Share of trained teachers in primary education
What you should know about this indicator
- Not all teachers receive the same level of preparation before entering the classroom. This indicator measures the percentage of teachers at each education level who have completed at least the minimum organized pedagogical training required for teaching at that level in their country.
- It captures the share of teachers who are pedagogically trained, expressed as a percentage of all teachers at that level. For example, if there are 1,000 primary teachers and 850 have completed the required training, the indicator shows 85%.
- The "minimum training" refers to whatever organized pedagogical preparation each country requires - pre-service teacher education programs, in-service training courses, or certification requirements that focus on teaching methods rather than subject knowledge.
- Values below 100% suggest some teachers are working without the pedagogical training their own country considers necessary. However, cross-country comparisons can be misleading since training requirements vary significantly between nations.
- The data comes from administrative records collected at schools and other organized learning centers, typically including information on teacher academic credentials and employment status.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of trained teachers in primary education”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), via World Bank. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250806-204725/grapher/share-of-teachers-in-primary-education-who-are-trained.html [online resource] (archived on August 6, 2025).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), via World Bank (2025) – processed by Our World in DataFull citation
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), via World Bank (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Share of trained teachers in primary education” [dataset]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), via World Bank, “World Development Indicators” [original data]. Retrieved August 6, 2025 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250806-204725/grapher/share-of-teachers-in-primary-education-who-are-trained.html (archived on August 6, 2025).