Closing the Teacher Gap: Researching the Challenges and Opportunities for International Teacher Recruitment and Retention

The Fourth Commonwealth Teachers' Research Symposium was hosted by the National Education Association, Washington, DC, USA from 18-20 March 2009.

The Fourth Commonwealth Teachers’ Research Symposium is the most recent in a series of research events conducted by the Commonwealth Secretariat since 2006 in direct response to the request of Commonwealth Ministers of Education to undertake research to monitor the status, mobility and recruitment of teachers as presented in the future actions of the Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol (Stoke Rochford, 2004).

Studies undertaken in 2006 revealed the unreliability and inadequacy of data and research about teachers across all regions of the Commonwealth and called on member countries to do more to capture teacher data for planning and policy-making. Symposium 2009, hosted by the National Education Association (NEA), the largest union and organisation of teachers in the USA, is the first time that one of these research symposia was held in a non-Commonwealth country.