and finance an expansion of educational opportunity for the more than 260 million children and youth who are not in school today. The Learning Generation report made 12 key recommendations to improve performance, harness innovation, improve inclusion, and mobilize more and better finance. One of these recommendations was to strengthen and diversify the workforce. Thanks to the generous support of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the Commission’s Education Workforce Initiative has worked with several Commissioners and many partners to produce Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation – a report that offers visions for the urgent action needed to strengthen, diversify, and reimagine an education workforce to deliver quality education for all. Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation 2 Foreword We live in an age of unprecedented change and disruption. In some places, cars drive themselves, drones deliver packages, and refrigerators tell you when it’s time to buy milk – but over 800 million children and youth around the world are not on track to learn the skills needed to thrive now and in the future. With millions of precious young minds at stake, the harsh reality of the global learning crisis stands in stark opposition to the “progress” promised by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We are running out of time to respond to one of the world’s most fundamental needs: ensuring inclusive, equitable, quality education for ALL our children. We are just over 10 years away from the 2030 deadline to meet this goal, as outlined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4. How can we get there? Teachers are at the heart of the learning process and teacher quality is the single most important influence on learning outcomes at the school level. But in many countries, teachers are in desperately short supply. And it is increasingly evident that teachers cannot work alone. As the African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” When this ethos of collaboration and care is applied to the learning process, we believe it takes a team to educate a child. Teachers need leadership and support to be effective at what they do best and to help reach those with the greatest needs. To build this support team, we must tap the potential of the broader education workforce – school and district leaders, specialists, learning assistants, community experts, entrepreneurs, health and welfare professionals, parents, volunteers, and many others – to create a responsive, evolving system that keeps pace with today’s changing world and equips young people with the new skills, knowledge, values, and competences they need to succeed. The Education Commission’s 2016 Learning Generation report called for the strengthening and diversification of the education workforce, as well as the establishment of an international expert group to take a fresh look at redesigning the workforce. Thanks to the support of the UK’s Department for International Development, the Commission’s Education Workforce Initiative (EWI) convened a high-level team of researchers, teachers, and policymakers that spent more than a year digging out data, debating, and developing new approaches to the challenges of workforce reform. This report is the result. (It takes a team to produce a report, too.) We are grateful to our country partners for their openness in collaborating with EWI to co-create and test concrete proposals for education workforce reform Transforming the in Ghana; teacher deployment for equity in Sierra Leone; and adaptive high- Education Workforce: touch, high-tech learning to support the STEM workforce in Vietnam. Learning Teams for a Learning Generation 3 Unsurprisingly, no “one-size-fits-all” model for education workforce design exists given the diverse social and political contexts of each country. But given the workforce is an education system’s biggest investment, countries should make it a smart one. Robust learning systems are powerful levers of change, and members of the workforce should be strengthened and empowered to be change agents themselves. While more research and evidence is needed to evaluate the impact of newer approaches, we do know that many workforce models in use today are outdated, inefficient, and unable to respond quickly enough to the rapidly changing world around us. The unmet promise to the world’s children for universal quality education demands a transformative response. We believe the evidence, innovations, and vision of building collaborative learning teams for a learning generation shared here are a good start. The Education Workforce Initiative Leadership Team Ju-Ho Lee, Chair Susan Hopgood, Vice-chair Theo Sowa, Vice-chair Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation 4 Table 8 Executive Summary of Contents 28 Terms 30 Chapter 1 Introduction 34 Chapter 2 Reimagining the education workforce 2.1 The broader education challenge 2.2 The education workforce: the key to achieving SDG 4 and future progress 2.3 The education workforce challenge 2.4 Global trends and opportunities to reimagine the education workforce 45 Chapter 3 Visions for the education workforce 55 Chapter 4 Strengthening the education workforce 4.1 Recruit the right people to the right places 4.2 Prepare, train, and induct the workforce 4.3 Motivate, professionally develop, and progress the workforce 4.4 Lead and manage the workforce 74 Chapter 5 Developing learning teams 5.1 Optimize the right skills and expertise of the workforce at school level 5.2 Reorient school leader roles to instructional leadership and inclusion 5.3 Reorient the district to provide instructional leadership and data-driven improvement 5.4 Shift state-level focus to evidence-based strategic change in collaboration with the workforce 5.5 Create structures and practices to support learning teams 5.6 Key shifts in the education workforce at each level with a learning team approach 94 Chapter 6 Transforming education systems into learning systems 6.1 Develop innovative learning configurations to address individual learner needs 6.2 Develop school networks and harness system leaders 6.3 Leverage cross-sectoral partnerships 6.4 Encourage a research and development culture where high impact innovations are identified and scaled 6.5 Key shifts in the education workforce at each level in a learning system Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation 5 Table 110 Chapter 7 of Contents How to make education workforce reform happen 7.1 Navigating the political economy of workforce reforms 7.2 Planning, costing, and financing the education workforce 138 Chapter 8 Agenda for action 8.1 Call to action for policymakers and the education workforce 8.2 Call to action for international actors 145 Annexes Annex A: Design principles Annex B: Guiding questions for strengthening the education workforce Annex C: Guiding questions for designing the workforce using learning team and learning system visions 152 Endnotes 167 Abbreviations 168 Acknowledgements List of boxes 32 Box 1: Defining the education workforce 33 Box 2: Designing and strengthening the education workforce 48 Box 3: Benefits of the learning team approach 52 Box 4: Defining networks for a learning system 58 Box 5: Chile’s approach to teacher professionalization 64 Box 6: Transforming Teacher Education and Learning (T-TEL) in Ghana 73 Box 7: EWI in Sierra Leone: Teacher deployment for equity 83 Box 8: School level – illustrative teaching and learning roles 84 Box 9: Instructional leadership 85 Box 10: School level – illustrative leadership and management roles 87 Box 11: District level – illustrative roles 89 Box 12: Peer learning enabling factors 93 Box 13: EWI in Ghana: Redesigning the education workforce 100 Box 14: EWI in Vietnam: High-tech, high-touch learning 103 Box 15: School and district level – illustrative roles needed to work with school networks 105 Box 16: School and district level – illustrative roles driven by cross- sectoral partnerships 107 Box 17: Learning from health: building an evidence-informed profession 114 Box 18: Teachers as a driving force in policy reforms 123 Box 19: Highly effective interventions to solve bottlenecks in the education workforce 135 Box 20: Modeling teacher reallocation costs 137 Box 21: Modeling costs for a route to teacher qualification Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation 6 Table List of figures of Contents 35 Figure 1: Median learning-adjusted years of schooling by country income group 38 Figure 2: In some countries, half of all graduates are needed to meet teacher demand 40 Figure 3: Teachers’ time at primary school level 47 Figure 4: Three interacting