Tomorrow is World Teachers’ Day, a global moment to celebrate the importance of teachers. This year’s theme of “Valuing teachers' voices: towards a new social contract for education” underscores the urgency of listening to teachers to address their challenges and, most importantly, to acknowledge and benefit from their knowledge and experience.

This year, the first Global Report on Teachers highlighted the severe teacher shortages across the world. The High-level Panel on the Teacher Profession, established by UN Secretary-General António Guterres following the 2022 Transforming Education Summit, published recommendations to set out a clear plan of action on how to support teachers.

At GPE, we recognize teachers as central to strong education systems and learning, and prioritize quality teaching. We advocate for teachers to be engaged actors in education planning, policy making and monitoring.

The engagement of teachers is all the more crucial in light of contemporary challenges to as well as changes in education and society as a whole, such as technology (including artificial intelligence) and the impacts of climate change.

Supporting teachers to use technology

As technology impacts education systems around the world, teachers remain at the center of the teaching and learning processes. Although technology has the potential to empower teachers and reduce their administrative workload, a majority of teachers feel they’re not ready to teach with technology, according to the 2023 GEM Report.

This implies that teachers must simultaneously acquire relevant digital skills and be able to use them to improve students’ learning experiences while keeping up with the pace of technology advancement. Co-creating digital learning solutions with teachers and building their capacity on information and communications technology (ICT) and artificial intelligence competencies are key to leveraging technology for teaching and learning.

Empowering teachers to use technology involves equipping them with digital devices and infrastructure that are the most available and accessible in their context, with the aim to improve their working conditions (see Rwanda’s partner country journey of using technology to transform teaching and learning).

Support to teachers in the face of climate challenges

According to a new World Bank report, teachers are crucial change elements in how governments can enhance the resilience of their education systems. Yet as the report notes, while teachers are tackling climate topics in their classes, they do not have the training needed to do this accurately or effectively.

UNESCO’s ‘Greening Every School’ concept note underscores this, noting that while 95% of teachers recognize the importance of teaching climate change, only 30% of them express readiness to do so given the lack of knowledge and skills needed to teach this topic (see also the ‘Green school quality standard’).

Teachers need to be provided with opportunities for professional growth and ongoing learning aimed not only at enhancing their comprehension of climate change, but also at: refining strategies to address climate skepticism; supporting students dealing with ecological grief and anxiety; and boosting their confidence in navigating contentious subjects and promoting civic engagement. This requires providing teachers with high quality educational materials, better textbooks, teacher’s guides, tools and training.

Climate change also impacts teachers’ working conditions where unsafe infrastructure, traumatic events and degraded environments can make teaching nearly impossible.

To help address some of these challenges, GPE is working with the Greening Education Partnership, Education International and UNICEF to develop a policy tool. The tool will help ministries put teachers at the heart of their strategies to make education systems more climate-smart, finance climate-smart education and complement GPE’s policy dialogue tool on mainstreaming climate change in education.

Solutions to consider include using climate data to inform policies that protect teachers’ working conditions and improve their resilience, monitoring and adapting policies to provide equitable support for teachers in vulnerable regions, as well as developing real-time communication systems and joint emergency protocols with other agencies to protect teachers and students.

GPE support to teachers

In the current context marked by such challenges, close to 90% of partnership compacts developed by GPE partner countries thus far emphasize strategies aimed at enhancing teaching and learning practices.

Common strategies include attracting more qualified candidates and retaining the current workforce by improving teacher motivation, career development opportunities, remuneration and working conditions.

In the Solomon Islands, the partnership compact aims to improve teaching and learning through 3 key strategies: better teacher management systems, including revised teaching standards and teacher career advancement; strengthened school leadership and management; and teacher professional development efforts that concentrate on Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) and other pedagogical approaches.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the partnership compact aims to improve teachers’ mastery of disciplinary content and their ability to support vulnerable students. It also includes measures to upgrade the profession through merit-based recruitment, a quality assurance system and improved social protections to support teachers’ retirement.

Since 2021, GPE grants have been used to train 1.9 million teachers. One clear result: on average, GPE partner countries have been increasing the share of qualified teachers in pre-primary (80%) and primary education (86%), though shares of qualified teachers have stagnated at the lower-secondary level and decreased at the upper-secondary level.

Looking forward, GPE aims to continue supporting the engagement of teachers as active agents in shaping and delivering the transformation of education systems and improving learning.

Transforming education through teacher engagement

Teachers, more than anyone else, can bring the realities of the classroom to the attention of decision makers and indicate what’s needed to improve their preparation, professional development and well-being, and raise teaching standards.

While many countries have made great strides in including teachers in policy dialogue, there’s much work to do. In GPE partner countries, teacher representation in partner country local education groups was 64% in 2023. But as our brief on teachers attests, their engagement in fora is paramount.

To value teachers’ voices, we will continue to advocate for meaningful teacher representation in policy dialogue in all GPE partner countries. Only then can we build a truly new social contract for education that is transformative and leads to more children learning across the globe.