In the face of increasing global disruptions and crises, ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030 (SDG 4) will not be possible unless education planning is crisis-sensitive. Teachers, who are the most important in-school factor influencing student achievement, are often at the frontline in situations of crisis. For this reason, it is imperative to prioritize, support and protect teachers through adequate education policy and planning.

Building on the Guidance Note on Developing a Crisis-Sensitive Teacher Policy, jointly developed by UNESCO, UNHCR, ILO, and UNICEF in 2020 under the Norwegian Teacher Initiative (NTI), the webinar on Crisis-Sensitive Teacher Policy and Planning in Emergency and Displacement Situations on 16 September brought together policy experts, country representatives and teachers to shed a light on what is needed to ensure that teacher policy is crisis-sensitive.

In a discussion that touched upon the key policy areas of the guide, participants shared lessons learned during previous and ongoing crises, expanded on the role of teachers in emergency and displacement contexts and advocated for increased support for teachers in such contexts.

Displacement creates challenges for teacher recruitment, training and deployment  

If Covid-19 highlighted at a global level the hardships educators confront when schooling is disrupted, this pandemic is only one among many situations of crisis that challenge the continuity and quality of education worldwide. According to UNHCR (2021), at the end of 2020, 82.4 million people were forcibly displaced due to violent conflict, persecution and natural disasters.

Uganda, which has experienced several displacement crises, is currently one of the largest refugee-hosting countries in Africa. It hosts over 1.4 million refugees, making up 3.6 % of the country's total population. During the webinar, Ms. Constance Alezuyo, Coordinator of the National Education Response Plan for Refugees and Host Communities, explained that one of the biggest challenges her country faced in providing quality education for refugee children and youth has been recruiting teachers to live and work in the remote places where refugees are located. Furthermore, even when qualified teachers willing to relocate are found, it is difficult to provide them with adequate housing.

Ms. Angéline Neya Donbwa, Technical Secretary for Education in Emergencies in Burkina Faso, echoed Ms. Alezuyo’s assessment. She added that with over of 1.4 million internally displaced persons and 2,444 schools closed in her country, redeployment of teachers from conflict-ridden areas to overcrowded host villages in safer zones has been a major challenge. Grace*, an internally displaced teacher also from Burkina Faso, expanded on the challenges of teaching children who have been traumatized. She explained that some of her students had trouble concentrating in class, were afraid or reacted in aggressive or violent ways. She also noted that in her classroom she had to address the needs of internally displaced children as well as be responsive to the needs of the children of the host community.

Psychosocial and financial support are essential for both students and teachers

Psychosocial support stands out as an important dimension of crisis-sensitive planning. Ms. Neya Donbwa explained that the need for this type of support has clearly been expressed by communities affected by insecurity and violence in her country. In addition to needing support to cope with traumatic situations themselves, teachers need to be able to deal with the physical and emotional impact of the crisis on their students. This has led Ms. Neya Donbwa’s team to develop a module for dealing with traumatic situations to supplement their “Safe School” trainings designed to prepare teachers for crisis situations.   

Moreover, teachers’ financial stability is often impacted during crisis and emergency situations. Ms. Neya Donbwa explained that continuing to pay teachers’ salaries when they had to flee unsafe areas is one of the provisions in their crisis teacher management strategy. Similarly, Ms. Alezuyo explained that during times of crisis in Uganda, government school teachers kept receiving their salaries until they were redeployed. However, this was not the case for private school teachers during the Covid-19 crisis, as Ms. Stella Turehe, a teacher from Uganda explained. Ms. Turehe shared that the financial pressures private schools faced during this crisis led to many school closures and teachers losing their jobs.

Complying with sanitary measures demands flexibility and innovation

Complying with Covid-19 sanitary measures was also difficult for schools and at times, led to their complete closure. In Uganda, the measures issued by the Ministry of Health capped student-teacher ratios at 20 students per teacher. According to Ms. Turehe, refugee settlement schools - which have high enrolment numbers – have struggled to reopen. However, in response to this, teachers have initiated a number of actions with the support of NGOs, such as devising a double shift system to allow schools to re-open, and promoting e-learning through tablets and group-learning in refugee students’ communities.

Moreover, teachers also innovated to support the whole school community during the COVID-19 crisis in Uganda. This involved organizing back-to-school campaigns, setting up committees to connect with learners and parents, forming student clubs, and offering guidance to teens.

The importance of communication and consultation mechanisms

Teacher communication and feedback mechanisms are essential to ensuring that policy-makers are adequately informed about the rapidly changing conditions that characterize crisis situations. Ms. Alezuyo explained that there are different levels of communication between policy-makers, teachers and communities in Uganda and how they are adapted to crisis-sensitive education planning. The teacher management information system tracks teachers’ levels of training and experience which facilitates teacher deployment and efficient planning during crises. Communication at school and community level has adapted, including through mobile phones, radios and social media platforms.

