Strengthening TE:  the role of research and international perspectives.

Prof. Sayed Yusuf, Director

CITE, South Africa

It is often asserted that equitable and quality education is only possible if there are “sufficient
numbers of adequately and highly qualified teachers” (Education International, 2011) and
that not education system can rise above the quality of tis teachers (Mourshed at al 2010).
This is particularly evident when viewed through the lens of learner performance and how
different learners perform at different levels across international contexts. What international
comparative tests highlight is the importance of quality teaching and learning, and thus the
importance of training that teachers need to receive to provide quality teaching and learning.
As such teacher professional development, governance, and accountability has become
important national and global priorities in the 21st century.

At the global policy level, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) list quality education
as a key goal to realise a more equitable, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive world.
Specifically, one of the key targets of the education SDG4 is to “substantially increase the
supply of qualified teachers by 2030, to address the qualified teacher shortage and to
ensure that learners have access to quality primary and secondary education”. The inclusion
of a teacher target, limited as it is, does recognise the important contrition that techier,
teaching and teacher education can make to providing equitable and quality education and
lifelong learning for all, particularly for the marginalised.

In this context, the challenge is to strengthen and improve the quality of initial and continuing
teacher education. In the case of initial teacher education, Naylor and Sayed (2014: 9-10)
assert that:

The quality of the new teachers graduating from initial teacher training will depend on
the selection of candidates into the program, the modality of the training, the quality
of the teacher educators, the teacher education curriculum and the assessment
process.

Drawing on current research (Sayed, et al 2017) this talk considers the existing knowledge
base about teacher professional development and teacher quality more generally and initial
teacher preparation specifically. To this end, it will outline a model of teacher education as a
way of understanding existing research gaps in the field and how they might be addressed. It
will conclude by arguing for a social justice orientated approach to teacher education policy,
research, and practice to promote equitable and quality learning for all.
Yusuf Sayed is the Professor of International Education and Development Policy at the University of
Sussex and the South African Research Chair in Teacher Education, and the Founding Director of the
Centre for International Teacher Education (CITE), at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology
(CPUT), South Africa. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic
Research (ISER), Rhodes University, South Africa. Previously Yusuf was Senior Policy Analyst at the
EFA Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO, Team Leader for Education and Skills, the Department for
International Development UK, and Head of Department of Comparative Education at the University
of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Yusuf is an education policy specialist with a career in international education and development
research. His research focuses on education policy formulation and implementation as it relates to
concerns of equity, social justice, and transformation. He has published on various issues in international
education and development including education quality and teacher education, exclusion and inclusion;
and education governance and the role of the state; equity, financing and education. His is presently
engaged in several research projects on teachers and teacher education including the ESRC/DFID
funded project “Engaging teachers in peacebuilding in post conflict contexts: evaluating education
interventions in Rwanda and South Africa and several large-scale studies about teacher
professionalism, teacher education and continuing professional developmet.in South Africa and
globally.