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To enhance teacher’s standards and accountability in education systems, Malawi’s Ministry of Education is developing its teachers’ policy, including the Teachers Code of Conduct (COC) with the support from UNESCO’s Norwegian Teacher Initiative. The CoC will include teachers from Teacher Training Colleges and should denounce corporal punishment.

A Nottingham teacher has collected 3,800 reports on corruption in the international school system that deal with nepotism, fraud, and cheating. In England, they highlight structural "reform", with its waste of money on free schools that never open, the horrific ongoing costs of successive Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), and the way schools are pitched against each other to survive. Examples include an academy boss telling teachers to cheat on exams and the widespread relocation of students to improve school performance.

A number of school heads planned to defraud the government by providing lists of non-existing teachers, which delayed the release of the funds to pay teachers and other staff employed by the Boards of Management (BoM). The Minister of Education asked principals to collect and submit the right data of BoM teachers employed including names, the Teachers Service Commission number, and the country they belong to.

The assessment watchdog Ofqual figures for the 2017-2018 academic year show 1,539 penalties for malpractice in vocational qualifications, of which 55 per cent were for students, 39 per cent for staff, and 6 per cent for schools and colleges. There were 606 penalties issued to staff, with the most common offense being “improper assistance to candidates”, which accounted for 75 per cent of all penalties. Only 7 per cent of penalties for staff came in the form of suspensions or bans. In 45 per cent of cases, staff received a written warning, while 41 per cent of the penalties involved further training. The most common type of cheating reported was plagiarism, which accounted for 46 per cent of all student penalties, followed by in the use of mobile phones or other communication devices in exams, accounted for 19 per cent.

Data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights shows that 29 per cent of teachers were considered chronically absent, missing more than 10 days of school in 2015-2016. This is near twice the 15 per cent of students who are chronically absent. As a result, a number of school districts included teacher and student absence measures in their school accountability system.