Teacher working conditions

Report
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  • 21.10.2021

The Global Report on the Status of Teachers

The status of teachers remains a concern in many jurisdictions. Teachers are aware that holding the same qualifications or levels of training as other professions does not bring the same status...
News
  • 30.08.2021

Supporting teachers in back-to-school efforts: A toolkit for school leaders

Many schools in the northern hemisphere will resume in-person classes in the coming weeks after over a year of intermittent closures - despite the continued presence and uncertain evolution of the COVID-19 virus. Other schools will opt for hybrid teaching and learning. Whichever modality they choose, the reopening of schools that had been closed because of COVID-19 continues to raise many questions for school leaders. They need to put the school community’s safety and health first. At the same time, they have to ensure that schools’ front-line workers – teachers and education support staff – have the help, protection and tools they need to resume work.  Teachers have played a key role during school closures by ensuring that learning can continue and by keeping in touch with students and their families. Their role during school reopening will be just as important.

Last year, UNESCO, the Teacher Task Force and the International Labour Organization released a toolkit to help school leaders support and protect teachers and education support staff in the return to school. The toolkit complements the joint Framework for Reopening Schools and the Task Force's policy guidance. It breaks down the seven dimensions in the policy guidance into a series of actionable guiding questions and tips. While many education systems have already been closed and reopened several times over the past year, the dimensions on supporting and protecting teachers and students remain relevant. These include how to support teachers’ health, safety and well-being, how to foster dialogue with teachers and the community, and how to ensure learning resumes.

Download the Toolkit in English, French, Spanish and Arabic.

Seven dimensions to support teachers and staff as schools reopen:

Figure 1. Seven dimensions to support teachers and staff as schools reopen

The toolkit recognizes the importance of local context. In many countries the pandemic is still evolving daily. Local decisions about when to reopen schools will be determined by a broad range of considerations; what is right for one school may not be right for another. In all contexts, school leaders will need to set priorities  and recognize that  trade-offs may be needed.

The toolkit shows us that school leaders will need to think about key issues in relation to teachers and education support staff as they adapt national directives to plan to reopen their schools.

  • The importance of consultation and communication

Teachers, school staff and their representative organizations should be actively involved in setting out policies and plans for school reopening, including occupational safety and health measures to protect personnel. Communication with teachers, learners and education support staff about reopening can ensure clarity about expectations  and highlight their role in the success  of safe, inclusive return-to-school efforts, including overall well-being, and the teaching and learning recovery process.

As decisions to reopen schools are made by central authorities, it will be important to communicate early, clearly and regularly with parents and school communities to understand their concerns and build support for plans to reopen. Parents will want to know what safeguards have been put in place to minimize health risks. They will also need to hear about the school’s ongoing commitment to key educational principles and goals. As teachers are often the first point of contact with parents, they will need to be prepared to ensure everyone is informed continually.

  • Reassuring teachers and school staff about their health, safety and rights

Concern for the well-being of teachers, support staff and students is at the heart of decision-making. It is important to balance the desire to return to school with consideration of the risks to (and needs of) teachers, support staff and learners, so that the needs of the most vulnerable members of the school community are met.

School-level responses may include ongoing psychological and socio-emotional assessment, and support for teachers and learners. School leaders and teachers should be free to address their own needs, exercise self-care and manage their own stress. School leaders can help teachers develop stress management skills and coping mechanisms, so they can teach effectively and provide much-needed psychosocial support to learners. It is also critical to understand that schools are a workplace and that it is more vital than ever to respect the rights and conditions of the people who work there.

 “Before schools reopened, the teachers were worried about resuming work and contracting the virus, as were the parents. We had no WASH facilities, no masks and large classes. Discussions with health staff would have helped us a lot. It would also have been reassuring to have psychologists in schools for psychosocial care. In the end, we were able to obtain sufficient sanitation and masks from an international NGO, and only one grade returned to school to prepare for exams. The classes were split in two", stated a Primary school principal from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

  • Using teachers’ expertise in the new classroom environment

In most contexts, when children return to classrooms it will not be business as usual. In some cases, only some students will be present, or there will be double shifts. Lesson plans, assessment and overall curricula will be adapted, and remedial lessons will need to be developed and deployed.

School leaders need to ensure teachers are empowered to make decisions about teaching and learning. They can work with teachers to adjust curricula and assessment based on revised school calendars and instructions from central authorities. School leaders should also support teachers to reorganize classrooms to allow for accelerated learning and remedial responses, while adhering to regulations on physical distancing.

Teachers’ key role in recognizing learning gaps and formulating pedagogical responses remains critical. This is especially true for vulnerable groups, including low-income families, girls, those with special needs or disabilities, ethnic or cultural minorities and those living in remote rural areas with no access to distance education.

