TES side event - Teachers at the Heart of Education

This United Nations Transforming Education Summit session on Solutions Day will be a call for action for the transformation of teaching by developing comprehensive teacher policies through social dialogue. 

The session will be in-person in the United Nations Headquarters, Conference Room 3. The webcast link will be available soon here.

Teachers, trainers and other education personnel are generally considered the single most influential variable in an education system for achieving learning outcomes. The achievement of SDG 4 and the transformation of education will depend heavily on teachers and education personnel that are empowered, adequately recruited, well-trained, professionally qualified, motivated and supported within well-resourced, efficient and effectively governed systems.

National teacher policies that are formulated and adopted through participatory processes that capture the voice of teachers, education personnel, and other stakeholders are a key strategy for countries to ensure a high-quality and sustainable education workforce. Ensuring that the needs and aspirations of teachers are included through social dialogue at every step of teacher policy formulation can ensure that teachers’ perspectives and expert knowledge form the basis of decision making, and, ultimately, lead to quality teaching and learning.

Drawing on experiences by countries and by previous teacher policy and social dialogue initiatives carried out by multilateral agencies, the co-leads of Action Track 3 on teachers, teaching and the teaching profession are proposing a global call for action to develop and support national teacher policies through social dialogue. The areas of action would support countries to:

The areas of action would support countries to:

• Map and identify challenges and opportunities in developing a quality education workforce, such as training bottlenecks, refugee and crisis contexts, career counselling, housing, gender issues, violence and harassment, wages and social protection;
• Formulate innovative policies to train, recruit, deploy and professionally develop teachers, trainers and other educational personnel to achieve national education goals;
• Formulate policies to ensure quality teaching in crisis contexts and in relation to refugees;
• Develop innovative policies to train education personnel in relation to current priorities, including labour market access, gender equality, crisis and conflict, digital competencies and environmental sustainability;
• Establish robust social dialogue mechanisms to ensure participation of education personnel and their representative organizations and other relevant stakeholders in education policy-making;
• Anchor achievements in education workforce development through national financing and continuous professional development strategies.

Useful links:

• Full official programme of the TES Solutions Day 
• #TeachersTransform campaign, led by the Teacher Task Force in collaboration with the Action Track 3 co-leads, Nigeria, Romania, the International Labor Organisation (anchor), UNESCO (alternate), UNICEF, UNHCR, UNRWA and the World Bank.

Speakers:

• Ms Alette van Leur, Director Sectoral Policies Department, International Labour Organization (ILO)
• Mr Oliver Liang, Head of Unit, Public and Private Services Sector, International Labour Organization (ILO)
• Dr Heike Kuhn, Head of Division ‘Education’, BMZ, Germany
• Dr Ligia Deca, Presidential Adviser, Presidential Administration of Romania
• H.E. Jaime Perczyk, Minister of Education, Argentina (tbc)
• H.E. Li Andersson, Minister of Education, Finland
• Hon. Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, Minister of Education of Ghana (tbc)
• Dr Abdulsalam Mohammed Al-Joufi, Advisor, Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States
• Ms Susan Hopgood, President, Education International
• Ms Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO
• Dr Khalifa Al Suwaidi, Board of Trustees, Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for Distinguished Academic Performance
• Prof Abubakar Adamu Rasheed, Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission of Nigeria
• Ms Mary Maker, Teacher