(PS Abdullah Rasheed’s one.. we send to review and complete it)
Maturity: Well-established
Scale: Macro-relevant pillar
| CIVIC-SCOPE Analysis | |
|---|---|
| Context | Interests |
| Disparity between Malé and atoll schools drives internal migration. Teacher shortages (especially local) and reliance on rote learning. Perception that "real" education only happens in the capital. | Parents: Will move anywhere for "good" schools. Teachers: Burned out, underpaid, prefer Malé for services. Islands: Losing young families due to poor schooling. Govt: Spending high per-capita with mixed results. |
| Vision | Incentives |
| Flagship atoll schools as regional anchors that rival Malé's best, reversing the migration magnet. High-status leadership, specialized streams, and ferry-linked access making island education the smarter choice. | Parents: Incentivized to stay in islands if schools are genuinely excellent and safe. Teachers: Incentivized to work in atolls if status, pay, and conditions improve. Schools: Incentivized to improve by becoming regional hubs. |
| Challenges | |
Structural: The "reputation trap" – good teachers go to good schools, making them better. Capacity: Severe shortage of quality local teachers, especially in Dhivehi/Islam; leadership deficit. Operational: synchronizing ferries with school timings; managing teacher housing and welfare in atolls. Political: Politicians prefer building classrooms (visible) over investing in teacher quality (invisible). Economic: High cost of duplicating specialized facilities (labs, gyms) across regions; transport subsidies. |
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Challenge Score (1-5) Budget: 4 | Logistics: 4 | Legislative: 2-3 | Political Capital: 3 | Execution: 4 | Time: 4 | Stakeholders: 4 | Risk: 3 |
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Historical Context and Policy Evolution The modern education system in the Maldives was built on a drive for universal access that began in the late 1970s. Prior to this, formal schooling was largely confined to Malé. A massive government investment program succeeded in establishing a primary school in every inhabited island by the late 1990s, achieving near-universal literacy and primary enrolment ahead of many regional peers. This quantitative success, however, masked deep qualitative disparities between the capital and the atolls. Historically, secondary and higher secondary education (A-Levels) were concentrated in Malé, forcing ambitious students to migrate to the capital, exacerbating urban congestion. While access to secondary education expanded to the atolls throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the quality of instruction remained uneven. The system developed a heavy reliance on expatriate teachers, particularly for secondary science and commerce subjects. As recently as 2019, foreign nationals comprised approximately 20% of the teaching workforce. This dependence has made the sector vulnerable to external shocks and fluctuating diplomatic relations. Efforts to train local teachers have been ongoing since the establishment of the Teacher Training Centre in 1984, but retention remains a challenge due to wage disparities with other sectors. A major structural reform occurred in 2015 with the rollout of a new National Curriculum aimed at shifting from rote learning to competency-based education. However, implementation has been inconsistent, often hampered by a lack of resources in island schools. The Education Act of 2021 formally mandated free compulsory education up to age 16 and established quality assurance mechanisms. Despite these legislative advances, the perception remains that "good" education is the exclusive preserve of Malé’s leading schools, driving a continued brain drain from the islands. Addressing this requires focusing on the prestige and resource allocation of regional schools to make them viable alternatives. |
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Atoll schools as a pull factor
For decades, Malé has functioned as a gravitational black hole for talent, pulling families, students, and educators into the capital in a self-reinforcing cycle that systematically depletes the atolls. The mechanism is straightforward and rational: parents believe, often correctly, that schools in Malé offer better opportunities, superior resources, more stable teaching. This belief drives them to move their families or send their children to the capital, concentrating student numbers and resources there. This concentration makes it easier to recruit good teachers to Malé, which widens the quality gap, which in turn pulls more families in. The loop accelerates over time, creating a fiscal death spiral where increasing sums get spent on infrastructure and services in the capital to accommodate the influx, leaving fewer resources for regional development and making island schools even less viable. When the best students and the most ambitious families leave an island, they take with them not just their immediate consumption but their future economic contribution. The local economy loses its most dynamic elements, the local school loses its most engaged parents, the community loses its future leaders. Brain drain is often discussed in the context of emigration to other countries, but its internal variant is just as damaging.
