This blog has been authored by Hannah Walker and Sophie Lashford, Save the Children, UK.

Teachers are the heart of our education systems, yet their voices are often missing from the conversations shaping policies and reforms that affect their daily work. Following World Teachers’ Day, we reflect on insights from a UKFIET (the Education for Development Forum) symposium convened by Save the Children UK with STiR Education, Aga Khan Foundation (Schools2030), the World Bank, the University of Notre Dame, and UNESCO & Teacher Task Force, which explored an often-overlooked lever for change: teacher agency.

"Agency, to me, is..." – Hearing from teachers themselves

To ground the discussion in real-world experience, two classroom teachers who spoke at the symposium shared what agency means to them—and how it plays out in their classrooms.

Amina Mohammed, P1 Classroom Teacher, Ronald Gideon Ngala Comprehensive School, Kenya

 “Teacher agency, to me, is the empowered mindset that allows educators to take ownership of their practice, make informed pedagogical decisions, and respond creatively to the needs of their learners. 

It’s about having the autonomy to design learning environments that are relevant and meaningful, shaped not only by curriculum standards but by deep understanding of the learners themselves. When teachers are trusted as professionals, they are more likely to innovate, reflect, and continuously adapt their practice to ensure all students thrive.”

In practice: When I noticed my learners disengaged during maths on place value, I asked how they preferred to learn and observed their struggles. Using these insights, I created a low-cost place value kit with everyday materials, shifting lessons from abstract to hands-on. As a result, students became more confident and engaged.”

Iqbal Dad, Teacher in the Government Boys High School Mominabad Ishkoman, Pakistan

“Teacher agency, to me, is about creating a coordinated, learning-oriented environment where stakeholders work together to co-create solutions for real classroom challenges. 

In practice: I worked together with parents, School Management Committees, and school administration to use local celebrations and events to enhance students’ creative writing skills. These ranged from personal occasions like birthdays to wider community experiences such as engaging with the impacts of climate change. Students wrote independently, critically, and creatively about their observations, opinions, and experiences. This process helped them move beyond routine textbook-based writing and emerge as more competent and confident individuals.”

Why is teacher agency a core issue?

Insights from the classrooms of Amina and Iqbal show why Save the Children convened this UKFIET symposium: we believe teacher agency and voice must be at the centre of education systems. Across our global education programmes in more than 100 countries, we see that when teachers are recognised as professionals, trusted to innovate, and included in decision-making, education becomes more relevant, resilient, and equitable. That’s why in our work with teachers, their professional and wellbeing needs are the starting point.

Join the conversation: What does teacher agency mean to you?

All actors have a role in ensuring teachers’ lived expertise drives meaningful change. Convening many of these actors at UKFIET was an important step, but we don’t want the conversation to end there.

We invite teachers, school leaders, policymakers, researchers, and all education practitioners to share reflections on what teacher agency means in their context to help widen the circle of voices and build a platform of shared learning across teachers and those who support them.

👉 Add your voice here.

We welcome:

• A short quote on what agency means to you
• An example from your own teaching or work
• A reflection on how teacher voice is enabled (or limited) in your context

Together, these contributions will help build a global picture of how teacher agency is understood and enacted.

Insights from the panel: Enabling agency across the system

The UKFIET symposium featured a dynamic panel of speakers from across research, policy, and practice. Each panelist offered reflections on how to enable teacher agency and what system-level changes are needed to support it.

John McIntosh, STiR Education

Teaching is highly agentic by its very nature. Every day teachers need to make decisions and judgements about the children in front of them, which only they can make. The role of the system is to ensure that the conditions are in place to help them do that, in ways that matter to both them and their students. Systems can do this by building mechanisms to listen to and incorporate the voices of teachers into the design and development of curricula and professional development programmes.

 

Bronwen Magrath, Schools2030, Aga Khan Foundation

For years, we as a global education sector have often imposed top-down models for improvement on teachers, without fully considering local realities or teachers’ own expertise. Human-Centred Design offers a practical, step-by-step process that enables teacher leadership to flourish and positions teachers as the authority in their classrooms when designing innovations to improve teaching and learning. This collaborative approach helps ensure that innovations are effective, relevant to learners, feasible to implement, valued by the wider school community, and sustainable beyond the lifetime of any programme or funding.

 

Laura Gregory, World Bank

Teachers’ voices are needed in policymaking because they bring expertise. The development of this expertise starts with initial teacher education, where teachers gain the core knowledge and skills for teaching and develop their professional identity. Recognizing and amplifying teacher agency and voice requires not only valuing their expertise, but also enabling high-quality initial teacher education and ongoing professional development, so that teachers are empowered to contribute meaningfully to education reforms and system improvement.

 

Nikhit D’Sa, University of Notre Dame

Defining teacher agency is important, but it is more critical that we agree that agency is not an individual trait but rather a process that emerges in the interactions that teachers have in the ecological system of the classrooms, schools, and communities. We need to understand agency within this ecological system and strengthen the resources and assets in the settings around teachers. We also need to question the limits that we impose on agency, expecting agency in specific domains and activities from teachers but not in others.

Matthew A.M. Thomas, UNESCO & Teacher Task Force

Teacher agency is something that must be cultivated and sustained across all levels, from individual teachers to international frameworks. For this reason, the Santiago Consensus, affirmed recently at the 2025 World Summit on Teachers, specifically references the importance of promoting teachers’ contributions to policy and decision-making processes. These commitments and related global recommendations on the teaching profession help ensure teacher agency is supported and nurtured throughout contexts worldwide, so that ultimately the voice, autonomy, creativity, power, and expertise of each individual teacher can be realized.

Where do we go from here?

The conversation on teacher agency must go beyond UKFIET - and beyond World Teachers’ Day. If we are serious about strengthening education systems, we need to create more and better opportunities for teachers to participate, share their voice, and feed directly into policy and reform.

• The symposium raised several critical questions:
• What structures best support authentic participation?
• How do we ensure teacher input is representative at scale?
• How can we work together across institutions to do this more effectively?
• What does it really take to recognise and reward teacher expertise?

We invite you to carry these questions forward—into your schools, your organisations, your networks.

• What would it look like to centre teacher agency in your context?
• And how can your voice, and the voices of the teachers you work with, help answer that?

Stay engaged

Be part of the conversation by engaging through the work of UNESCO, the Teacher Task Force, Save the Children, and our partners. Most important is to stay connected to the voices of teachers themselves. In this way, we can collectively ensure that teacher agency is embedded in how we build and sustain education systems every day.

Useful links

• Call for teacher voices: add your voice here

• Read the Santiago Consensus

The views and opinions expressed are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of UNESCO or the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, Save the Children or any of the other organisations named in this blog post.

Hero photo credit: Kasonga Primary School, Kyangwali Refugee Settlement, Uganda. Save the Children / Benjamin Hill