Person:
Linden, Toby
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Secondary education,
Tertiary education,
Skills and workforce development,
Roma,
India,
Southeast Europe,
Central Europe
Degrees
ORCID
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
September 20, 2023
Biography
Toby Linden has had a long and diverse career working in countries across the globe with
the World Bank, including in South Asia, Southeast and Central Europe, and Southern
and Eastern Africa. His publications include Lifelong Learning in the Global Knowledge
Economy: Challenges for Developing Countries, with Harry Patrinos, and Getting the
Right Teachers into the Right Schools: Managing India’s Teacher Workforce, with Vimala
Ramachandran and others. He also served as director of the Roma Education Fund, an
international nongovernmental organization working to improve the educational outcomes of
Roma (Gypsies), the poorest minority in Europe. Previously, he worked for the British Council
and England’s national Department for Education.
Publication Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
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Publication
Getting the Right Teachers into the Right Schools: Managing India's Teacher Workforce
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018)India's landmark Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009) guarantees education to all children aged 6-14 years. The Act mandates specific student-teacher ratios and emphasizes teacher quality. Writing this into legislation took seven years, but the seven years since has proven that ensuring effective teachers are recruited and placed in all schools in a time-bound manner is considerably more challenging. This report takes a detailed look at the complexity of the teacher management landscape in elementary and secondary schools in nine Indian states. On a daily basis, the administrative machinery of these states has to manage between 19,000 to nearly a million teachers in different types of schools and employment contracts, and cope with recruiting thousands more and distributing them equitably across schools. This report examines the following issues: official requirements for becoming a schoolteacher in India; policies and processes for teacher recruitment, deployment and transfers; salaries and benefits of teachers; professional growth of teachers; and grievance redress mechanisms for teachers. For the first time in India, this report compares and contrasts stated policy with actual practice in teacher management in the country, using a combination of primary and secondary data. In so doing, the report reveals the hidden challenges and the nature of problems faced by administrators in attempting to build an effective teacher workforce which serves the needs of all of India's 200 million school children. The report examines states with varying characteristics, thus generating knowledge and evidence likely to be of interest to policy makers and practitioners in a wide range of contexts. -
Publication
Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-20)Countries in middle-income East Asia and the Pacific were already experiencing serious learning deficits prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-related school disruptions have only made things worse. Learning poverty -- defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text -- is as high as 90 percent in several countries. Several large Southeast Asian countries consistently perform well below expectations on adolescent learning assessments. This report examines key factors affecting student learning in the region, with emphasis on the central role of teachers and teaching quality. It also analyzes the role education technologies, which came into widespread use during the pandemic, and examines the political economy of education reform. The report presents recommendations on how countries can strengthen teaching to improve learning and, in doing so, can enhance productivity, growth, and future development in the region.