This creates what amounts to a tiered citizenship where those in the capital have access to a different class of public services than those in the periphery, violating the fundamental promise of equitable development. Breaking this loop requires more than incremental improvements to island schools. It demands deliberate intervention to create educational anchors in the atolls that are not just good enough but demonstrably superior to the average offering in Malé, reversing the polarity of the magnet so that instead of education driving migration to the capital, high-quality education becomes the primary pull factor that draws families to regional centres, stabilizing populations and seeding local economic growth. These schools are hubs for their atolls and accessible to the public, not isolated elite enclaves. They can host advanced streams, laboratories, and specialist teachers, but they also have a responsibility to support surrounding schools, with schools in smaller islands being able to access higher quality resources as effectively satellite schools of these flagship schools, sharing labs on a schedule, hosting in-service training and mentoring for teachers from smaller islands, running joint programs that bring students together. Alongside this, there must be a minimum standard committed for every basic school so that families do not feel forced to migrate simply to access basic quality.
The idea that school quality can drive migration patterns into or within rural areas is supported by literature. The view that rural schools have less experienced and qualified teachers and administrators is a major cause of brain drain, while rural schools that better benefit their local communities can prevent brain drain130Footnote reference. In the U.S. where standardized testing and school scores can be viewed by parents, every 1% increase in average reading or math scores drove a 1.8% and 1.4% increase in migration to the county where families would qualify to have their children be within that school’s catchment, while a 1% rise in dropout rates in school statistics reduced in-migration by 1.7%, with these results holding even after accounting for incomes and community amenities131Footnote reference,132Footnote reference,133Footnote reference. Families are willing to make sacrifices in other aspects of life and pay a premium for the chance to access good schools, with homes in neighbourhoods where children would qualify for these schools seeing higher home prices – a 5% improvement in publicly available test scores for schools increased home prices by about 2.5%134Footnote reference. The implication is that perceived school quality is a very powerful pull factor for parents and families, separate from economic opportunities or other amenities. If Maldivian cultural norms prioritize education quality more than the United States does, then we would expect these trends to hold or be even stronger if better schools are developed in the atolls.
None of this will work without the right people in the classroom. The core constraint on quality is not only buildings or equipment. It is the supply and retention of strong teachers and school leaders in every atoll. Any plan for flagship atoll schools, specialized streams, or new campuses must be locked to a teacher workforce plan. That includes recruitment pathways, pre-service and in-service training, fair pay and progression, housing and support for teachers and their families, and recognition for those who choose to work outside Malé. Capital spending on new facilities should only proceed where there is a realistic path to staff them.
## Perception as a market force
Policy often treats education quality from a decentralisation perspective as purely a function of test scores and facilities, but in terms of what drives actual human behaviour around education-driven migration, perception is crucial. Parents making decisions about their children’s futures aren’t carrying out sophisticated analyses based on granular school-level data that doesn’t even exist, so perception and reputation acts as a signal for quality. In a competitive world, parents are driven by a deep concern about their children's future status and economic mobility. Currently, the (largely justified) perception among Maldivians that the Male’ area receives the most concentrated investment into education means that a school being in Male’ signals a likely stronger education. Even if an island school has decent facilities and qualified expat teachers, it often lacks the social currency of established capital schools. Parents rely on heuristics like reputation, familiarity, and word-of-mouth to judge quality. Just as patients often cancel an appointment with talented brilliant but unknown young specialist doctor in favour of a widely-known and respected senior doctor, parents are suspicious of schools led by unknown entities. They fear that if they choose a regional school, they are gambling with their child's future respect and opportunities.
To counter this, we could treat reputation as a tangible asset. The new flagship schools cannot just be good; they need to be known for being good. This means the leadership of these schools is not an HR detail but a critical branding signal. When a well-known and highly respected principal – someone whose name is synonymous with excellence and discipline in Malé – is recruited to lead a school in an atoll, it sends an immediate, credible signal to parents that this institution is serious. It validates the school in the eyes of the community and the competitive parent network. This prestige transfer from the leader to the institution is a way to break the default assumption that real education happens only in the capital. We need to create an environment where ambitious families see these schools not as a compromise, but as an upgrade where their children get elite leadership without the chaotic environment, cost of living, risk of criminal recruitment, and cramped conditions of Malé. Reputation and marketing effectively is fundamental to the value of this approach. Although the teaching and infrastructure still need to be very strong to retain a positive reputation, just building quality alone won’t be enough. This requires thinking about signals and perceptions as carefully as we think about curriculum and infrastructure.
