Chapter 10: Leaders, Organisations and Making Teacher Work Sustainable

Education is a vital process which all humans should have the right to experience. It opens up life opportunities and widens people’s worldviews as they gain knowledge and understanding of the world’s complexity and their place within it. In addition, education can be a process for reducing inequality by acting as the basis for creating opportunity. The importance of education is enshrined in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals as Goal 4:

However, it is a truism that this can only be achieved if there are enough teachers to ensure access to quality education for all children. Teacher expertise and professionalism is crucial for all countries as they are the core of all education systems. They are not merely a ‘resource’; they are professionals crucial for the proper functioning of any society (alongside many other professionals who operate in the public sector). Without teachers, countries would be culturally, socially and economically poorer, and their populations less able to function in creative, thoughtful and critical ways. But as we explored in Part 2 of this book, the sustainability of teacher work has been damaged in many countries, particularly those who have become part of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2012). Fuller and Stevenson (2019, p. 1) characterise the GERM after Sahlberg as constituted of countries which have: