2024 World Teachers' Day background paper: Valuing teacher voices
Word Teachers' Day 2024 celebrations focus on "Valuing teacher voices: towards a new social contract for education", underscoring the urgency of calling for and attending to teachers' voices to address their challenges but, most importantly, to acknowledge and benefit from the expert knowledge and input that they bring to education.
This background paper discusses the importance of teacher voices in raising the esteem of the profession by soliciting their contributions to decision- and policy-making at all levels of education systems. By actively participating in social dialogue and collective bargaining, a new social contract for education that values teacher voices can be leveraged which can promote collaborative decision-making, innovation and improved working conditions, raising the attractiveness of a teaching career. Even so, barriers to free and open negotiations between governments, employers and teacher unions, can put the impacts of teacher voices at risk. To rectify this, systems need to better institutionalise teacher voices through social dialogue mechanisms while also fostering new means for all teachers to express their needs.