Across the globe, there are tens of thousands of teacher training institutions producing teachers ready to take on the challenge of educating the next generation of young people.

This is crucial work because numerous reports have warned of a teacher shortage in the coming years, saying that we need to start producing more teachers than ever before - 69 million more, according to a United Nations report from 2016.

Yet how do we ensure that teacher training institutions are recruiting enough people? And also that they are delivering comparable types of initial teacher education (ITE) to tackle global inequalities in the quality of teaching that pupils receive?

How should courses evolve so that they develop teachers able to prepare children for a world we cannot predict? How should online ITE be incorporated into courses after the rapid switch to this form of learning in the pandemic?

• Teacher training: Applications drop to pre-Covid levels
• Teacher education changes: What schools need to know
• ITT reforms: What’s behind the backlash?

These are just some of the questions that a forthcoming session at the online World Education Summit from 21-24 March will address - and Tes has had a preview ahead of the event.

The session is entitled ITE 2030: Closing the Gaps and will feature a panel of stellar speakers well-placed to tackle such big topics:

• Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E Ducommun professor of education emeritus at Stanford University  
• Professor Field Rickards, dean of education emeritus at the University of Melbourne
• Professor Sir Chris Husbands, the vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University

Setting the scene, Rickards says that currently a key problem in education is the lack of a “global view on what teacher capabilities should be” and that for a long time teaching has been seen more as a “craft”, which has led to a mindset of “that’s the way we do things”. And this has been hard to change.

The future of teacher training around the world

Not only this but research demonstrating how teacher education can feed into the capabilities and learning of young people has been scant.

“I think even teacher educators conceded that there was little empirical evidence to support the methods on how to prepare teachers” Rickards adds.

What’s more, Darling-Hammond says that, given the ever-changing world in which students are living - and will later enter as members of the workforce - the idea that ITE can stay the same is not sustainable.

“[The next generation] is going to have to work with knowledge that hasn’t been discovered yet, use technologies that haven’t been invented yet [and] solve major problems that threaten the entire survival of the species that we have not managed to solve,” she says.

“So the idea that we could just have education for them - that is, memorise a bunch of things and spit them back, and then you’re ready to go out and be done - makes no sense at this moment in history. They have to be able to be knowledge users, knowledge producers; they have to have analytic skills and capacities.

“That means their teachers need to be able to teach that.”

Husbands, meanwhile, notes that the need to evolve ITE will mean different things to people in different regions in the world - another issue that needs consideration.

“The teacher education challenge in advanced economies [such as] Australia, America, the UK is quite different from the teacher education challenge in developing economies, where the challenge is around sufficiency of supply and the massive growth in demand for teachers,” he says.

“So how do we globally close the discourse gap between the discourse of teacher education in the rich north and the discourse of teacher education in the global south?”

Darling-Hammond agrees, saying that one issue that needs to be considered is the role of online education and how ITE prepares future teachers for this - something Covid has rapidly accelerated.

“I was teaching in the Stanford teacher education programme last year during Covid and we were all in California but online and it was challenging and difficult, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot from my students, who learned a lot about how to teach their students.

“[So] there were some benefits that could be integrated into a more holistic approach that is in-person and to some extent online.”

She adds that this could be especially useful for teachers in more rural areas, where providing supervision in-person may be harder to deliver.

Rickards agrees that online provision should be something ITE providers think more about - noting that if he were still in his dean of education role he would “be looking at ways of delivering our programme remotely”.

Even if this happens, though, and it broadens access to ITE or allows skilled practitioners to deliver feedback to more trainees, Husbands says that the way that some societies value the role of educators still needs to be tackled.

“In a lot of societies the teacher education problem is not conceptualised as a quality problem - it is conceptualised as a numbers problem,” he explains. “How do we get enough people to put in front of young learners? And what’s the cheapest price that we can do it at?”

Could it be that some form of global accreditation for teaching courses is required to overcome this? Or should teaching qualifications be put on the same footing as law and medicine to enhance their reputation and rigour? How might the skill of teachers be understood more clearly by wider society - and would that push governments to invest more in teacher education?

These are just some of the questions to be discussed in detail by the panel. The sessions will be available to watch on the Global Amphitheatre stage at 11am on Tuesday 22 March.

For more information or to book tickets, visit worldedsummit.com