To manage the return to school, it is important for teachers and education support staff to receive adequate professional preparation to assume their responsibilities and meet expectations. Training, peer-to-peer learning and collaboration with other teachers, both within the school and more broadly, will be critical. Such support is particularly important where additional strain may be placed on teachers’ time if they are required to conduct both face-to-face and distance education.

Education recovery will require investments to ensure that a generation of learners is not lost. Which is why the Teacher Task Force is urgently calling for greater investment in teachers and teaching. Read the Call for Greater Investment

Download the Toolkit in English, French, Spanish and Arabic.

See also the Guidelines for national authorities in Arabic, English, French and Spanish.

Photo credit: MIA Studio/Shutterstock.com

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News
  • 28.05.2021

The Teacher Task Force launches an international campaign to boost funding for the teaching profession

June 1st - The International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 is launching a campaign calling on governments and the donor community to urgently increase their funding of teachers and teaching. Such an increase is crucial to help education systems recover from the COVID-19 crisis and build their resilience. It is also critically needed to reach the Sustainable Development Goals, especially the education goal and its targets.

Qualified and motivated teachers are the single-most important school-based determinant of quality education. Around the world, however, there not enough teachers and large numbers of teachers have not received sufficient training.

People who are already disadvantaged are disproportionally affected by these shortfalls. Remote and poor areas face acute teacher shortages, swelling class numbers and shrinking learning time. This “teacher gap” – quantitative and qualitative – is one of the world’s biggest education challenges.

The COVID-19 crisis and ensuing school closures have posed unprecedented challenges for education systems. The crisis threatens to significantly slow progress towards many of the global development goals, especially the education-related goals. It is also likely to exacerbate the global learning crisis and global education inequalities, as the impact falls disproportionately on the poorest. Education budgets are coming under strain, in particular in middle- and low-income countries. Reductions in public spending have been coupled with the financial strain felt by households as the global recession unfolds.

The crisis has shown clearly the need to sustain and increase domestic and international investment in teachers and teaching, especially salaries, which make up the largest component of education budgets. Further investment is also needed so that teachers are prepared and supported for the challenges that the crisis has caused, notably to enable remedial teaching and ensure that a generation of learners is not lost.

The Teacher Task Force campaign aims to secure the international community’s commitment to substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers by 2030 through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing states. In particular, it will call for greater funding to:

  1. maintain salaries and enhance working conditions to attract quality candidates
  2. improve teachers’ continuing professional development
  3. ensure health and safety and provide psychosocial support for teachers and pupils.

The time to invest in teachers is now – to ensure sustainable recovery from the crisis and prepare today’s learners for tomorrow. Join us to call on national decision makers and international funding organisations to make the best investment they can make – in today’s teachers for tomorrow’s future.

More information and to sign the call, visit the campaign’s webpage.

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Blog
  • 23.03.2021

Vaccinating teachers is crucial for returning to school

This blog was first published on March 15, 2021, on the Global Partnership for Education website.

As countries roll out plans to inoculate their populations against COVID-19, the urgent need to vaccinate teachers is an increasingly pressing concern. But are teachers prioritized in national plans? Here’s an overview of what some countries are currently doing for teachers, and recommendations on why teachers must be considered as a priority group.

As countries proceed with rollout plans to inoculate their populations against COVID-19, the urgent need to vaccinate teachers is an increasingly pressing concern. The pandemic crippled education systems across the world.

By April 2020, most of the world’s schools were closed. To expedite their reopening, countries must act to protect teachers’ health, safety and wellbeing. This is a critical precursor to the renormalization of in-person teaching and learning and to the much-needed return of the socialization function of education.

In December 2020, UNESCO and Education International (EI), the global federation of education unions, issued a call to governments and the international community to consider the vital importance of vaccinating teachers and school personnel.

As UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay and EI’s General Secretary David Edwards say in their joint video message,

 

Reopening schools and education institutions safely and keeping them open as long as possible is an imperative. In this context, as we see positive developments regarding vaccination, we believe that teachers and education support personnel must be considered as a priority group.”

 

As early as March 2020, the Teacher Task Force had launched an international Call for Action on Teachers to highlight critical measures that countries should take regarding teachers in the global pandemic, including the “protection of teachers’ and students’ health, safety and well-being”.

This was reaffirmed during the Extraordinary session of the Global Education Meeting (2020 GEM), convened by UNESCO in October 2020, where heads of state and ministers committed to support all teachers and education personnel as frontline workers and to prioritize their health and safety.

 

What countries are vaccinating teachers?

The Teacher Task Force notes that despite the urgency of protecting teachers and other education personnel, and the international community’s attempts to promote their priority for vaccination, they are not consistently prioritized in national plans, which is partly due to a slow global rollout.

Where well-defined rollout plans exist, most countries tend to give priority to health care workers, the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions putting them at high risk.

