World Teachers’ Day 2021

Held annually on the 5th of October, World Teachers’ Day celebrates the contributions that teachers make around the world.

One and a half years into the COVID-19 crisis, the 2021 World Teachers' Day will focus on the support teachers need to…

en.unesco.org

It honours the adoption of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers. Something that provides benchmarks regarding the rights and responsibilities of teachers.

Teachers deserve more respect than what they are provided with in today’s society. The theme of this year’s, World Teachers’ Day is COVID-19 and more specifically, teachers being at the heart of education recovery.

A week-long series of events will showcase the effect that the pandemic has had on the profession. From home learning to respect and catching children up. Teachers are essential to the recovery process, building back better and more specifically, creating an identity for the United Kingdom outside of Europe.

How Will You Celebrate?

Celebrate may not be the most appropriate word as the day is a date within the calendar when we remember. We walk past the schools and thank the world that there are a group of talented and dedicated human beings that give up hours of their lives each year to educate children and offer them the best start in the world. A more appropriate word would be respect.

I have absolute respect for teachers. For the additional hours that they give up every day, for the additional money that they place into their classrooms and how they consistently place children first.

Whilst I could not be a teacher, I have enough sense to know that they are a profession that deserves absolute respect. For World Teachers’ Day this year, I will be celebrating for my wife and for all the teachers in the world.

They perform miracles every day, yet the world consistently turns a blind eye in favour of the medical profession. The industry is deemed to be on the frontlines and whilst this is true, teachers deserve mention too.

I am biased, it is true but for World Teachers’ Day, I will pay tribute.

A Lack of Recovery

In the United Kingdom money was promised. It was offered to schools across the country in order to prioritise the catching up of students. A noble sentiment you might ponder, but as we know, the reality was not that.

Money was predominately provided to secondary schools, as GCSEs and A-Levels were deemed to be of more importance than children within Primary Schools. It is a believable change of heart as the surface reasons are legitimate.

If you have a smaller pot of money than you originally considered, then you would prioritise the immediate threat and that is of unprepared students heading into exams.

The flip side of this is that we have students entering year six with knowledge of a child two years younger. It is something that will not affect the bigger picture today, but give it a couple of years and the headlines will change. They could show secondary school teachers complaining as students are arriving with less knowledge than they need.

The way around this problem? Prioritise schools and pledge to get all children up to speed and offer teachers the overtime they richly deserve. Yes, it will cost millions but is the long term stability of the United Kingdom not worth this?

An Essential Profession

Teaching is essential to the infrastructure of the world. It is like a building, first, you need the foundations and then, once you have them, you can build the perfect house. Without the foundations, the infrastructure around it will fall to the ground, useless and wasted, to be picked up by another and used for an alternative purpose.

Without the basic knowledge, how can teachers build around it and help the children of today become the heroes of tomorrow?

Teaching has and always will be essential to the growth of the world. It is the fundamental industry, uploading the basic operating systems to the youth of today. Will it always take place in a face to face environment or will it shift to the virtual sphere?

Who knows but what I do know is that without teachers we would be lost.

A World Without Teachers

Imagine a world without teachers. Right now, close your eyes and imagine if all the teachers in the world were blinked out of existence. A childish game, yes, but sometimes in life, the simplest tasks are always the most powerful.

If all of the teachers in the world ceased to exist then we would need to educate our own young. We would have to adapt our careers.

Using the template of the first lockdown, we would extend the scenario to permanent, being tethered to our children with no release. Many would need to change careers to re-open schools and cement the future for the next generation. This would open up many vacancies as there would be mass change.

The world would shift. Additional pay and benefits would have to be offered to people to persuade them to shift from their comfortable six-figure salaries. It could be a world-altering event, but as I would lose my wife in the process, it would be one that I could not vote for.

Moving back into the realm of the living rather than the fantasy, we can agree that whichever scenario we play out in our heads, we can see one lesson clearly, teachers will always be needed. They are essential and we need to start treating them as such.

The Primary Thought

This week we celebrate World Teachers’ Day. A minor event on the calendar for many but for me and thousands of others, it is a key event in the diary. We know that teachers do not get the respect that they deserve and this is something that needs to change. The theme of this year’s event is rebuilding.

Teachers are at the heart of any recovery and we need to admit this. With thousands leaving each year and the percentages continuing to slip, something needs to be done. The coin needs to be flipped and society needs to acknowledge that without the correct education our children would be lost.

One in three teachers plan to quit, says National Education Union survey

One in three teachers plan to quit the classroom within five years because of increased workload and diminishing…

www.theguardian.com

For this year’s World Teachers’ Day I will raise a glass to my wife and all those teachers across the world who go above and beyond each and every day. More respect is owed to the profession and I for one will continue to champion this until my final breath, or until the situation alters.