3.2 Teacher education – initial and continuing

A coherent and holistic teacher education framework is an essential component of a teacher policy.‘Strong, objective-led policy for teacher training, that clearly outlines supply and demand, budgetary and resourcing needs and how these will help meet education goals, is necessary at national and international levels’ (ILO, 2012: 225).Teacher education includes three interrelated stages: initial teacher preparation; the induction period, when newly qualified teachers begin to teach and should receive supervised mentoring and support, prior to being licensed or certified; and continuing professional development or in-service education and training (INSET), particularly important for untrained or undertrained teachers (UNESCO, 2014a: 236).