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When the General Teaching Council for England was set up it faced an uphill struggle to keep teachers and unions on side. Three years on, John Crace asks: has it made a difference and is it adequately carrying out its function as an investigator of misconduct?

Low wages and lax standards have created a vicious cycle: teachers and school administrators demand bribes; parents feel they can't refuse.

A 31-year-old junior clerk in the Eastern Cape Department of Education was arrested by the Joint Anti-Corruption Task Team for allegedly defrauding the department of more than R37 000. He had fraudulently deposited the monthly salary of a retired teacher into a bank account. The Director of communication mentions that his suspension illustrates the department's commitment to eradicating all forms of corruption and running a clean administration.

According to the Ministry of Education and Sport, at least 952 teachers are "ghosts" or irregularly kept on the payroll. Investigations reveal that some head teachers have allowed some teachers to remain on the payroll irregularly. Given an average salary of sh250,000 per month per teacher, government has been paying sh238m monthly to ghost teachers.

Nepal's anticorruption commission says that tens of thousands of government employees, including teachers, police, and senior bureaucrats, have been using fake university degrees. The Commission for Investigation on Abuse of Authority says it suspects that 10 percent of the Himalayan kingdom's 140,000 schoolteachers are using diplomas purchased from India.

Ten weeks in charge of Belgrade's most unruly high school killed its Director's passion for education. Few of the staff members were willing to cooperate with her efforts to stop a system of bribery for good grades. When the police caught one math teacher accepting a marked 50-euros note from a student and the problem came out into the open, the teachers rebelled against her with a vote of no confidence in her authority.

Ghana. Kazakhstan. Poland: In many countries, teachers must bribe their way into teacher-training college. Some then collect their salaries and do not actually teach; when they do, they demand bribes for students to pass exams. "Textbook racket" is also a common practice.