Flagship schools as regional anchors
The strategy centres on establishing a network of flagship atoll schools, institutions designed to rival the best in Malé in terms of resources, faculty quality, and outcomes. These do not necessarily need to be new buildings (in many cases, substantial overhauls of existing premises could work), but the key is that they function as new institutions with a distinct operational mandate and significantly elevated resources compared to typical island schools. Located in key regional urban centres, these schools would be resourced to offer a full, high-quality curriculum including the specialized streams currently available only in the capital (advanced sciences, commerce streams, humanities tracks that lead to specific university pathways). There is good evidence that improving school quality in rural areas can both narrow educational gaps and make public education spending more effective. Evidence from Indonesia suggests that in urban areas, peer effects and community education levels are closely linked to outcomes, while in less populated rural areas these community effects are weaker; school quality and what families can provide at home become the main drivers. Improving rural schools brings the most gains for children from less educated or poorer families, since better schools can partly compensate for what parents with fewer resources are less able to provide at home135Footnote reference. This is also born out more broadly in evidence136Footnote reference.
The value proposition for families extends far beyond the classroom experience itself. For a family in Malé, good education currently comes packaged with a heavy cost: cramped apartments, high rents, exposure to street crime and the drug trade, lack of safe outdoor space for children to play. A flagship school in a regional centre offers a radically different package: the same or better educational quality, led by respected and recognized figures, but in an environment of safety, space, and nature. It offers a childhood where kids can play outside without fear, where the moral risks of a congested city are minimized, where extended family and community support structures are intact. For families already in the region, it removes the heart-wrenching choice of either sending a young child away to live with relatives in Malé or moving the whole family into debt. It allows them to stay in their own homes, close to their extended support networks, while still giving their children what they perceive as a world-class start. We have heard this tension expressed repeatedly in conversations with parents from the atolls: the deep desire to provide the best for their children without having to uproot their entire lives or separate their families.
This environment could also be equally attractive for teachers, if we structure it properly. Currently, many teachers migrate to Malé for career progression, only to find themselves burned out by the high cost of living and the intense pressure of overcrowded city schools (class sizes of 40+ students are common in Malé schools, making individual attention nearly impossible). A flagship regional school offers what we might call a prestige track that is closer to home. It allows ambitious educators to build a standout resume in a respected institution without the personal sacrifice of living in expensive, stressful urban conditions. It offers a professional environment with better student-teacher ratios (because class sizes can be smaller when you are not dealing with the overwhelming demand of the capital), more administrative support, better facilities, and a community that values teachers as essential pillars of society rather than just another category of civil servant. This makes recruitment competitive. We want a situation where graduating teachers actively compete for spots in these schools because they recognize it as the best launchpad for their careers, not just a posting they accept because they cannot get a job in Malé. That shift in perception is critical.
These schools could also become custodians of local heritage in ways that Malé schools cannot easily replicate. By integrating local master craftsmen and elders into the curriculum (offering mentorships in traditional boat building, lacquer work, mat weaving, traditional medicine and healing practices), the school becomes a bridge between the modern economy and island tradition. This gives the school a unique specialization and identity that generic city schools cannot match. It grounds the education in the specific dignity and history of its region, which both preserves knowledge that might otherwise be lost and creates a distinctive value proposition. This is not just about cultural preservation for its own sake; it is about giving these schools a genuinely distinctive identity that makes them attractive rather than just adequate substitutes for Malé schools.
Teacher development as a force multiplier
These schools could be integrated with a broader teacher development ecosystem (and this integration is important, not an add-on). We cannot rely solely on the existing pipeline of graduates from the Faculty of Education, which the Ministry admits is insufficient to meet projected needs for the coming decade. Instead, we could adapt something like the teaching hospital model used in medical education, where these flagship schools serve as training grounds for new teachers137Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education on "Clinical Practice in Teacher Preparation" [edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/clinical-practice-teacher-preparation-creating-powerful-learning-environment.pdf](https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/clinical-practice-teacher-preparation-creating-powerful-learning-environment.pdf). Just as medical interns learn by doing under the supervision of senior consultants, new teachers would spend a residency year in these schools, mentored by the elite faculty we have recruited. They would have reduced teaching loads initially, focusing on observing experienced teachers, co-teaching lessons, getting detailed feedback on their practice, before taking on full responsibility for their own classes.
