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

This blog was submitted by the Global Partnership for Education Secretariat in the framework of the Teacher Task Force #TeachersMissing advocacy campaign to showcase members' good practices in addressing teacher shortages worldwide.   

The shortage of teachers is a crisis undermining education systems globally. To achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030, 44 million additional teachers are needed. This shortage impacts sub-Saharan Africa the most: on average, there are 56 students per trained teacher.

The consequences of teacher shortages include large class sizes, increased teacher workload and financial strain on school systems, which impact the quality of education.

For GPE, quality teaching is a priority and, as such, GPE aims to invest in quality teachers and teaching in all partner countries.

Continuing teachers’ professional development in Cambodia

In Cambodia, the availability of well-trained teachers remains a critical issue, and teachers have had scant opportunities for professional growth. A GPE grant funded the Ministry of Education’s reform program—Strengthening Teacher Education Programs in Cambodia (STEPCam). Implemented by UNESCO, STEPCam focused on in-service training and mentoring of teachers.

Thanks to STEPCam, 4,000 primary school teachers have been trained in early-grade Khmer and 3,000 in early-grade math. In addition, over 3,000 mentors, school directors and education staff have been trained to support teachers in their professional development. “My mentor taught me the methodologies I lacked,” says Chhay Kimsak, a teacher at Chambok Haer Primary School in Siem Reap. “This helps fill the gaps in my class activities.”

Upskilling primary school teachers in Punjab, Pakistan

The TALEEM program (Transformation in Access, Learning, Equity and Education Management), funded by a GPE $50.6 million grant, is helping the government of Punjab bring more children to school to receive a quality education—by giving teachers the right skills. More than 126,000 primary school teachers had received training on basic teaching skills as of January 2024.

Under TALEEM, the School Education Department set up the Integrated Management Information System (IMIS), a centralized data platform that helps the government better manage the teacher workforce, among other things. In IMIS, a school locator application helps assistant education officers easily find the schools they visit twice monthly to provide feedback to teachers, coach and mentor them, and track their progress, all of which can easily be recorded and shared via the system.

Developing early childhood education in Djibouti

GPE and partners supported the education ministry in developing a new skills framework for preschool teachers—approved in 2022—accompanied by pedagogical guides that encourage learning through play. The primary and lower secondary curricula were also revised to focus on the building blocks of early literacy and numeracy, life skills, and other relevant content.

The program—partly funded by GPE and implemented in partnership with the World Bank and the Education Above All Foundation—supports 252 schools and has trained 2,000 teachers on the revised skills framework and curricula. In addition, classroom observation tools adapted from the World Bank's TEACH/COACH tool serve as a basis for the national preschool inspector and pedagogical advisors to support and monitor teachers. "Although preschool is important, specific practices for this age group are not yet common. So it is necessary to support teachers through in-person and in-classroom training," says Naglah Mohamed, National Preschool Education Inspector.

Improving teaching quality in Nigeria

Nigeria’s North East region has experienced civil armed conflict since 2009, significantly impacting education delivery. With GPE support, the government has increased the number of certified teachers and improved the quality of teaching in three states severely affected by the conflict. In 2021, GPE funding, with UNICEF as grant agent, supported a training program for 18,360 teachers in need of minimum level qualifications.

Also, in partnership with Teaching at the Right Level Africa—which groups children according to learning level rather than age or grade—the GPE-funded project provided over 3,600 teachers with professional development and mentoring to deliver remedial education to children in grades 4–6. Thanks to the project, 176,000 students from 386 schools strengthened their foundational learning skills: after 9 months, only 7% were considered beginners in English (compared to 54% at the start of the program) and 3% in mathematics (compared to 28%). These promising results have led GPE and partners to advocate for more investment to sustain and scale the program.

Increasing the number of female teachers in Yemen

Since 2015, ongoing conflict in the Republic of Yemen has disrupted learning for millions of children, but the majority of out-of-school children are girls. Girls face barriers to education such as early marriage, parental concern about long distances to schools, and unsafe schools. Also, “Most parents do not want their daughters to be taught by male teachers,” says Jawaher, a 16-year-old student at Al-Haj Naser Muthana School for Girls, AlDhale’e Governorate. There is a lack of female teachers, particularly in rural areas.

A GPE program enabled 2,162 female teachers to be hired to work in remote areas. This funding continued support to 1,600 teachers for eight years, and to almost 700 more teachers whose salaries were at risk due to the suspension of a World Bank program. In rural communities, female teachers play a key role in advocacy and outreach to families around the importance of education for girls, and GPE has pledged to support these teachers for another three years through new grants.

Photo credit: GPE/Roun Ry

The #TeachersMissing advocacy campaign is supported by: