Forty-four million people who do not currently teach

To staff the classrooms its own goals assume, the world needs to recruit 44 million primary and secondary teachers by 2030¹. That is roughly one new teacher for every six children currently sitting outside the school system.

The number does not move on this page, and that is deliberate. UNESCO publishes the size of the gap rather than a running count of it, so anything ticking here would be invented.

More than half are replacements

The shortage is mostly not about building new schools for new children. More than half of the 44 million are needed to replace teachers who will have left the profession by 2030¹.

Teachers are leaving faster than they used to, and the change is recent. Primary attrition nearly doubled between 2015 and 2022, and departures cluster in the first five years of a career², which says more about the conditions of the job than about how many people are willing to try it.

Secondary school is where the gap opens

Seven of every ten teachers the world needs are for secondary school¹. Primary systems, which most countries built first and fund most reliably, are closest to staffed.

That lines up with where the children are missing too. Of the children and young people out of school, the large majority are past primary age, so the level with the fewest teachers is also the level losing the most students. The two shortfalls are the same gap seen from opposite ends.

Where the shortage bites hardest

Sub-Saharan Africa alone needs about 15 million new teachers by 2030, more than a third of the global total¹. It is also the region with the fastest-growing school-age population, so the target moves while it is being chased.

The bill for filling it

Roughly US$120 billion a year in salaries: $12.8 billion for universal primary teaching posts and $106.8 billion for secondary¹. The ratio repeats the pattern. Secondary education is where the staffing is thinnest and where the children are missing, and it would take nearly nine tenths of the money.

Smaller than it was

In 2016 the equivalent assessment put the shortfall at nearly 69 million teachers². Today’s 44 million is a large improvement on that.

That comparison needs care, though. These are two estimates of the same 2030 target made eight years apart, using different methods, with very different amounts of time left to act. The gap between them reflects better estimating and real recruitment in some mixture nobody has separated, so it is encouraging without being measurable.

The children waiting