To provide the opportunity to get every child in the world in an elementary school classroom by next year, the world will need 4 million more teachers. 

So says a new report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which looks at the global teacher shortage taking place in 93 countries, according to an article on The Huffington Post. The report, titled, "Wanted: Trained Teachers to ensure every child's right to primary education," found countries will need to recruit a total of 4 million teachers to achieve universal primary education by 2015."

Of this total, 2.6 million will replace teachers who retire, change occupations or leave the workforce due to illness or death. The remaining 1.4 million will be needed to [universalize] access to primary education and underwrite quality by ensuring that there are not more than 40 students for every teacher.

The report said that it will not be achieved by 2015, for "58 million children are still out of school."

For this reason, the analysis presented in this paper determines how many teachers would be needed if the goal of achieving UPE was shifted to 2020 or 2030. To achieve UPE by 2020, for example, countries will need to recruit a total of 12.6 million primary teachers.

"Teacher shortages will continue to block efforts to achieve universal primary education unless action is taken now," the report concluded. "As this paper shows, most countries can afford to hire the extra teachers needed in classrooms if they continue to steadily increase their education budgets as in the case of recent years. However, they must also prepare to accommodate a growing number of school-age children in classrooms that are already over-crowded."

The chart created by UNESCO groups North American with Western Europe and states that by 2015, just under 600,000 teachers are needed in those regions, by 2020, more than 1.6 million teachers are needed and by 2030 more than 3.6 million teachers are needed.

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Article by Kassondra Granata, EducationWorld Contributor