LITERATURE on teacher impact shows that good teaching provides a significant delta on student learning, compared to average or poor teaching. Simply put, teachers matter and good teaching is important for ensuring better learning outcomes.
However, recruiting, motivating, and keeping good teachers gainfully and efficiently employed is not easy. In Pakistan, a couple of decades back, teacher recruitment was seen as having too much discretion with not enough reliance on rules. Allegations of corruption and nepotism in teacher recruitment were common. Many of these charges were based on facts. Two decades ago, reforms were introduced to move to more rules-based (merit-based) recruitment. This has definitely reduced the allegations, and litigation on recruitment issues has also decreased. But has it improved teacher and/or teaching quality? Has it improved student learning? And what unintended consequences has it led to? These are important follow-ups for completing the loop for feedback and continuous improvement. ‘Merit’-based recruitment might reduce corruption, but does it allow us to differentiate between good and bad teachers? If not, the reform might be of limited value.
Many places worldwide have significant requirements for specific courses, diplomas and even degrees before a person can become a teacher. When we moved towards merit-based recruitment, provincial governments removed the requirements for education degrees before joining as a teacher. This has increased the pool of candidates for teaching (a physics graduate can come into teaching directly) but many of these applicants did not choose to be teachers and have no understanding of what teaching is: you can be good at physics but teach it badly. How has this impacted learning outcomes?
Some jurisdictions even have teacher licensing. Teacher licensing has often been talked about in Pakistan but it was only recently that Sindh introduced it. But will licensing improve teaching and learning? We have 1.5 million or so teachers in Pakistan and still suffer a shortage. Will licensing help? Is it only for government schools or also private schools? Will teachers be required to have licences in low-fee private schools, where sometimes they teach Matriculation- or Intermediate-level students? Who will pay for the cost?
Recruiting, motivating, and keeping good teachers efficiently employed is not easy.
Once a teacher has been recruited, is she a teacher forever? Does she need any education, training or upgradation? Is there a role for continuous professional development and how is it to be structured? Punjab has some 450,000 teachers. How do you design effective professional development systems for such large numbers? Do we design devolved systems or centralised ones? How do we ensure quality and some level of uniformity across the system? We have had continuing professional development systems in place, but the general feeling is that they don’t seem to work and haven’t had the intended impact and definitely not the one needed.
Once deployed, how do we keep teachers motivated to teach effectively for the entire length of their careers — 30-35 years? What are effective career paths for teachers? If a teacher is a good Grade 1 teacher today, how do we ensure that she will be a good, motivated and effective Grade 1 teacher in 10, 20 or 30 years from now? What should happen to her financial returns and other ‘incentives’ so that she is able to have a rewarding career in Grade 1?
We do not have research on most of these important questions. Which means we do not have effective feedback loops on policies. Policies keep coming and getting implemented. But what consequences do they have? How can we improve if we don’t have effective feedback loops that research consequences and impact?
What is heartening is that there is an increasing realisation — in government and academia and among development partners and research institutions — of the need to have these feedback loops and to do relevant policy research on important questions. Most education departments already have specific implementation and planning units to structure some of this work. Development partners have historically funded and encouraged some research, but this has recently become more structured and is being given due importance. Academic research output has also been steadily increasing in education in Pakistan.
The most recent and current impetus has come from a very innovative research support programme funded by FCDO and called the Data and Research in Education-Research Consortium. DARE-RC has funded some 35 studies in the education sector, five to six of them on teacher issues. These studies are in collaboration with education departments. The programme is of medium term (it just closed the fourth round of call for proposals).
The results of the studies will allow us to bring out relevant issues more clearly, and some of them will start answering some of the questions raised above. By focusing on local researchers, the programme is also developing the capacity for research in education in Pakistan and a community of practice in the area. The hope is that other programmes, following this one and funded by government and partners, will continue to build on this approach, so that we not only have answers to the questions but also the local capacity to do such work. We will always have more questions and we need communities and people who are able to answer them so that we can keep improving outcomes in education.
Pakistan must have around 1.5-2m teachers today. With millions of children still out of school, and with most in-school children getting a poor quality of education across the country, we need more teachers — more motivated and committed teachers — and a lot more teacher training to ensure better content knowledge as well as a sound understanding of optimal pedagogical strategies. We also need much better policies for management and regulation of teaching, and effective feedback loops to ensure things keep improving. In this context, DARE-RC offers an interesting model for developing the capacity needed for such work. I hope education departments will not only look at the outcomes of the research studies being done under DARE-RC, but also at how the research capacity being built can be strengthened and deepened beyond the programme. This is important if we are to ensure our policies improve over time.
Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2025