This residency model solves two problems at once. First, it gives novice teachers a protected space to develop their skills away from the firefighting atmosphere of typical Malé schools (where new teachers often get thrown into the hardest classes with minimal support and are expected to figure it out). This ensures they enter the full workforce with actual confidence and competence rather than just theoretical knowledge from their degree programs. Second, the presence of these apprentice teachers effectively lowers the student-teacher ratio, allowing for more personalized attention and support for every child in the flagship school. This could create a virtuous cycle: the school becomes better at teaching students because it has more teaching capacity (senior teachers plus apprentices), and teachers become better at their profession because they trained in a high-quality environment with proper mentorship. Over time, this could become the gold standard pathway into teaching, raising the prestige and quality of the entire profession. It transforms teacher training from a purely theoretical university exercise into an embedded practical apprenticeship within actual functioning schools.
Tertiary hubs focused on comparative advantage
The pull factor of education extends beyond the secondary level, and there may be opportunities at the tertiary level as well. We could look at creating specialized residential tertiary campuses in regional centres, but focused specifically on fields that leverage the unique comparative advantages of the Maldives rather than trying to replicate generic degree programs. Rather than duplicating the broad offerings of Malé-based colleges, these hubs would become centres of excellence for very specific niche disciplines: marine technology and ocean engineering, environmental science with a focus on small island systems, sustainable tourism and hospitality management, creative industries tied to island crafts and culture. The idea is not to compete directly with Villa College or the Maldives National University on their core offerings, but to offer programs that make sense only in the Maldivian context and that might actually attract interest from outside. We can look to the Zikra College model in Fuvahmulah as a successful precedent. Zikra demonstrated that a regional institution can build a strong academic reputation and loyal alumni base if it focuses on quality and carves out a clear identity. The challenge is replicating that success in a way that is sustainable and scalable without requiring ongoing subsidies that the government may not be able to afford long-term.
These campuses could potentially be developed through partnerships with international institutions, though we should be realistic about the challenges. A prestigious foreign university might not open a full branch campus in Malé (the market is too small, the regulatory environment can be uncertain), but it might be interested in running a specialized marine biology research centre or a hospitality management school on an island where students have direct access to working coral reefs, resort operations, actual field sites rather than just theoretical instruction. The government's contribution would be land and infrastructure (dormitories, laboratories, high-speed internet, facilities), while the partner institution brings curriculum design, faculty expertise, and brand credibility. The model could potentially use a differential tuition structure where Maldivian students pay subsidized local rates (keeping higher education accessible), while a carefully managed intake of international students, drawn by the unique opportunity to study coral reef ecology or luxury resort management in the actual Maldives, pay higher fees that cross-subsidize the local students. This could create a financially sustainable model that reduces the burden on the state budget while bringing foreign exchange and cultural diversity into regional towns.
Digital transformation where most impactful
Policymakers have identified digital transformation as a priority, and there are specific applications where digital tools could be deployed strategically to close the regional gap rather than just digitizing existing inefficient processes. Currently, the Ministry has to physically transport teachers to Malé for national exam marking, which is a costly and logistically complex process of arranging transport and accommodation for dozens or hundreds of teachers for weeks at a time [will double check if this is true]. Students in the atolls cannot view their marked answer scripts after exams, unlike their peers in international systems where this is standard practice and helps students understand their mistakes. These are solvable problems with existing technology. An e-marking system where answer scripts are scanned and distributed digitally to markers would allow teachers in the atolls to participate in national exam marking from their home islands, which not only saves money on transport and accommodation but also integrates regional teachers into the national assessment community. They get professional development through the marking process, exposure to what standards look like across the country, a voice in how exams are scored and calibrated. This is not just about cost savings but professional integration.
