The Costs of Supply and Demand for Teacher Education: Dilemmas for Development

This paper explores some of the financial issues that arise for teacher education policy and practice in developing countries. It is based on the results of the MUSTER1 research programme First it provides an overview of the context which shapes investment in teacher education across four countries. Second, each case is considered from different perspectives¿a profile of the supply side, estimates of the costs of training, and an analysis of demand. This leads to some reflections on each case which draw attention to the main issues. The final discussion draws out some implications for policy, not least those arising from the inability of some training systems to meet demand at sustainable levels of cost. This creates dilemmas in terms of whether to adopt systems that can produce large numbers of teachers at low costs with reduced time in college, or maintain expensive conventional full-time pre-career residential systems and accept shortfalls in the supply of teachers long into the future. The data analysed here are derived from extensive MUSTER research in Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi and Trinidad and Tobago.2