UN calls for teachers to be prioritized to transform education

Teachers are the “single most important element in education systems” and must be respected, supported, paid well, and on time — including those working in emergency settings — according to a new report by a United Nations high-level panel on the teaching profession. Set up following the 2022 U.N. Transforming Education Summit, or TES, the panel was tasked with coming up with clear recommendations on how to reform the teaching profession amid persistent teacher shortages, high attrition rates, the increasing use of unqualified and contract teachers, low salaries, poor professional development, and severely delayed payment of teachers working in crisis contexts. The report, officially launched in South Africa on Monday, comes as new data estimates countries must recruit an additional 44 million primary and secondary school educators by 2030. Sub-Saharan Africa is facing the most severe shortage, needing about 15 million more teachers. Education advocates have welcomed the panel’s recommendations, which — they say — finally recognize the importance of supporting teachers through decent salaries and working conditions to improve the world’s worryingly poor learning levels. “The United Nations recommendations are a turning point in global education policymaking. No more fads, no more stopgap measures that end up making things worse,” David Edwards, general secretary of Education International, which represents teachers unions worldwide and was on the panel, told Devex. “For too long, teachers have been undermined and overlooked, but we know that teachers are the single most important factor in achieving quality education. They must be paid, respected, and valued for the essential work that they do,” Edwards added. The panel’s work is the first tangible deliverable to come out of TES, which was held in New York alongside the U.N. General Assembly to much fanfare two years ago. Despite lofty promises, TES appears to have delivered little in concrete change, education experts say. Meanwhile, progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children has flatlined, with numbers actually going up in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Those in school are doing little better, with the World Bank estimating that 70% of 10-year-olds are unable to understand a simple written text, up from 57% before the COVID-19 pandemic. The 18-member panel included ministers of education and labor, former presidents, representatives from employers’ organizations, teachers’ unions, teachers, students, civil society, and academia. It was supported by UNESCO and the International Labour Organization. The panel came up with 59 recommendations including urging governments to invest in education, offer teachers competitive salaries, secure employment, good working conditions, professional development, and balanced workloads. Supporting teachers in crisis settings Notably, the report also called on the international community to establish a “global fund for teachers’ salaries” to support teachers working in crisis-affected contexts by ensuring they receive fair and timely salaries, in a bid to keep them in the classroom. Teachers in Lebanon and Yemen, for example, have been forced to strike or work for very low or no pay. Discussions are understood to be underway about hosting the fund within Education Cannot Wait, a multidonor fund housed within UNICEF and dedicated to funding education in emergencies. Chris Henderson, an education in emergencies specialist for the NORRAG Global Education Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, told Devex he welcomed the idea of the global fund for teachers’ salaries, explaining the hardships facing teachers in crisis settings. “So many of the teacher mental health and wellbeing challenges that we see in crisis-affected contexts stem from inadequate salaries and the often impossible decisions that teachers have to make to support themselves and their families while also providing many of the ‘unpaid expanded roles’ that emergencies require teachers to fulfill,” Henderson said in an email. However, the fund should be a temporary measure introduced alongside “complementary avenues of advocacy” on issues including insufficient tax revenue in low-income and crisis-affected contexts, and the burden of debt servicing, as well as regular investments in teachers. A message for IFIs The panel also called on international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to end all austerity measures that negatively impact education spending, including public sector wage constraints, while also seeking debt relief and forgiveness to ensure education financing is maintained. Campaign groups ActionAid, Education International, and Public Services International report that routine IMF recommendations of public sector wage bill cuts in lower-income countries disproportionately affect teachers, the largest group of government workers in most countries. This has had devastating consequences for education progress, the 2021 report argues. David Archer, head of programs at ActionAid, said he was “delighted” to see the panel’s recommendation to the World Bank and IMF. “Teachers are the largest group on most public sector wage bills and so overall squeezes both block the recruitment of new teachers (even where there are serious teacher shortages) and block improvements in teacher pay and conditions (even where teachers are barely on the minimum wage),” he told Devex in an email. “We need to see bold action now to support countries to expand spending on the frontline public sector workforce in education, health and other sectors.” As a next step, the report recommends governments set up national commissions to “assess and tackle” shortages of trained teachers. The report also calls for the U.N. to “adopt an up-to-date international instrument, including a convention or a revision of existing instruments, on the teaching profession.”