A virtual specialized faculty could also be established for subjects where it genuinely makes sense. If a school in a small island has only three students who want to take A-level Further Mathematics, it is not economically viable to hire a full-time teacher for them. The students either cannot take the subject at all, or one teacher tries to teach it without proper expertise. But a blended classroom model (connecting students from ten different islands to a single expert teacher via high-quality video link) makes that course viable. The local school provides the physical space and a facilitator who can help with logistics and individual support; the remote specialist provides the actual subject instruction. This ensures that a student's academic potential is never limited by their address, at least for specialized subjects where live in-person instruction is less critical than access to expertise. We should be clear about the limits though: this is likelier to work for advanced academic subjects with highly motivated older students than to work well for young children learning basic literacy, or for subjects that require a lot of hands-on interaction. The model has to be deployed strategically where it actually adds value, not applied uniformly just because the technology exists.
| Component | Current Barrier | Proposed Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Exam Marking | Physical travel to Malé required. | E-marking system for remote participation. |
| Niche Subjects | Non-viable due to low student numbers. | Virtual Specialized Faculty (blended classrooms). |
| Transport | Cost and schedule mismatch. | Free RTL passes; synced school hours. |
Physical access through coordinated transport
Access is also about the physical logistics of getting students to school safely and reliably, which sounds mundane but is actually critical. The rollout of the Raajje Transport Link high-speed ferry network offers a powerful tool for educational equity if we use it intelligently. We could align school policy with transport reality in very practical ways. This means providing free, reliable ferry passes for students commuting to the flagship school from nearby islands (making sure cost is not a barrier). More importantly, it means adjusting school start and end times to match the ferry schedule in coordinated ways. If the morning ferry from Island A to Island B (where the flagship school is) arrives at 8:00 AM, then school starts at 8:30 AM, giving students time to walk from the harbor. If the return ferry departs at 3:30 PM, school ends at 3:00 PM.
This kind of simple synchronization expands the effective catchment area of a high-quality school from a single island to an entire atoll, making the investment viable and making quality education accessible to hundreds more families. Without this coordination, you end up with situations where families want to send their kids to a better school but cannot because the ferry schedule does not line up with school hours, or where kids have to wake up at 5 AM and don't get home until 7 PM just to attend school, which is not sustainable for young children.
Different age groups will need different arrangements, and this is important. Very young children (primary school age) should not be doing long daily commutes across open water in all weather conditions. For them, the focus should be on strengthening local primary schools to ensure quality education within walking distance of home. Secondary students, and especially upper secondary and A-level students, have more tolerance for travel and can benefit from concentrated specialized facilities. The ferry-linked flagship model works best for this older cohort. This means the strategy has to be differentiated by age group and life stage, not one-size-fits-all. What works for a 16-year-old preparing for university entrance exams (where access to specialized instruction and advanced labs is critical) will not work for a 6-year-old learning to read and write (where stability, familiarity, and proximity to home and family are what matter most).
Why education policy is inseparable from everything else
We make this point about educational pull factors and regional development to emphasize something that often gets lost in sector-specific planning: education policy cannot be separated from housing policy, economic policy, or migration policy. They are all part of the same system. If we build genuinely excellent schools in regional centres, ensure they are accessible via reliable transport, staff them with respected leaders and quality teachers, and market them effectively so parents actually believe in them, then we create the conditions for families to make a rational choice to stay in or move to the atolls rather than gravitating toward Malé by default.
This is not guaranteed to work (there are always other factors influencing where families choose to live, from job opportunities to family ties to personal preferences to historical accident). But the evidence from other contexts suggests that school quality is a powerful enough force to shift migration patterns when the quality gap is large, credible, and well-communicated. That is the opportunity we have if we are willing to invest seriously (both financially and politically) in making regional education genuinely competitive with the capital. Not just adequate, not just good enough, but actually competitive: where parents look at the options and choose the atoll school because it is genuinely the better choice for their child's future. The alternative is continuing the current trajectory where we spend increasing amounts trying to manage the symptoms of hyper-centralization in Malé (congestion, housing crisis, infrastructure strain) while simultaneously watching the atolls hollow out. That trajectory is fiscally unsustainable and socially damaging. Education is not the only lever for reversing it, but it may be one of the most powerful ones we have.
An effective and high-quality system of regional schools can create a virtuous cycle. As regional centres grow, they develop the critical mass to support other services – private clinics, cafes, retail shops – that further enhance their liveability. The pull factor of the school becomes the catalyst for wider urban development. In twenty years, we could see a Maldives where the choice of where to live is driven by preference and opportunity, not by the forced necessity of accessing a decent education. We would have replaced the single magnet of Malé with a multi-polar network of opportunity, building a nation that is more resilient, more equitable, and more humane.
Box: What drives the teacher shortage?
