Teacher shortages have intensified across several OECD countries, making this an urgent priority for education systems. Between 2015 and 2022, the share of students whose principals reported shortages rose from 29% to 46.7% on average across the OECD. Simultaneously, rapid technological advances, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and broader socio-economic shifts, increase the need to support teachers in delivering quality education in evolving contexts. Addressing both the number of teachers and ensuring they possess the skills to meet new educational needs is essential for student success. This report presents a policy roadmap to help education systems balance the supply and demand for quality teaching in these changing times. Drawing on responses from 33 education systems to the Education Policy Outlook National Survey for Comparative Analysis, as well as additional evidence, the report outlines current challenges and key factors in their interplay. It also explores policy responses to attract, retain, and develop teachers, enhancing their teaching practices and professional learning. In doing so, the report aims to support countries in advancing the goals set by the 2022 OECD Declaration on Building Equitable Societies Through Education. This report is part of the Education Policy Outlook series – the OECD’s analytical observatory of education policy.
Education Policy Outlook 2024
Abstract
Executive Summary
Many education systems are struggling to balance teacher supply and demand, while facing declining student performance and persistent inequities. In 2022, nearly half (47%) of school principals across OECD countries reported that teacher shortages were hindering instruction at the lower secondary level – up from 29% in 2015. Global demographic shifts, such as ageing populations and low birth rates, mean disruptions in teacher supply and demand are set to intensify. At the same time, rapid technological advancements, particularly in AI, are reshaping how people live and work.
The 2022 Ministerial Declaration on Building Equitable Societies Through Education, marked a commitment by OECD education ministers to develop policies that promote quality and equity in student learning. Achieving this vision requires bold action to reimagine education systems and support educators. Policymakers, teachers, and institutional leaders must work together to enhance, adapt, or even disrupt current practices to strengthen teaching quality.
Chapter 1 of this report provides a comparative overview of the challenges education systems face in attracting, retaining, and developing quality teachers in this evolving context. It introduces a policy roadmap for education systems, which is further examined in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 through selected international experiences.
This analysis draws on data from over 33 education systems, gathered through the Education Policy Outlook National Survey for Comparative Policy Analysis 2024 (EPO Survey 2024) and additional OECD data. While the central focus is on school-level education, the report also considers other education levels.
Responses to the EPO Survey 2024 showed that, when it comes to the urgent policy challenge of addressing teacher shortages experienced in some education systems, a larger share of education ministries are focused on attracting teachers, compared to retaining them. Regarding attraction, two-thirds of respondents prioritised raising the status of the profession, enhancing institutional leadership, and diversifying pathways into teaching to improve teacher attraction.
The roadmap identifies key factors influencing teacher demand such as the size of the school-age population, compulsory education duration and coverage, teaching loads, and graduation requirements. Teacher supply, on the other hand, is affected by professional prestige, salaries and incentives, working conditions, and job availability, as well as by training, certification, and career structures.
Policy responses explored in this report to address teacher shortages aim to:
Get more teachers into the workforce, by reducing barriers to entering the profession, supporting re-entry, addressing targeted shortages, or proposing alternative pathways into the profession.
Better allocate teachers to areas of need, by rethinking teams’ skill mixes (e.g. enhancing teaching roles in collaborative structures, and restructuring teachers’ time into teams), increasing mobility within and outside of the profession, or ensuring an equitable distribution of teachers.
Make teaching a more attractive profession, by enhancing career structures that support progression, reviewing relative salaries and incentives; or developing campaigns to improve the status of the teaching profession.
In rapidly changing contexts, addressing teacher quality is also an urgent need. Responses to the EPO Survey 2024 suggest that harnessing the potential of digital technologies to improve teachers’ professional learning is only an emerging priority across education ministries compared to its use to support student outcomes. Similarly, fewer ministries prioritise policies that encourage teachers to use evidence-informed practices.
To support teacher quality in these contexts, the roadmap identifies policy factors to help them manage their workload while enhancing skills that can enhance their practice (e.g. digital skills, integration of evidence-informed approaches). At school level, the roadmap sees teachers’ professional judgement as informed and strengthened by strong relationships with colleagues and other partners, including from beyond the school walls. Similarly, supporting school leadership and enhancing physical and digital infrastructure or resources matter too. Furthermore, relevant areas of action at system level in times of rapid change include ongoing professional development and formative teacher appraisal.
Policy responses explored focus on:
Teachers: Helping manage teacher workloads including through the support of AI, enhancing teaching with technology and AI, or engaging with research to experiment with practice.
Schools: Working with champion teachers and institutions; or fostering collaborations between educators, researchers, and EdTech to co-design digital tools that meet teachers’ needs.
System: Embedding mentoring systems to support both novice and experienced teachers, or diagnosing teachers’ development needs
Education systems require strategic yet flexible approaches to address teacher shortages, grounded in a coherent vision. For this, effective planning must balance immediate needs with long-term objectives, supported by robust evaluation and monitoring to understand what is working, for whom, and in which contexts. However, the EPO Survey 2024 reveals that only two-thirds of education systems have projections of potential teacher shortages for 2025-2030 at primary and secondary levels, and fewer than half have done so for other education levels. The survey also finds that barriers to implementation or evaluation vary across the area of teacher policy surveyed.
Key efforts identified to enhance evaluation and monitoring capacity include:
Developing data infrastructure to inform decision-making: Developing comprehensive data infrastructure involves mapping current data efforts, integrating disparate data sources, and closing gaps with qualitative and quantitative data. Such infrastructure can allow for real-time adjustments and long-term impact assessments of policies on teacher quality and retention.
Empowering teachers and leaders as evidence contributors: Encouraging teacher participation in evaluation, supported by recognition and professional development, can enhance feedback quality and engagement. Digital tools and structured methods can further enable teachers to systematically document evidence, fostering a culture of evaluative thinking and continuous improvement within the teaching profession.
Leveraging rapid and adaptive evaluation models: Rapid, adaptive models can enable incremental assessment and timely adjustments to policies as they are being implemented. These methods use scenario-based evaluations, stress testing, and small-scale pilots to provide actionable insights in real time. While they may involve rigour trade-offs, these models can deliver timely information, allowing for flexible monitoring that addresses challenges before they become entrenched. Technology adoption – including AI-enabled data analytics, reflective tools, or platforms – can further streamline this process, creating feedback loops that support decision-making.
