Background paper prepared for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2007 Pre-Primary teachers: a global analysis of several key education indicators

Peter Wallet
2006 unpublished
It is not always clear what kind of services are being provided to young children at the pre-primary level, given the variety of terms attached to Early Childhood Education. Nevertheless, this paper attempts to stand as a contribution to the general understanding of these workers and examines several relevant issues including expansion versus contraction in student numbers, deployment patterns, and teachers' characteristics including age and gender. This paper also examines many of the
more » ... that pre-primary teachers have at their disposal and the constraints they face in their professional careers. This includes the qualifications teachers have, the kinds of training they encounter as well as the salaries they earn and the teaching hours they must complete. This paper, where relevant and where data exists, performs an analysis by making international comparisons. Moreover differences between educational levels are examined, particularly the primary level as it is used as a benchmark for understanding pre-primary education. In addition, given the large proportion of private provision among many developing and developed countries alike, this paper tries to highlight some of the disparities that commonly result from a two-tiered system. Unfortunately, given the lack of coherence among services provided and the way in which they are delivered, a full and comprehensive analysis of all issues is not possible until more countries systematically collect and disseminate pre-primary data as they do at other educational levels. 2 Introduction:
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