Consultation for new module on Crisis-Sensitive Teacher Policy

The webinar also launched an international consultation to develop a new module on Crisis-Sensitive Teacher Policy and Planning which will complement the Teacher Policy Development Guide developed by the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030. The module has been developed with the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP).

The draft module is available for comments and suggested case studies at the link below:

English: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NC8h2fNfjYj3CxSI2jkQWOYjy2v5Zz1N/edit

French: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E6WlaCuoeDGyi6WHTZPaUUAcHntbB97t/edit?rtpof=true&sd=true

Please submit your comments and suggestions by 1 October to sm.richter@unesco.org.

*Name has been changed for security reasons 

Photo credit: UNHCR/Eduardo Soteras

Authors: James O'Meara from ICET and Purna Shresta from VSO.

The Global Education Summit in July raised a record US$4 billion, which will help 175 million children learn. This stunning effort shows what is possible when governments work with the UN and other intergovernmental organizations, alongside development agencies and organizations from civil society and the private sector. Such cooperation will help us achieve the common objective envisaged in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Education that includes everyone and gives everyone a fair chance of learning is not possible without ensuring that everyone has access to quality teachers. It is crucial to implement policies and practices that promote inclusion and equity for teachers in every educational context, considering gender, socio-economic status, location, ability, and other factors that can lead to exclusion.

Ensuring that everyone has access to quality teachers requires significant levels of investment, especially in least developed countries and small island developing states. To ensure quality education for all by 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa – the region with the highest concentration of least developed countries – will need to recruit and prepare 15 million teachers.

Providing access to quality teachers for all requires:

• closing the gaps in teacher numbers, qualifications, gender, and connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa. The proportion of qualified teachers in the region has steadily declined since 2000 at both primary and secondary levels. Female teachers play a pivotal role in encouraging girls’ enrolment, but less than 50% of primary teachers and 30% of secondary teachers are female. Lack of infrastructure and Internet connectivity were exposed during COVID-19 school closures when they posed an immense barrier to distance and hybrid teaching.
• holistic and inclusive policy dialogue that genuinely involves teachers, during the development, implementation and assessment of teaching policies and practices that promote fair opportunities for all teachers.
• innovations in recruitment, as current approaches are failing to close teacher gaps. New approaches should focus on creating new pathways into teaching for people from groups underserved and underrepresented in teacher workforces. Establishing such pathways will help to close not only the numbers gap but also demographic gaps, for example by positioning local role models from local communities who use local dialects in hard-to-staff classrooms across the globe.  
• quality professional development for all to increase levels of teacher retention. If we are to “retain the trained” we need to support countries along every stage of their journey in designing, implementing and evaluating high-quality and effective teacher professional development programmes and systems. If we fail to “retain the trained” by 2030 we will have failed to heed the warnings by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics in 2014 that by 2030, 89% (24 million teachers) of the teacher gap will be caused by attrition.

Helping 175 million children learn moves us closer to the shared vision expressed in SDG4. The international education community will be able to maintain the momentum created by the Global Education Summit – and help to ensure quality teachers for all – at the 13th Policy Dialogue Forum and governance meetings of the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, which will be held in Kigali, Rwanda, and online from December 1 to December 3, 2021. The meetings provide the ideal setting to come together again and invest in teachers now ­to ensure sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and prepare today’s learners for tomorrow.

Have your say in developing, implementing and assessing teaching policies

The Inclusion and Equity in Teacher Policies and Practices Thematic group is launching a series of online discussions – synchronous (September 2021) and asynchronous (October and November). The discussions are designed to allow you to get involved with shaping policies and practices that promote fair opportunities for all teachers. By sharing your knowledge, you can help bridge the growing gaps in teacher recruitment, preparation and deployment, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19.

Your engagement in this inclusive policy dialogue will ensure teachers and their representative organizations have a greater voice in policy-making processes. You can participate in these discussions at a time and place convenient to you, increasing the diversity of perspectives on how to provide pathways into teaching for the underserved, vulnerable and underrepresented (including migrants, people with disabilities, indigenous people, ethnic minorities and the poor), closing the teacher numbers gap across the globe.

Details of the first synchronous session on September 24 will be posted on the TTF website. If you are already a TTF member, please visit the TTF website and join the Inclusion and Equity in Teacher Policies and Practices thematic group in the Member Space before the event so you can receive information on TTF events. If you are not a TTF member, please contact the coordinators of the thematic group: Purna Shrestha at purna.shrestha@vsoint.org or James O’meara at james.omeara@tamiu.edu.

Photo: The teacher and her students in a Rwanda primary school. Credit: GPE