Policymakers have flagged an increasing shortage of Maldivian teachers entering the education system. For many subjects, an imperfect solution is hiring expatriate teachers from the global market. This approach is imperfect with many drawbacks – there is less direct cultural connection and context between expatriate teachers and students, there is less ability to explain things to students in native language if doing so would be simpler and pedagogically helpful, it makes classrooms less accessible for students from backgrounds where they are not quite as fluent in Dhivehi, it means that some foreign teachers themselves are teaching in their second language as well and are less able to explain clearly, the selection effects in the regional pool of teachers means that teachers who could get high-level and often higher-paid jobs in their home countries are not those who are persuaded to come to the Maldives which results in likely lower quality of teachers available, and so on.
Even considered, there is a notable situation where hiring expatriate teachers isn’t even an option: the two subjects taught in local language, Dhivehi and Islamic Studies. Unlike biology or mathematics, which can be taught by qualified expatriates hired from the global market, these subjects require Maldivian educators. The Ministry of Education has identified a looming retirement cliff, with hundreds of veteran teachers in these specific fields set to retire in the next few years. Without a new cohort to replace them, we face a genuine crisis for the ability to continue what has long been a core pillar of Maldivian education, especially in a time where the youngest Maldivians increasingly are exposed to very little Dhivehi outside the classroom. This shortage cannot be filled by importing labour; it has to be filled by elevating the status of the teaching profession locally and making it attractive enough that talented young Maldivians choose it as a career rather than seeing it as a fallback for those who cannot find other work.
The conditions and pressures of teaching in the Maldives increases burnout and rate of teachers transitioning to other careers, and reduces the interest of college students into entering teaching degrees or pursuing a career in teaching. While there have been measures to make teaching as a profession more attractive, such as increased pay for teachers, the issues within the industry are deeper than just pay. Teachers express that they do not feel valued for their work or seen as pillars of the community. Their work is consistently questioned, their expertise is under attack, they are undervalued professionally and expected to do a lot of work beyond their job description and spend their own incomes on materials. On top of all this, a particularly flagged issue is that they fear a climate of increasing pressure and harassment by parents. Teachers and students who considered a teaching career but went in another direction often express that the most stressful and exhausting part of their job is the current environment where harassment of teachers is relatively normalized.
Intense competition drives parents to seek an edge for their children by any means possible. Among the whole chain of factors which affect their child’s grades, from their classroom education to behavioural elements to tutoring to environment and home support to the child’s own interest or aptitude and level of application to their work, often the most controllable element for parents is the teacher’s personal discretion in grading. In pure calculation terms, for time/effort/money spent for x% improvement in a child’s grades, parents can calculate that turning B to an A- through 3000 MVR per month of tuition over 3 hours per week of time and cajoling young students to add extra work to their already exhausting schedules, or expecting the government to invest more in teacher trainings and pedagogical modernizations, or spending their little free time at home after work quizzing their children instead of getting a breather, is much less efficient than doing so by spending an hour or so insisting a teacher bump up their child’s grade. In a sense, parents are responding to the natural incentives within the status quo culture where this has been normalized enough that if they don’t participate, they will feel they are losing ground to the children of other parents who do participate.
Human behaviour will follow structural incentives. Parents follow incentives to efficiently drive up their children’s grades and compete against peers. Students follow incentives to encourage this behaviour and involve their parents when already overworked, exhausted students can barely fit in time for their fourth tuition class of the day. Teachers follow incentives to leave a career track that burns them out. College entrants follow incentives to avoid a teaching career, when doing a degree such as business administration and entering an office job in a government office is a likely available option without the massive stresses and burdens of being a teacher.
The role of policy and public administration is to reshape incentives to a better state of affairs. Trying to pressure improvements in individual behaviour without addressing the overall problem in a more systematic way that protects teachers won’t give them the dignified and protected work environment that will make that career worth going into. This will require proactive protections of teachers, both through explicit rules and through the messaging of administrators and the system defending their teachers. This would ideally require overall social norms to improve and to actively promote the importance and socially necessary role played by teachers, measures to reduce the need felt by parents to be as competitive on the margins, ways to reduce the discretion of teachers in marking, or even ways to protect teachers from being individually targeted such as through having grading be done by teachers collectively for each others’ students where possible instead of by the same teachers. Connecting back to the previous brief, this cultural shift can be modelled within these prestigious flagship schools, with norms established and reset by respected principals. These can incubate Dhivehi and Islam teachers in particular, to address the specific shortage in those areas.