2. What are the links between pupil performance and teacher characteristics?

In order to achieve the Education for All goals, many governments have focused their most significant efforts on access to education, by massively increasing teacher recruitments. While considerable progress has been made in most countries in terms of enrolment rates, there has sometimes been a simultaneous fall in the quality of education. This explains why debates recently refocused on the quality of education, and particularly on the role of the quality of teachers.

It is widely recognised that the quality of learning depends to a great extent on the quality of the teachers. This seems to be the case in a number of countries: an analysis of the results of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2011 for grade 4 in 45 countries led to the following observation “the greater the quality of the teacher, the greater the level of achievement” (UNESCO, 2014: 233). Bernard et al. measured the impact of the variable represented by the teacher, proving that the “teacher effect” (global effect of the teacher on school achievements) explains 10 to 15 per cent of the variation in the levels of achievement of pupils in developed countries, and 27 per cent on average in francophone sub-Saharan Africa (Bernard et al., 2004).

In the USA, researchers have evaluated the “added value” of a teacher in terms of pupils’ achievements, demonstrating that considerable variations in results may exist depending on the teacher. Some pupils master only half or less than half of the syllabus for their grade at the end of the school year, while others progress by 1.5 grades or more (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2012). The “teacher effect” is cumulative on school results: in the case of two pupils with similar performance in second grade, if one of them has three high “added value” teachers and the second has three low “added value” teachers, their results three years later can register a gap of up to 54 per cent (Sanders and Rivers, 1996).

The teacher is the main factor in terms of impact on pupil performance at school level, no other variable playing such a significant role (Bruns and Luque, 2014). Many studies have arrived at this conclusion, such as meta-analyses to determine the factors most likely to help children to learn. As such, it was observed, in a study of 28 of these factors, that the two most important variables were directly linked to the teacher (Wang et al., 1994, cited in UNESCO, 2005: 172). This finding was confirmed by a summary of 1134 meta-analyses indicating that the teacher is the factor with the greatest influence on raising the level of pupils’ achievements, even when the pupils come from very different backgrounds (Hattie, 1992, cited in UNESCO, 2005: 172; UNESCO, 2009).

The teacher variable is also the one with the most pronounced effect on the school achievements of pupils from modest backgrounds and ethnic minorities (Coleman et al., 1996, cited in Gauthier and Dembélé, 2004: 2-4). Moreover, the role of the teacher is even more important in schools where children are from underprivileged backgrounds (Nye et al., 2004). The teacher therefore plays a vital role in terms of the quality of learning but also of equity.

While the “teacher effect” is crucial, research tends to show that it is not necessarily linked to the academic level of teachers, to their training or even their level of salary. These aspects, often presented as highly decisive, have in fact proved to be hardly or not significantly linked to pupil performance (Rasera, 2012; Bernard, 2007; Costrell, Hanushek, and Loeb, 2008; Hanushek, 1998; Hanushek, 1996). The “teacher effect” also seems impacted by other factors, 6such as contextual factors – for example, the absenteeism of a teacher having to go into town to collect their salary or due to the rainy season (instruction time has an impact on performance) -, or else administrative factors – for example, a delay in payments having a negative effect on the teacher’s motivation. This is why it may seem more relevant to speak of a “context effect” or a “class effect” rather than a “teacher effect”, in reference to all the factors involved in the provision of quality education. Added to that is the importance of the characteristics and social competencies of each teacher, such as their charisma and capacity to motivate their pupils. The effectiveness of the teacher cannot be put down to a single factor. The “teacher/class/context effect” thus shows that the teacher plays a decisive role for quality education, but that the teacher-pupil performance relationship is complex (UNESCO, 2009) and is a result of multiple factors demanding a consistent context-related teacher management system.

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