Too many children are not learning to read in the East Asia and Pacific region's middle-income countries. In some countries in the region, such as the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the Philippines, more than 90 percent of 10-year-olds cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text. To accelerate learning in these countries, better teaching will be needed. To improve teacher quality in the next 10 years, where should countries focus their attention? On improving the teaching skills and content knowledge of their existing stock of teachers, on recruiting and better training new teachers, or on doing both? This paper contributes to this discussion by addressing two policy questions: (i) will East Asia and Pacific's middle-income countries need more or fewer teachers in the coming decade, and (ii) quantitatively, how important will the newly recruited teachers be (the flow) relative to the teaching workforce who have already been recruited (the stock)? To answer these questions, the paper uses a simple model that projects the required number of primary school teachers in each of the East Asia and Pacific region's 22 middle-income countries. The model is based on several factors, such as: (i) the size of future cohorts of children, (ii) the proportion of those cohorts who end up in school, (iii) the pupil-to-teacher ratio, and (iv) teacher attrition. Two key messages emerge with an important policy implication. First, significant heterogeneity exists across the 22 countries, with seven countries projected to need fewer teachers overall in the next 10 years relative to the teacher stock in 2020, while the rest will need to expand their teacher workforce. Second, despite this heterogeneity, in every East Asia and Pacific country, teachers who are already "in the system" are expected to constitute the majority of teachers still employed in 2030. In some countries, teachers who have already been recruited will constitute more than 70 percent of those who will be in schools in 2030. The finding has an important policy implication, namely: if countries want to improve the quality of teaching in schools, their primary focus in the next 10 years should be on improving the stock, that is, the quality of their current teacher workforce (through more and better teacher professional development)
