This book aims to promote a more holistic approach to teacher policy development, by juxtaposing qualitative, narrative studies that provide insights into the lived experience of male and female teachers in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America, with studies focused at the systems level. Besides the introductory and concluding chapter, it contains eight further chapters. Taken together, these chapters convincingly show that effective policy development to ensure an adequate supply of competent teachers requires attention to the connections and relationships between the ‘private’ lives and experiences of teachers and the ‘public’ systems and policy development processes that govern their recruitment, preparation, deployment, conditions of service, working conditions and professional development.

The book thus maps out the intersections and relationships between what we can
learn from in-depth investigations of the lived experiences of teachers and macro-level 
processes of systems and policy development. It also provides critical building blocks
in the development of more teacher-centred policies, and especially so in the critical
contexts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab States, and South and West Asia, where the need for new teachers is the most intense