A report by the World Bank focused on Investing in Education across East Asia and the Pacific has revealed there is no bigger impact on how well students perform in the classroom than the quality of their teacher.

The special section in the World Bank’s March 2024 Pacific Economic Update provided by lead economist Lars Sondergaard showed that these led to literacy and numeracy challenges among students.

“Children need to be able to read and write and do basic maths to be ready to acquire those more advanced skills that will be needed to adopt new technologies to innovate and meet tomorrow’s economic challenges,” said Mr Sondergaard.

“And here lies the current challenge for these countries.

“Many children are not acquiring the basic literacy and numeracy skills by Grade 6, so even before the pandemic hit, our analysis shows that in nine out of 11 countries, more than half of students were not meeting international benchmarks in reading.

“COVID related school closures made the situation even worse in most countries.”

Mr Sondergaard said most of these challenges were caused by many factors.

“They affect learning, but research shows that once children enter school, teachers and teaching quality are the most important factors.

“There are no other factors that have a bigger impact on how well students perform in their classroom than the quality of their teacher.”

He said their studies also revealed that in the Pacific there were challenges related to teaching in the region.

“Well, the first challenge is that some education systems are struggling to attract enough teachers, and there’s clear evidence of this in Samoa. In particular, their class sizes have been increasing in recent years, and now more than half of their schools have a pupil to teacher ratio that exceeds 30.

“And in 14 per cent of their schools, there are classes with more than 40 children. “So, it’s clear that more teachers are needed, and they are needed in the right places.

“This is not just the challenge of overall quantities. A major impediment of getting quality teachers for all students is the reluctance of teachers to live in rural and remote areas.

“The second challenge is that many teachers in the Pacific need to strengthen their use of teaching practices that are known to help students learn, and we can see this from classroom observational tools, which have recently been used in several Pacific classrooms to better understand teaching and teaching training needs.

“So, the observation shows that many teachers are not yet using effective teaching practices.”