Teacher shortage enters OECD's annual report

Every September the OECD publishes “Education at a Glance”, the annual statistical report on participation, funding, organisation and outcomes of the education systems of member and partner countries. The 2026 edition has a special chapter: the teacher shortage, the countries where the problem is most acute and the impact in classrooms. The official launch page indicates an online event with secretary-general Mathias Cormann and with Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills; the volume also appears in the catalogue of forthcoming publications.

The primary source and its date. The document is the OECD report “Education at a Glance”, in its 2026 edition, whose launch is announced by the organisation itself on the page cited above. The complete series of previous editions is collected in the publication’s collection.

The comparison interval. This is where the value of the publication lies, and not in this year’s single figure. Previous editions came out on 9 September 2025, 10 September 2024 and 12 September 2023: a regular annual cadence that allows multi-year comparisons on education spending, levels of education attained and teaching staff conditions. A figure on missing teachers acquires meaning only when it can be placed alongside those of previous years, and this is exactly what an annual series allows one to do.

From the 2025 edition come two indicators that help frame the phenomenon even before knowing the 2026 figures: in OECD countries nearly 7% of secondary school teachers do not possess all the required credentials, and each year between 1% and 3% of teachers retire.

These are two figures that tell two different stories. The first concerns the present: a share of staff already in service is teaching without the full qualification required by their system, which means the shortage does not only show up as an empty position but as a position filled under exception. The second concerns the future and is a flow: an annual percentage of exits due to retirement that, even at the lower end of the range, needs to be replaced every year with new entrants. When recruitment fails to keep pace with the flow, the share of staff without full qualification is the variable that absorbs the difference.

The limits, stated. The scope of the report is that of the member and partner countries considered by the OECD: the exact number of systems covered by the 2026 edition does not appear in the material on which this piece is based. In any case it is not a global snapshot, and very large school systems remain outside it. The two indicators cited above belong to the 2025 edition and concern secondary school only: the corresponding figures for the 2026 edition are not available in the material on which this piece is based, and this newspaper does not anticipate them. The fact sheet from the German federal statistical office (Destatis) confirms the report’s role as a comparative reference for national statistical institutes, which take up its indicators.

The point to be verified, once the figures are made public, is only one: whether the share of teachers lacking all required credentials has moved compared to the 7% recorded in the 2025 edition, and in which direction.