One exception is the jurisdiction of New Delhi in India, where all personnel, including teachers, who were actively involved in the city’s COVID-19 management efforts will be vaccinated on a priority basis as front line workers.

Chile has been relatively successful in its program to vaccinate teachers. To prepare for the return to classes, the Chilean government included teachers and education workers early on in the country’s massive vaccination drive. In just the previous two weeks, more than half of the country’s 513,000 teachers and education workers received shots in time for the start of the school year.

UNICEF/ Raphael Puget/UNI342143
During the pandemic, a teacher is teaching Arabic at a center for girls who are victims of gender-based violence in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
Credit: UNICEF/ Raphael Puget/UNI342143

 

Teachers in the second wave

In other countries, teachers are included in the second priority group for vaccination. This is true in Argentina, Colombia and Turkey. In Vietnam, teachers are given higher priority as they will be vaccinated in the same group as senior citizens and people with chronic illnesses, along with other workers providing essential services and diplomats.

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, teachers are listed in the second priority group along with first responders, the military, those working in the justice system, transport workers and public servants essential to the pandemic response. Some who question this ranking have launched an online petition to Parliament to prioritize teachers and school/child care staff.

In a three-phase plan, teachers in South Africa are listed in a very large second-level priority group comprising around 17 million people, which includes essential workers such as police officers, persons in congregate settings such as prisons and shelters, people aged 60 and over, and people with various comorbidities.

Some countries have indirectly given precedence to teachers by taking the approach of prioritizing workers writ large, in order to spur stalled economies. In Indonesia, teachers along with the elderly form a second priority group in the national rollout plan. The country aims to vaccinate 5 million teachers by June.

Similarly, in Bangladesh, it was announced in early February that all primary teachers would be vaccinated, and by the end of the month teachers under the age of 40 registered on the health directorate’s list could sign up online to receive the vaccine.

With an increasing global rollout, some major commitments have been made. In the United States, all states have been asked to give priority to teachers in vaccination efforts, in accordance with a goal to have all pre-primary to secondary teachers and child care workers receiving their first shots by the end of March.

Similarly, the Ministry of Education in Singapore announced that it would begin vaccinating 150,000 teachers and other staff in educational institutions from as of early March.

Little information is available from African countries. Rwanda, however, which received 347,000 doses of vaccine from the UN-backed COVAX initiative in early March, has emphasized the vaccination of teachers, with the Ministry of Health stating that “teachers and lecturers are among the frontline workers being vaccinated against COVID-19.”

Elsewhere on the continent, teachers in Uganda will be included in the second priority group after health care workers and security personnel, while Kenya has also put teachers in a high priority group, after health care workers and security personnel but before those with possible comorbidities and over 58 years old.

 

Teachers still missing out

In other countries such as Italy and Brazil, teachers are relegated to a lower position in national plans for vaccine prioritization. Brazil has grouped teachers with security workers and prison staff, which has led to strikes in Sao Paulo to protest, among other issues, the health concerns that teachers face in schools.

In the Russian Federation, a certain mistrust of the vaccine may hamper efforts to vaccinate teachers, despite their high priority along with medical staff and social workers, in initial stages of mass vaccination.

Recently, new statistics reveal that two-thirds of poorer countries will face education budget cuts. This is problematic for numerous reasons, two of the main ones being the need to vaccinate teachers and recruit staff to meet the challenges of increased workload, teacher attrition and illness.

 

Many low-income countries are unlikely to obtain enough doses to vaccinate their teachers for some time. This puts massive pressure on teachers to teach in-person while unvaccinated putting theirs and others’ health at risk.

 

A recent study suggests that without greater international cooperation, more than 85 poor countries will not have widespread access to coronavirus vaccines before 2023.

 

Recommendations

In view of the global situation outlined above, the Teacher Task Force makes the following recommendations:

  • As called for by UNESCO and Education International, teachers should be considered frontline workers and a high-priority group to be vaccinated early to ensure that schools can reopen safely for in-person education.

  • Governments should work with teacher unions to ensure that all schools continue to adhere strictly to rules of safe operation, and that unvaccinated teachers have access to psychological and socio-emotional care, sick leave and support from school leaders and district/central level authorities.

  • Where high-priority groups require identification for access to vaccination, ministries should ensure that teacher lists are accurate and that teachers have adequate identification.

  • Lessons learned from previous pandemics should inform vaccine distribution plans to ensure that dissemination mechanisms are effectively put in place and run efficiently so that all teachers have access, including those in remote regions.

  • Governments should ensure adequate funds are available to support vaccination roll out to guarantee the safety of teachers and education support staff and the safe reopening of schools.

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Cover photo credit: Bret Bostock/Flickr
Caption: A medical syringe with a vaccine

 

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