World Teachers’ Day arrives in a year when education policy has shifted in visible ways. On 29 August 2025, ministers, unions, and civil society adopted the Santiago Consensus at the World Summit on Teachers in Santiago, Chile, setting out actions to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers and to finance public education systems at the scale required.
This week the African Union hosted the official World Teachers’ Day event during the Pan-African Conference on Teacher Education, PACTED, in Addis Ababa. Alongside the celebration, the African Union launched the African Decade of Education and new continental frameworks that place teacher professionalism, foundational learning, digital skills, and green skills at the center of policy.
These moves build on the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, which in 2024 set out recommendations to ensure every learner has a trained and well-supported teacher and to anchor that goal in law, budgeting, and national workforce planning. The recommendations remain a reference point for governments that are translating global agreements into national policy.
For students, the implications are direct. Teacher shortages reduce course offerings, increase class sizes, and weaken supervision and support, especially for those already facing barriers to education. A credible workforce plan, financed and negotiated with the profession, is therefore a student issue, not only a staffing issue. The Santiago Consensus offers a practical checklist for that plan, and the African Union frameworks give countries in Africa a regional route map that students and educators can use together in national advocacy.
Education International, representing more than 32 million teachers and education personnel, continues to organise common messaging through its Go Public, Fund Education campaign. For World Teachers’ Day 2025, EI calls on governments to invest in teachers, fund public systems, and engage in meaningful social dialogue with unions. Students can add weight by echoing this language and by making sure that student testimony on workload, course cuts, and access reaches decision makers.
GSF stands with teacher unions. Governments should set out a public teacher workforce plan with targets for recruitment, initial teacher education, induction, and retention, linked to credible budgets and timelines. Higher education and research need stable funding and secure careers so that teaching quality, supervision, and academic freedom are protected. National ministries and institutions should establish regular social dialogue with both teacher unions and student unions and publish the outcomes.
If you want to take part today, use the common campaign tags for visibility (#WorldTeachersDay) and tag Education International so messages are amplified.
