Teachers

The new Sustainable Development Agenda can only be achieved if we invest in recruiting, supporting and empowering teachers and enabling good quality teaching to dominant the classroom. Teachers are vital because of the role they play in unleashing and fostering children’s learning potential in education, but also because of the insight they provide on how education systems are functioning and how education policies are being implemented. 

 

Our vision to equip children and youth with important transferable skills to help them become responsible global citizens and skills for decent work cannot be delivered without teachers and through effective teaching. There is a pressing need to collaborate with teachers to draw attention to effective policies as well as obstacles to real progress on the ground. Holding governments to account where promises are not being kept will require teachers to inform us as to what is taking place behind school gates and classroom doors. As such, they are vital partners for all those working to improve the conditions for learning throughout life.

 

The onus to deliver equitable, quality and inclusive lifelong learning and solve the crisis that has left 250 million children not learning the basics does not sit with teachers alone, however. Teachers need relevant and adequate preparation, and feel motivated to provide a productive classroom learning environment. They need help in identifying and supporting weak learners and must be backed by well-managed and adequately financed education systems. Without appropriate curriculum and assessment systems that pay particular attention to the needs of children in early grades, teachers will be unable to prevent the most vulnerable from continuing to drop out. They will also be unable to build up the informed, skilled future population that the vision of Education 2030 requires.