In the last decade two themes have had considerable prominence in education policy discussions – the need to focus on education ystems, and the importance of attending to girls’ education and gender equality. The COVID 19 crisis accentuated concerns with re iewing shocks at system level sand thinking about resilience (United Nations, 2020). Despite acknowledgement of the importance of working on gender at the level of education systems, as noted, for example, in the G7 Gender at the Centre Initiative3and the policy initiatives associated with the African Union Africa 2063 policy 4, there has been little conceptual or empirical investigation of what making a gender perspective means for working on education systems. This paper, written mainly during the period of the COVID-19 andemic, sets out to explore this issue, building from insights generated from a research project we conducted, 2014-2016, looking t the ways in which teacher education in Nigeria reproduces forms of gender inequalities, despite strong policy commitments that it ill effect change. We consider a number of different ways of positioning teacher education within an education system, highlighting some of the different ways in which systems can be understood and some of the implications of this for work on gender and connected equalities.
