The Global Education Monitoring Report, “Leadership in Education” was launched on 31 October in Fortaleza, Brazil, during the UNESCO Global Education Meeting. It provides the latest data for monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 4 and reviews the evidence on leadership in the education sector. The report calls for school principals to be recruited fairly, empowered, and trusted so that they can foster quality education.
Collaborative leadership
Importantly, the report highlights the importance of collaborative rather than hierarchical, heroic school leaders. It emphasizes that teachers should be empowered to lead in their own classrooms and the best principals are instructional leaders: globally, 57% of countries expect principals to provide feedback to teachers based on their observations. However, the share of secondary school principals overseeing teaching activities fell from 81% in 2015 to 77% in 2022 in high-income countries.
“Principals can support teachers by involving them in decision-making and providing necessary training and resources and fostering a collaborative environment” (p.85).
The report rightly recognises that education support personnel can also play leadership roles, for example to promote inclusive education. It calls for principals to include them in decision making so that they can realise their potential.
Training and supporting school leaders
School leaders require preparation, yet the report shows that almost half of principals in high-income countries do not receive any training before appointment. Increased investment in training can provide principals with crucial management skills. Providing more support can also give principals more time to set a vision, inspire, and lead change rather than just focusing on routine operational tasks. In OECD countries, about a third of public school principals report lacking sufficient time for instructional leadership. Reducing the administrative load that has heightened in recent years due to new accountability mechanisms could help.
Women’s leadership
The report shows insufficient diversity in school leadership: data from 40 countries show the average share of female principals was at least 20 percentage points lower than the share of female teachers. Only 11% of countries globally have measures in place to address gender diversity in principal recruitment. However, female principals can raise learning outcomes.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Global Education Monitoring Report, EI’s Research, Policy and Advocacy Director, Antonia Wulff, stressed the need for countries to introduce targeted policies to promote women’s leadership, as called for by the UN High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession. Examples of such policies include professional development opportunities, fair promotion procedures, adequate parental leave, support during pregnancy and menopause, and fostering women teachers’ wellbeing.
Teacher unions taking the lead
The report argues that teacher unions can have a strong influence on education policy through lobbying, collective bargaining, and strikes. It recognises that teacher unions can be misportrayed as resistant to change, when in fact teacher unions often lead positive reforms in education. It calls for engaging with teacher unions through social and policy dialogue and including teacher unions in the design phase of reforms, to improve teaching and learning.
“Governments need to engage with teacher unions as teachers are the ones who will implement reforms and have unique on-the-ground perspectives of education needs and priorities.” (p.127).
SDG 4: dismal progress
The report highlights some positive areas of progress – for example, the participation in children under three in early childhood education has increased in Subs-Saharan Africa by over 10 percentage points over the past decade.
However, overall, the report shows little hope of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 on quality education for all by 2030. According to projections by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, at current rates, it will be over a hundred years – the year 2133 – before all students achieve the minimum proficiency level in reading by the end of primary school. The share of teachers with minimum qualification in Sub-Saharan Africa has dropped by ten percentage points over a decade, to 64% in 2022. Teacher shortages remain rife. Shortages can be due to teaching being an unattractive profession (only 4% of 15-year-olds in the richest countries want to become teachers) or a shortage of vacancies (for example, in Senegal, limited funding for teacher posts led to a surplus of over 1000 qualified teachers in 2020).
To solve these issues and accelerate progress, increased education financing is crucial. Yet, the report informs that globally, public education expenditure fell by 0.4 percentage points related to GDP and 0.6% (from 13.2% to 12.6%) related to total public expenditure between 2015 and 2022. Join EI’s Go Public: Fund Education campaign and advocate for urgent action by your government to fully fund education.