countries, estimates the gains in student promotion from optimal allocation of existing teachers between schools at between 0.1 and 4.2 percentage points.

- In **Chapter 2** , we present a stylized algorithm, based on the MoE’s rules, to identify target schools in need of more teachers. Drawing on administrative data collected in 2017, 2018 and 2019, we apply this algorithm to identify all target schools in each year. We present estimated needs for teachers according to this algorithm, at national, district and school levels.

- In **Chapter 3** , we compare our targeting algorithm to the actual allocations of new teachers in Malawi in each of the four years, and assess the extent to which allocation met with need, both nationally and at the district level.

- In **Chapter 4** , we assess the impact of the allocation of new teachers on school PTRs.

- In **Chapter 5** , we assess the impact of reduced PTRs on student repetition rates and dropout rates.

- **Chapter 6** discusses the results.

# **2. Rules-based targeting of new teachers to schools**

The allocation of newly deployed teachers – typically 3,000 to 5,000 per year – is a multi-stage process across multiple levels of government (see Asim et al., 2019, for a detailed discussion). Teachers enter the workforce having completed pre-service training under the auspices of the Department for Teacher Education and Development (DTED) of MoE, primarily through a program known as the Initial Primary Teacher Education (IPTE). Through the Directorate of Basic Education (DBE) and the Local Government Service Commission (LASCOM), MoE allocates teachers to each of Malawi’s 34 education districts;<sup>6</sup> District Education Offices (DEOs) in each district then allocate teachers to specific schools.

Allocating new teachers equitably to schools may seem a simple matter of targeting the schools with the highest PTRs, but this has not historically been the case. Malawi has an official target for school PTRs of 60 and, prior to 2017, teacher allocations were guided only by this target. However, with more than half of schools above this ratio, this approach did not significantly guide allocations. The result was that allocations of teachers to districts and, in particular, to schools was conducted with a high degree of discretion that left district officials subject to pressure from teachers to avoid postings in remote schools (see Asim et al., 2019, for a detailed description of Malawi’s teacher allocation system and the history of attempts to rationalize deployments).

Beginning in 2017, a new set of targeting rules was introduced to support more equitable allocations of teachers to schools. In 2017, national and district officials were instructed to allocate teachers to schools with PTR below 60 if they did not have at least one teacher per grade offered. This was intended to prevent multi-grade teaching. Beginning in 2018, officials were instructed that, having fulfilled this first condition, they should target the remaining teachers to the schools with the highest PTRs. A revised Primary Teacher Management Strategy codified the new guidance (Ministry of

> 6 Malawi has 28 local government authorities, including districts and municipalities. Some of these are subdivided into two or three components for the purposes of education management, producing a total of 34 education districts. In this paper, we use ’district’ to refer to these education districts. The country’s four urban districts, Lilongwe City, Blantyre City, Mzuzu and Zomba Urban, are typically excluded from receiving newly deployed teachers owing to high existing levels of staffing.

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