ZLSB anthology sheds light on lateral entry from eleven international perspectives

In February 2025, TU Dresden's ZLSB published the first international anthology on the shortage of teachers and non-traditional routes into the teaching profession. Researchers from eleven countries, including Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA, combined a multi-perspective discourse on the topic of teacher shortages with approaches to alternative routes into the teaching profession.

The open access volume entitled "Teacher Shortage in International Perspectives: Insights and Responses: Non-Traditional Pathways to the Teacher Profession"(open access: and Springer) is the result of many years of intensive collaboration with national and international network partners of the ZLSB on the topic of teacher shortages. The authors' contributions encourage innovative and nationally individualized changes in teacher training practice and policy in connection with the global shortage of teachers. The current issue of the lack of teachers is addressed from different perspectives: These include country-specific descriptive accounts of teacher education and teacher shortages. Furthermore, the academic articles in the volume shed light on further training structures for career changers in different countries. The authors' country-specific contributions are rounded off by the results of qualitative and quantitative studies as well as examples of best practice. In the concluding remarks of the anthology, the focus is once again on systematically capturing the complexity of the problem of teacher shortages. Against this background, Prof. Gehrmann (Managing Director of the ZLSB and co-editor) once again summarizes the causal structure and drafts three models for the respective country groups: "State Responsibility Model", "Market Economy Model" and the "Model of Overproduction of Teacher Certificates".

The international anthology is an important milestone in the creation of sustainable and stable educational structures against the backdrop of current political changes.

Contact: Dr. Peggy Germer